Ship Drives, Handling & Turn Rates

Freeform discussion about anything related to modding Transcendence.
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Anarchist
Anarchist
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Jun 05, 2012 11:28 am

Changing Ship Maneuver & Handling with Modded Ship Drives

This is a small comment by a non-modder

A problem when playing with mods which allow access to a wide variety of player ships (like PM's Playership Drones) is that the physics of the larger ships make them very difficult to aim and handle in a dogfight or when flying around in general. This adds realism but reduces the overall fun experienced by the player in having a large ship with many linked-fire mounts.

I noticed that most ship thrusters/drive mods which add custom ship drives mostly change acceleration and maxSpeed without changing how the player ship handles (in terms of how sluggish/swiftly it turns.)

A lucky guess and a tiny bit of tinkering gave me a way out of this:
  • Download a suitable drive/thruster mod that adds a variety of shipdrives and thrusters to the game.
  • Edit one of the modded drives by adding maneuver stats to the drive attributes.
Here, the usual attributes associated with ship drives are:

Code: Select all

		<DriveDevice
				maxSpeed=		"70"
				thrust=			"100000"
				powerUsed=		"1"
				/>
One merely needs to transplant three attributes readily present in custom playership mods - maxRotationRate, rotationAccel and rotationStopAccel:

Code: Select all

		<DriveDevice
				maxSpeed=		"70"
				thrust=			"100000"
				powerUsed=		"1"
				maxRotationRate=	"10.0"
				rotationAccel=		"3.0"
				rotationStopAccel=	"12.0"
				/>
These attributes define how fast your custom ship turns, and adding it to your modded ship drive seems to override the basic stats of the ship which you are flying.

Here's some sample code:

Code: Select all

	<ItemType UNID="&debugPowerDrive;"
			name=				"debugPowerDrive"
			level=				"1"
			value=				"100"
			mass=				"6000"
			frequency=			"rare"
			attributes=			"MajorItem"

			description=		"For your modded ship needs."
			>

		<Image imageID="&rsItems1;" imageX="96" imageY="384" imageWidth="96" imageHeight="96"/>

		<DriveDevice
				maxSpeed=		"70"
				thrust=			"100000"
				powerUsed=		"1"
				maxRotationRate=	"10.0"
				rotationAccel=		"3.0"
				rotationStopAccel=	"12.0"
				/>
Depending on how you want your playership to handle after installing this custom drive that changes both thrust and handling aspects - you can look up common handling characteristics of familiar playerships like the Wolfen, Sapphire Yacht and EI500.

Make your CSC playership handle like a Wind Slaver!
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