Re: Effects showroom!

looks good - someone needs some sunglasses while watching it 8-)

Hi mates,

This is a question aimed at Why485 but hoping anyone maybe able to give the answer. Im currently trying to recreate the reverse thruster effect shown in a previous post and come up with a problem. With the engine powered up (not killed) everything works fine, the ship goes forward with the engine and reverse when thrusting. The problem I found was when the engine is killed, the thruster works as normal ie. it powers the ship forward. Is this a known problem ? Any advice would be appreciated.

Ice

I think what you need to do is go into the cmp for the ship and flip the hardpoint that you’re using 180 degrees. I wish I could remember which axis that is, those always confused me…

yea the axises in the hardcmp on the rotation are entirely wrongly written in the program layout. the first one is z and not x, the second is x and not y and the last is y but not z (while we agree that y is, like in physics, the up-down axis and z is the back-front one).

Ice.man wrote:
Hi mates,

This is a question aimed at Why485 but hoping anyone maybe able to give the answer. Im currently trying to recreate the reverse thruster effect shown in a previous post and come up with a problem. With the engine powered up (not killed) everything works fine, the ship goes forward with the engine and reverse when thrusting. The problem I found was when the engine is killed, the thruster works as normal ie. it powers the ship forward. Is this a known problem ? Any advice would be appreciated.

Ice

I’ll be honest and just say that doing such a thing never occurred to me. In making the reverse thruster thing, I never killed the engine and tried to fire a thruster with negative thrust.

Thrusters with a reverse thrust may very well do just that with how they were coded into Freelancer. Short of a hex edit, I don’t think anything can be done about that if it happens entirely as you describe.

To prevent that from ever being an issue I suppose you could disable engine kill… I was never really a fan of it, and Itano Circus actually does just that. In IC it messed up the flow of things so the player just isn’t allowed to engine kill. (Disabled the key for it.) I’m not sure how practical a solution that is for your mod though, as it is a global change.

Gisteron wrote:
yea the axises in the hardcmp on the rotation are entirely wrongly written in the program layout. the first one is z and not x, the second is x and not y and the last is y but not z (while we agree that y is, like in physics, the up-down axis and z is the back-front one).

is anyone interested on a hardpointeditor.exe of the version 1.0.0.18 where this is fixed? just did it a few mins ago. hope SHSAN wouldn’t mind…

Yes please, but why did you modify 1.0.0.18?

because the .23 version doesn’t work for me. has to do with my graphics hardware, i am stick to .18. anyway, if there is need for it and if the axises in .23 are the same as in .18, i can download it and check whether i can edit its loadout like that, too. here is the .18 anyway.

Thank you.

robocop wrote:
So, what do you do there? Forward motion is done by the engines, reverse motion by the thrusters? In other words, no forward motion assist by thrusters?…
That’s so simple yet so ingenious…

Or not so simple after all…
No matter which way I edit the axiseseses… on the Hp, the thrusters always thrust forward with the exhaust effect pointing backward, just like normal. Thrust is also forward regardless of whether the ship is in motion or not.

Also, forward momentum with thrust only is at 1 with a normal thruster.

I placed the Hps on the forward face of the two wings in the bow of the dreadnought. When I hit thrust, I can see the flame effect pushing the ship forward at speed = 1.

1). Am I missing something critical here?
2). Did you have to boost the thrust force of the thruster? I boosted mine from 72000 to 720000 but not seeing any change.

Help?

As you noticed, the orientation of a thruster has nothing to do with the direction in which the thrust is actually applied. To create my reverse thruster, all I did was apply a negative value to the thrust parameter of the reverse thruster. Doing so causes some minor issues which adoxa pointed out how to fix, but functionally it works as intended.

There was however some bug mentioned earlier related to engine kill. I never tested it myself but it is worth looking into if you plan on seriously implementing this.

OK, so instead of max_force = 72000, max_force should equal -72000?

How much force do I need to move the ship?
The stock thrusters are moving my dread at only 1 m/s.
Top engine speed of my dread is 29. Let’s say I want reverse thrust to be about -5 to -10. Is there a relation to the ships mass involved?

Yes, thrust should be negative.

How much thrust you need to move your ship is related to how much total linear drag the ship has. The total linear drag is addition of the ships own linear drag and the linear drag of the engine that the ship uses. To determine a maximum speed added by a thruster, use this formula:

SpeedThrusterProvides = Thrust/TotalLinearDrag

At least I’m pretty sure that was the formula.

kk, so, the linear drag of the ship is 1 with a mass of 100,000
the linear drag of the engine is 100,000

So, thrust boost = -10 would be
-10 = x/100,001? with x being the max_force?

-10 = x/100001
-10*100001 = x = -1000010

That look right?

I don’t know, try it. I’m a bit rusty with my Freelancer math. Plug in the values and see what happens. Mass has nothing to do with top speed either. It affects how long it takes to reach max speed, and a higher value adds a general slippiness, but it has no effect on top speed.

Well, my ship now does do reverse thrust, but at speed -19. I’ll need to tweak the values a bit I guess.
Perhaps the formula should be
for:
max_force = x
desired_thrust_speed = dts
linear_drag_ship = lds
linear_grag_engine = lde

x= dts*((lds+lde)/2)

dts = x/(lds+lde)

Yes, you’re correct. I had forgotten I had put two thrusters on the ship, effectively doubling the thrust speed. Sorry if I confused anyone.

Umm… I’m not sure why you are using thrusters in reverse, robo?

Every engine is capable of reverse thrust without thrusters. You can set it for each engine in engine_equip.ini

e.g. reverse_fraction = 0.3 means the engine can make the ship go 30% of its forward speed in reverse.

No? :-?

Well yeah… But now we can make it something someone has to buy!!! (trying to fleece my players out of every credit I can)