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Full 3D Space Flight - As an Option
seraphantilles
Member Posts: 97 Arc User
I'm really tired of not being able to fly directly UP or directly DOWN. It's really lame for a space game to not allow directly vertical flight up and down.
I get it that you want to keep it 'easy' for players but seriously, for me, it does NOT make it easier. It's much HARDER to play this game as a result of this. Not being able to fly in a direct straight line between two points, but instead, having to do some weird corkscrew maneuver to get there, is NOT EASIER.
Please allow a checkbox in the game's preferences to allow for full vertical flight. I know that this is an available option in your game engine and I'm disappointed that you guys have ignored players' previous requests to enable this feature (at least as an option). I realize most people don't care but I have some very valid reasons for requesting this.
Especially in PVP matches, often the group of people is way above you and you have to "corkscrew" to get up there.
That's not so bad in a fast escort with a good turn radius. But in an Odyssey the turn radius is huge and therefore just to corkscrew up into the fight I often have to fly over 10km away from the fight, then circle back, just to get up there. It's ridiculous.
To make matters worse, the good escort pilots will often corkscrew straight down or up to get away from me in a fight. They know that in order to chase them I'll have to corkscrew down as well, but since my turn radius is so huge, I'll end up over 10km out of range, even with Evasive Maneuvers.
Then there are the PVE scenarios where a ship is directly above or below you for whatever reason. This happens a lot in things like Starbase 24. A ship will be above me to the point that I cannot directly hit it with dual heavy cannons even though I'm facing it. I just can't angle my ship upwards enough.
I tried the Fleet Turn x3 engines but they do jack. They are fully broken and no one will admit it or fix it. Piling on RCS consoles makes me pretty squishy, and the saucer separation console has a 5-minute cooldown that lasts between respawns (why? why does it matter? why have this long cooldown? sorry that's another post).
Lastly: I get it that you might think this would make things unfair in PVP, where people who enable this option would gain an advantage. Well, given that there is already so much insane imbalance in PVP, what's one more unbalancing thing to add to the gigantic pile of unbalancing factors? We all know that the elite PVP players would all figure it out quite easily and become that much better, and the crappy PVP players who never win anyway would continue to lose badly. What difference would it really make?
At least make the game play like it should. A space game should have full 3D movement. I'm going to continue to request this until it happens. Maybe it's a lost cause but for the love of God, please do this.
I get it that you want to keep it 'easy' for players but seriously, for me, it does NOT make it easier. It's much HARDER to play this game as a result of this. Not being able to fly in a direct straight line between two points, but instead, having to do some weird corkscrew maneuver to get there, is NOT EASIER.
Please allow a checkbox in the game's preferences to allow for full vertical flight. I know that this is an available option in your game engine and I'm disappointed that you guys have ignored players' previous requests to enable this feature (at least as an option). I realize most people don't care but I have some very valid reasons for requesting this.
Especially in PVP matches, often the group of people is way above you and you have to "corkscrew" to get up there.
That's not so bad in a fast escort with a good turn radius. But in an Odyssey the turn radius is huge and therefore just to corkscrew up into the fight I often have to fly over 10km away from the fight, then circle back, just to get up there. It's ridiculous.
To make matters worse, the good escort pilots will often corkscrew straight down or up to get away from me in a fight. They know that in order to chase them I'll have to corkscrew down as well, but since my turn radius is so huge, I'll end up over 10km out of range, even with Evasive Maneuvers.
Then there are the PVE scenarios where a ship is directly above or below you for whatever reason. This happens a lot in things like Starbase 24. A ship will be above me to the point that I cannot directly hit it with dual heavy cannons even though I'm facing it. I just can't angle my ship upwards enough.
I tried the Fleet Turn x3 engines but they do jack. They are fully broken and no one will admit it or fix it. Piling on RCS consoles makes me pretty squishy, and the saucer separation console has a 5-minute cooldown that lasts between respawns (why? why does it matter? why have this long cooldown? sorry that's another post).
Lastly: I get it that you might think this would make things unfair in PVP, where people who enable this option would gain an advantage. Well, given that there is already so much insane imbalance in PVP, what's one more unbalancing thing to add to the gigantic pile of unbalancing factors? We all know that the elite PVP players would all figure it out quite easily and become that much better, and the crappy PVP players who never win anyway would continue to lose badly. What difference would it really make?
At least make the game play like it should. A space game should have full 3D movement. I'm going to continue to request this until it happens. Maybe it's a lost cause but for the love of God, please do this.
Post edited by seraphantilles on
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Not that I wouldn't like up/down movement myself, but how are any of the reasons you yourself mentioned for not implementing this a load of bunk?
If the license holder says no, you have no options.
If the developer worries players would become disoriented, that seems like a valid (althou way too hand-holding-of-players) reason.
And yes, almost all of the TV and movie trek ship combat has been depicted as ship-at-sea type combat.
So while I would like up/down movement, the reasons stated for not implementing it aren't "a load of bunk."
The game is essentially stuck in TOS mode.
If you limit it to up/down, I would agree.
