daid
[Feature Request] Impulse-Warp Momentum
Brought this up with Xansta after the game today; This is especially noticeable with slower ships, but the interchange between going from Impulse Thrusters to Warp Drive and back again feels very stiff due to Impulse requiring you to slow down to 0 before Jump starts to accelerate, and vice versa.
When you think of ships coming out of warp or even full jump, they usually maintain some momentum in space. EE doesn't have the most accurate physics to real life and that's perfectly fine, my issue is the frame or two of zero forward thrust before one or the other begins accelerating.
My suggestion would be to make Warp acceleration and deceleration return to the target speed of your Impulse thrusters. My immediate thought is to make current thrust from Impulse and Warp separate variables that the ship then takes the highest value of as its actual forward thrust. This would allow for warp starting while stationary to begin immediately, while requiring Warp starting while moving to have a delay based on warp acceleration, due to requiring the warp to spool up to a speed faster than Impulse.
Naturally, while Warp is spooling up, weapons are still disabled, meaning there will be a second or so of Impulse-Speed movement where you can't attack as a result of Warp accelerating or decelerating, but the UI already has a bit of feedback regarding when Warp is in use, so it should be fine as-is. This would also allow hit-and-run and minelayer play to be less stiff as well as exiting warp hot into combat and ready to maneuver around incoming fire. For hit and run, You'll still have to drop out of warp and make your attacks, then spend precious seconds in a dangerous position revving your Warp back up to go fast while you can't retaliate, but the ability is there, and might even open up the design space for a ship that utilizes a warp with low top speed but high acceleration and deceleration to make attacks with lighter weaponry, kind of like a jousting ship.
That warp behavior has already changed in master, although I am not sure if this was intentional or should be considered a bug. In master, instead of decelerating to zero the ship will now accelerate to full impulse before it goes to warp. One downside of this change is that is might make warp a bit stronger, considering the ship is probably in motion most of the time.
When you think of ships coming out of warp or even full jump, they usually maintain some momentum in space. EE doesn't have the most accurate physics to real life and that's perfectly fine, my issue is the frame or two of zero forward thrust before one or the other begins accelerating.
Actually, "maintaining momentum" would be less accurate, as there is no momentum to maintain in the first place. As it is in the name, a warp drive warps the spacetime, so the ship is not really moving through space. In many scifi franchises, jump drives are generating a massive spacetime distortion to instantly change the position (and the jump shader in EE strongly suggests this as well) - which won't generate any momentum either. Decelerating before activating those drives always made sense to me, you don't want to have any weird side effects when playing with space time.
I'm less thinking about it in realism sense, and more in gameplay sense. The warpdrive is already one of the strongest things on most ships. The way it interacts with the impulse engines is one of it's very much intended downsides. And something for a crew to learn to work with. Removing it would make it less interesting IMHO.
Yeah that's what I meant when I said it might make warp stronger. So, the behavior change in ECS (going to 100% impulse instead of zero) was unintentional then?
Actually, "maintaining momentum" would be less accurate, as there is no momentum to maintain in the first place.
momentum for lack of a better single word, I get that its all based on applied thrust.
Removing it would make it less interesting IMHO.
I wouldn't say it's less interesting. Stronger on paper, sure, 100% agree just changing it without rebalancing it would just make jump too ueful, but thats why i wanted to keep the charge-up state. If anything, it's more dynamic and adds another factor for the pilot to consider because you might not want to exit warp at full speed, or attempt to exit warp and go into full reverse for a laser engagement. Not to say it's all upsides, there is some skill expression lost from the pilot having a lot stricter warp etiquette with the current return-to-0 warp.
Provided the forward thrust blending would happen, I honestly think Warp as a whole should just have a full stop cooldown period based on how much power is being routed to it, to de-incentivize stop and go warping in combat and fluttering the jump throttle, which is mostly going to be a problem for Weapons who is going to see their terminal flicker from usable to unusable. You should still have to commit to warp speed, and commit to leaving warp speed.
At the end of the day, I'm not the most experienced EE player, but its the only thing so far that I've come across that I've said 'that really doesn't feel right' and figure I'd ask and see if its something that can be changed, and that answer is clearly a negative, which is fine. I don't know how easy or hard it would be to implement anyway, either as a fundamental thing or as an optional thing that some ships can do that others cant.
Not saying it is a definitive "everything will stay as it is!". As I am not convinced the current warpdrive implementation is the best. As it is clearly one of the more powerful things on a ship. So I do value your idea, don't get me wrong on that side. And at the moment, the engine rewrite is still not finished, so that also makes me rather not change any game mechanics.
In many of the sci-fi stories I think of as inspiration sources, warp physics is usually intentionally separate from normal physics, and sometimes you even have to do things like get into a special padded room to "bleed off" the weird inertia you have because of the mismatch of the relative speeds and directions of your origin and destination (Lensmen), so warp having the same sort of instant start and stop feeling of Start Trek TNG makes a ton of sense to me.
But at impulse speeds, it would be fun to allow in just a smidge of Newtonian mechanics. Maybe not enough for full realism, so we still have a 2D, sort of 'naval' vibe to the movement, but just enough 'ice-physics' to smooth over the feeling that ships are magically anchored to some sort of ether when they stop.
