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Thread: Atomosphere Flight
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The_Annihalter
Thu Oct 14, 2004 8:56 am
#1
I felt very frustrate after learning there would be no atmosphere flight as I thouhgt that would be a very good feature. I think that it would be good if you could personally take off the ground and land your shuttle in the ports. To solve the problem of too many people entering the port at the same time, there should be a que. The atmoshphere flight would provide intense dog fights and would enable pilots to cause serious damage on Battlefields, thus making it a very lucrative postition, lets hope that atmosphere flight will be a possibility, post any comments or suggestions.
john_p
Thu Oct 14, 2004 9:08 am
#2
I suppose the biggest problem is that the ground area is only 15km by 15km - whereas a planet is a heck of a lot bigger than that.
If you were flying from orbit into a planet it would have to be a big kludge to ensure you always ended up in the 15km sq area.
I agree it would be fantastic (kind of likeFrontier,Starglider 2 or Damocles) but not going to happen, ever. 
Sinatra3
Thu Oct 14, 2004 10:13 am
#3
The biggest problem would be lag on the ground. There isnt as much geometry in space and if you were to fly in the atmosphere, you wouldnt be able to do anything because you would be running at 1FPS.
RozhlokLightningskull
Thu Oct 14, 2004 10:25 am
#4
Space is real-time twitch combat. Ground isdie-roll RPG-format combat. The two systems wouldn't work well together. To hit a target in the ground game you select the target and you select the special. You hit the target if your accuracy roll is higher than the target's defense roll. In space you aim and shoot. If you're aim is off you miss. If its on you hit. I'd hate to be the programmer that would have to write a system where these two systems would have to interact. Blah. 
But, that's not to say the devs couldn't do some cool things with the two different systems. I'd like to see battlefields were meeting objectives on the ground could effect the battle in space. For example, Rebels are ambushing an ISD over Naboo. However, reinforcement TIE squadrons keep on coming from the ground. A unit of rebel soldiers must inflatrate the Imperial space port and activate a destruct sequence. Once the space port is destroyed the ISD will become more vulnerable without anymore TIE units being able to be deployed. The devs could do a bunch of stuff like that.
Leana_Txorana
Thu Oct 14, 2004 11:56 am
#5
Another issue is how would you like to be running a faction mission and have a Tie Fighter see you have a tef and straf you. Well we could just not allow it but then you are codeing the fighter spaceships to not be able to fire under some situations and you just know a bug or two will allow the exploit.
The devs have said they want to add atmospheric flight but the challenges did not allow it to be added for the launch of JTL.
MadcowwithSARS
Thu Oct 14, 2004 1:36 pm
#6
Ya my idea of fun isnt seeing somone camp the krayt gravyard with a multicrewed YT-1300 or straffing Jedi grinding on yavin.....Oh wait on second thought that would be fun. Not for the Jedi of course 
RasalTheWise
Thu Oct 14, 2004 1:43 pm
#7
I think SOE did mention at one point that they could integrate atmosphere-flying ships (not necessarily space-faring ones) into the ground game. That would be most excellent. Even if the ships didn't have combat capability.
JoNusi
Thu Oct 14, 2004 1:48 pm
#8
/agree
that would be such a cool feature, making the Star Wars universe so much greater than it is. Also say the ability to land your ships in specific locations, outside a spaceport (phantom meanace style) but would have disadvantages, say it'd remain in the game world vunerable to attack, or a different way on intergration, use them as respawn/drop ship dealies, like the Stormtroopers in Lambda Shuttles - the ships cant actually partisipate in the battle, but especially on planets where either dungeons or outposts are a great distance from spaceports! Never gonna happen but still.
Maybe if SOE do Star Wars Galaxies 2do it should be more like Planetside in-regards to full real-time combatfor both airbourne and ground battles, still retaining its RPG progressionof SWG1 for the non-combat profs, but of-course making them far more dynamic and interesting to pursue, well justa random thought 
-Staberinde-
Fri Oct 15, 2004 12:34 am
#9
The major issue with flying on planets is bandwidth, SoE have cunningly kept bandwidth usage to a minimum by ignoreing the vertical axis. Thats why jump doesnt really jump, and when you jump your speeder off a cliff it still hits obsticles on the ground. The vertical axis is purely a graphical thing, according to the server, all PCs and NPCs are on the ground. Adding aircraft to the game would mean that every object in the game would need to be positioned on a vertical axis as well as the current X,Y coordinate, add into that the fact that the fighters would need to have real time calculated weaponry (which would be like adding another NPC with every shot as the shots need to be placed in the world). Add all these factors up and you have an impossible lag fest, the only reason they can do it in space is because they can severly cut down on objects, what with it being space and everything. Its not going to look weird if you dont see any NPCs around, and you dont need to deal with player houseing, items on the ground, collisions with static objects (well not as often at least, no trees in space). You can also cut back a lot on custimisations, the server wont need to tell every computer all 15 items you happen to have equiped and need to be rendered.
Sorry to ruin it but for a game that is suppost to require a 56K modem to play, its never going to happen.
Everitt_Cage
Fri Oct 15, 2004 12:54 am
#10
How would you like to be walking around on the groundand a ship come flying by and blow you away? The ground part of the game and the flight part of the game dont mix.
-Staberinde-
Sun Oct 17, 2004 9:47 am
#11
I think when they are talking about atmosphere flying type ships your talking about Snow Speeder type thing, which I highly doubt being like actual aircraft. They will most likely fly at a fixed hieght very much like normal speeders and jetpacks do right now, only higher up. Id imagine they will just be very fast unattackable speeders that dont hit off trees.I seriously doubt they will be able to attack stuff, itd reduceany kinda PvP to hit and run fly bys, it would ruin the ground based game.This way they can still have aircraft but they wont need to worry about the extra hieght data, SWG has kinda limited itself in the way PSO did with the 2 digit locations.
I do think armour in PvP would be a lot of fun, as in manable AT-STs, armoured Speeders ala Battlefront, itd be hard to get right, but it would make PvP a bit more interesting.
Dronayus
Sun Oct 17, 2004 10:41 am
#12
one problem i find with atmospheric flight is that people forget that JTL and SWG are programmed differently. JTL is twicthed based and SWG is not. Blending the two will cause so many bugs that it wont even be pretty. And also, the whole point of JTL is space combat. Allowing a player to fly from ground directly into space will be cool but if you fly lets say straight from a star port and directly into space, the transition from ground to space will have to be through a loading process. Hence if your going to go to a load screen when you reach the planet atmosphere and then see yourself in space, why would devs cause a lag nightmare by having you fly up then load when you can just load from the ground and into space. It adds a cool immersion affect but the problems that it'll cause out wieght it. If they give go atmospheric flight then players will want atmospheric combat and this will cause a lag nightmare as well. I remember when mounts and vehicles were first introduced and we couldnt be near each other cause of the lag. Imagine a fleet 10 X-wings and 10 Tie's fighting over Theed Starport. the lag will be horrific for both you and other players. It will just cause so many problems that it wont work out.
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