If you want rotation on long axis, I would have to say no. We never ever saw anyone turn on the view screen and the other guys ship was upside down. I can only think of one movie example (in Nemesis) and one tv example (in Enterprise) where they even showed a ship do a rotation.
dont forget in wrath of khan during the last battle where spock says something about 2-dimentional thinking and they start doing some z-axis maneuvering.
but overall yea in all the shows and movies its more 2-D with a tiny bit of z-axis flying around
Z-axis I would be totally cool with. Ships doing barrel rolls or zipping around sector space upside down? not so much.
Space needs to be bigger and space flight / combat needs improving.
There is no reason that the ships would ever have to be fully inverted. You could make it so that while they can be vertical that they would keep their top always facing "Up" so that if you tried to do a roll, for instance, you would automatically turn back upright.
Also; in DS9, which is reputed for its battle scenes, they clearly show the Defiant doing an aileron roll during its fight and other ships moving at vertical or near vertical trajectories.
Quite frankly the notion that you should be snapped to a plane in space is absolutely inane. Furthermore, the idea that you can blockade ships in open space (read: Not near a planet or any other specific location they may be attempting to reach) is absolutely insane when you take into account how massive a wall you would have to form to prevent them from going around it at warp speeds.
I have said this many many many times... Either A) Give us full 3D flight or
YOU'RE DAMN STRAIGHT it's a load of bunk. I'm just going to quote from Wrath of Khan:
Spock: "He's intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking."
Kirk: "Full stop."
Sulu: "Full stop sir."
Kirk: "Z minus ten thousand meters. Standby photon torpedoes."
What ensued was one of the greatest examples of "full 3D" tactics in a space battle in all of cinema. OK so the ship doesn't "rotate" 90 degrees but it flies directly straight up and directly straight down.
---
Fast forward to the JJ Abrahms era, and of course with modern computer graphics now they can actually show ships flying inverted and at 90-degree angles to each other, etc.
Plus most current space games I play allow for this kind of movement, from Galaxy on Fire on my iPhone to Dark Star One on the XBox.
It just seems ridiculous for a major title like STO not to have THE basic defining feature of spaceflight. I get it that it might be disorienting to some players to have their ship rotate forever and never know which way is "up." For these noobs they would have a noob button that says "I'm scared of space" and they can keep it check-marked. But for those players Spock would call "experienced," they would uncheck it and live the real life experience.
Let me point out that if ships could not fly directly up WE WOULD NEVER HAVE GOTTEN INTO SPACE IN THE FIRST PLACE. Think of the message you're sending to children! These games should AT LEAST be somewhat educational about space. Puh-leeze!
As for allowing vertical climbs... If you did do it you would have to rework a lot of stuff, things like NPCs would need to be able to fly vertically to keep you in their arcs, or else people would just fly under the target and point the forward arc up to shoot the NPC who cant shoot back. Then if you have NPCs flying vertically, you need EVERYBODY to fly vertically or else the NPCs will wtfpwn the newbs. For me, STO just not that kind of game. You'll never get to the point of full 3D combat anyway, with having to actually aim the guns, so its just incremental change at a lot of cost and very little gain.
Also, you can already manipulate firing arcs with reverse and corkscrew and a few other things that people are saying is too damned hard. This is about making it simpler, not making it more involved.
AMEN TO EVERYTHING YOU JUST WROTE HERE.
This is EXACTLY correct, and thank you for being part of the choir. Maybe after enough years of asking they'll finally do the right thing with this.
Again I want to reiterate that I'm only asking for 3D flight as an optional feature. Is there really anyone among the devs or players that for some reason has a problem with the idea of some people enjoying the game this way? I can't see a down side to allowing people to enable this if they wish.
I think we should start a cross-faction player group called:
STO Sanity. Our overall goal is to act as a QA team to hone the "immersiveness" of the game. Like fixing 3D flight. Making your captain sit down in the captain's chair instead of beaming off his own bridge to enter Tactical View from Bridge View. Allowing a BOFF or two to accompany you in maps like ESD or Drozana. Let there be debris from exploding ships and have ships with parts that can get blown off permanently (like blowing someone's nacell off etc.) until they respawn. Etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7eqb2vVYU8
The mechanics to avoid player disorientation are already there in that the ship automatically rights itself when you let go of the controls. If the pitch and roll limits were removed to allow full freedom of movement but the self right ability was retained, you would have the best of both worlds.
The ability to pull the ship over onto its back for a tight turn and when you let go of the controls, the ship takes the shortest route to the right way up whilst facing in the current direction. If ye gets me drift.
This is simply wrong. You are totally misinterpreting this on many levels.
First of all, your statement assumes the NPCs are all using small-arc weapons like torps, cannons, or DBBs. Frankly most NPCs use beam arrays, mines, warp plasma, turrets, carrier-spam, and sci-spam that can already hit an enemy that is directly above or below them.
Furthermore, people already exploit the limited angle of attack of NPCs like Borg Cubes who use torps. My favorite strategy has been to fly directly under the cube and hit it from below with beams and mines. It seems like they've updated the Cubes however to have 360-degree torpedo attacks to counter this however.
