That's what I mean, "post all X topic feedback here". In this case, X being spaceship controls.
Perhaps having 5 or 6 stickys for feedback relating to common subjects?
This thread is too specific and its topic not common enough to warrant making it a sticky.
Don't know who, if any of you, believes in extraterrestrial live intelligent enought to build vehicles that can actually travel beyond the limits of the hollistic/real universe limitations, I think they do exist given the unlimited extension of the universe, thus by logic, everything exists, let's imagine for a second how those machines would function.
So I imagine a kindof a flight model that is like a VTOL on a planet but with onboard computers that level you off and keep altitude or speed vectors, just like the fa-18 in fsx has an autopilot that holds your flight vector. So, we take off, nice and safe, then depending on shield strengh we can accellerate to a certain speed till we leave the atmosphere, there we change the flight model to gravi-drive vectoring, which could be relationed to your energy available/money spent on gravi-drive quality. This would vector you towards your target, calculating the perfect accel-travel-decel times so we get there in not more than (in game 5 minutes) an hour or two.
Nice would be to plan a route, like gravi-drive entry point, gravi-drive exit point at safe distant from target.
Enroute issues, like enemy/friendly vessels, rocks, suns should be detected by hyperfield scanners and make us drop out of gravi-drive. That way we get to shoot a bit or we found a resource rich unknown planet/sun.
Of course our ship can be steered completley without any electronic assitance just for fun sake but maybe it should have a distress recovery button so if we loose it we hit tha panik button not to loose our 10.000.000 credit vessel on takeoff after having mined asteroids for 2 months to collect the necesary credits.
These are just thoughts, no suggestions nor petitions at all, but I'd like to hear what you think about them.
First of All, What an Incredible Program!!!
While we may think that in Space we would want to grab a joystick and fly around, in reality, I would think that all space motion would be computer controlled given what we want the spacecraft to do. So I would suggest a method for saying at Time T1 spacecraft is here, pointing in this direction, at time T2 spacecraft is here pointed in this direction and so forth. You can do this for a whole set of spacecraft. Finally you say "fly all vehicles" and the you use the camera to record or view the action. This would allow you to fly complex space maneuvers like you see in any movie such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien.
It would be great to have a method of telling the spacecraft how to point itself ( point at the earth, moon, sun, velocity vector, tangential to surface, acceleration vector, nadir, zenith, at another spacecraft and which axis, etc..)The speed is already taken into account by specifying time. Perhaps another option is to allow to record your flying and then play it back while you fly a different spacecraft so you can fly formation with yourself or others online. This would allow users to make really impressive space movies and quickly create complicated and coordinated space scenes for videos and movies.
People have suggested attaching the spacecraft to the camera. That is a great idea. I do think that there should be an ability to record spacecraft movements and also camera movements in a quick render way so that you get smooth moves and then the ability of render the whole coreography with full graphics.
I want to come back to life this thread, because SE is getting way more players, and a lot of them are complaining about Spaceship commands.
Right now it's pretty a nightmare getting used with SE commands for spacecraft. I've got the hang of it, but for new user it's very complex.
They're very similar to "free mode" commands, with WASD and RF for RCS translation, mouse for rotation and mouse scroll-wheel for throttling up/down. You can also use numpad for rotation, but I've discovered that recently since my previous keyboard had no numpad at all!
It sounds easy, but as soon as you want to do orbital maneuvering or you want to fly on the surface of a planet, it kind of becomes uncomfortable. Even if I admit that WASD/RF for translation becomes very userful when you want to do docking or complex maneuvers.
So... I thought it would be a good idea to completely change default commands, to make them a little more "noob-friendly", what do you think?
We could take KSP or Orbiter as inspiration source.
I have to agree with Salvo. People in this thread have been complaining about the keyboard controls but I use a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick to control ships in SpaceEngine. It's still really difficult to do anything with the ships although in patch 8 of 0.9.7.4., there were a few additions made to the ship hud that makes it easier than before to create stable orbits with your ship.