So I have just shown how the problem of people exploiting the blind spot directly above or below NPCs is not a problem that's specific to whether or not we have 360 flight ship rotation for players. A beam user can exploit this blind spot of a cannon-using NPC easily enough now without needing the rotation ability.
And since an NPC who is angled up to the max degree possible can already hit you with cannons if you're almost directly over it, you currently have to be *exactly* on top of them to take advantage of this blind spot. But we all know what happens, they circle up to you and a one or two seconds later your advantage is gone. Space piloting *should* be like that -- you *should* be able to get an advantage on an enemy by coming directly down on them.
Enabling full 360-degree rotation would not really give you a significant advantage over enemy NPCs. The trouble to get right over them and then come straight down while they can't hit you with cannons... when you can already get the same advantage by just coming up from behind them... I don't see how that would be unbalancing at all.
But if you had to modify the game you could just expand the rotation of NPCs when they are attacked by a player who has full rotation. I don't think this would be necessary though.
If you are a beam boat, you can already fly directly under an NPC and target them when they can't target you due to their limited rotation arc.
No, no, this is so wrong. It's not that big of a difference from the current corkscrewing maneuvers. NPCs flying vertically would not be any harder to target. In fact it's already the case that you often get attacked by NPCs who are directly below you -- they use beams and other TRIBBLE as I already said. And you already can't target them. You already get attacked by ships from behind you who you can't hit back at.
The rare case where an NPC happened to be directly below you and hitting you with cannons (where currently they can't), would be so rare as to not even be a factor. And even when it did happen, well, that's what Evasive Maneuvers is for!
You didn't even read my original post did you? My *whole point* is that it's very frustrating and unbalancing to be forced to use the corkscrew maneuver. It's not "too damned hard" (nobody said that). What it is, is stupid, lame, annoying, and frustrating.
The current system unbalances the advantage that escorts already have over cruisers. Escorts already have a huge advantage over cruisers in maneuverability. But because of the inability to go straight up, the escort with a tight turn radius escorts essentially goes up a thin "spiral staircase" to ascend while the cruiser chasing them has to go up a wide "parking garage spiral" to chase them (instead of being able to simply turn straight up and fly that way). An escort using the corkscrew maneuver vertically can widen their gap from a pursuing cruiser much faster that way than if they fly in a straight line away horizontally, because the pursuing cruiser will have to circle around such a wide radius that for the first part of the maneuver they are actually moving *away* from the escort they're chasing! That's frustrating, and it's indicative of a broken game that needs to be fixed.
Not even regular aerial flight has a limited turn radius. An airplane can go straight up and down. So can Mast Chief in a Banshee. STO needs to with the program!
Roddenberry approached space from a very naval perspective: you *can* move on a Z-axis, but it's generally within a small range, and it's really not that different from operating on a flat surface. The Wrath of Khan scene above is a straight up basic naval submarine tactic. Not a real 3-D space environment tactic. And people who can't tell the difference aren't very good at math, to be honest.
It's much easier for the average person to follow that way.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
And for what? Its a pokemon 3D combat model. Most of the players probably dont care except for the few times when they need to change z-axis quickly. Which you can already do.
I'm not actually opposed to it, I'm just saying it seems complicated for the payoff.
That game was awesome, and the Sovereign the best ship in the game
Yeah I loved that game too as well as Starfleet Command 3. I really think that space / combat needs a massive revamp and using a combination of things from Bridge Commander & Starfleet Command would be the way to go.
I think Stahl at some point said those were the ones that inspired their creation of space / combat in this game, but I don't really see it..... I'd rather be done away with all the massive difference in classes to be honest, there were quite a few ships unique in their own complete way to any other ship. I'm more for the tactically minded space combat though with a full 3d environment that doesn't restrict me.
But I'd be happy with being able to go vertical up and down without barrel rolls or flying upside down. Less star wars style combat would be nice too.
Deep Space 9. Not always, but often. There are ample examples with the Defiant and its successor following contours of larger Dominion ships and making similar, no less insane, maneuvers.
You're right that it's not commonplace, but it's there, and it's Star Trek enough that I fly a Tactical Escort Refit and look forward to the nonexistent day when I'll be able to do the same to a Borg Unimatrix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=did164yEFx4
Looks like one hell off a z axis attack to me, and this was during TNG episodes no less.
I am sorry, but I do not buy that TRIBBLE about z axis not possible, or that it wasn't canon, or that player's would be disoriented.
How can you be disoriented, it isn't flying from the cockpit view, you are seeing things from a birds eye view.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
a very, very old suggestion that comes up from time to time to want 3d movement but as i understand it its never gonna happen, it would basically mean getting into the game coding and completely rebuilding it amongst other things.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Maps for buildings, yes can be a pain without multi tier mapping, but you can get by without it.
Same goes for space maps, unless the intended object is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy far away, otherwise it again isn't really necessary to complete the objectives.
This game has very small maps, so space isn't even an issue without 3d maps, because once engaged with an object, it most often will never be outside of you visual range, and if it is than neither can interact.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!