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Please increase the speed limit to 200!

Auhrii shared this feedback ago

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I imagine speed increases have been asked for time and time again and you probably want to shoot me with a crossbow, but please consider increasing the speed limit to 200m/s!

The vast majority of the servers I've played on have speed limit mods - some up to 150, some to a couple of thousand and one or two that I never found the limit of. After hundreds upon hundreds of hours of testing in both single player and multiplayer, I haven't had an issue with speeds below around 300m/s, even with head-on collisions with ships travelling in the opposing direction.

300, I think, would be a bit of a stretch (at least for now), but I'm certain that 200m/s will cause no issues. The game is far more resistant to the "bullet through paper" effect than it was back in alpha and early beta, and 100m/s feels extremely slow.

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Replies (8)

ViccyQ ●

I too agree the speed bump to 200ms may be a nice new added feature however there is a couple concerns.

Moving at 200ms and firing missiles = suicide because missiles seem to move at that same speed then blow up, destroying your vessel in the process. This means missiles will need to increase as well.

I'm not sure how this plays into the velocity of other objects in the game as well as how fast the system itself trying to crunch speedy calculations.

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Auhrii ●

Agreed. I floated making projectiles inherit the speed of the grid that fired them a while back, but the idea was either scrapped, forgotten or hasn't made it high up enough in the priority list yet.

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Nybbl er ●

I agree to this feedback, 100m/s is a joke considering most space travel happens at thousands of meters per second. Traveling any real distance without a jump drive is painful and boring. Testing with speed mods I have to agree with the OP, the game can deal with the higher speeds now. At least add a slider in the world config to adjust it with 100 as the default, then leave it up to the player to decide. That way powerful servers could accommodate much higher speeds, I think even the p2p server can take it on average hardware.

When a missile is emitted do a simple vector addition adding the parent objects velocity. One vector addition per missile extra isn't really going to strain the game much. Bullets should really behave the same way too of course.

I think all it needs is value in the world file which is substituted for the games fixed speed limit, this should be configured with a slider starting at 100 and ending at 1000, at least initially. Perhaps a number entry field would be a better choice. The mods are small patches, this shouldn't take much of your time.

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domingo ●

Currently: 100 m/s max speed - that means 200 m/s max relative speed if two grids are jousting each other. Physics update 60 times per second.

Take into account that physics engine is de-facto teleporting objects/grids each tick. Thus at relative 200m/s and 60 ticks per second each grid is teleported 3.33 m (well one 1.66, other 1.66 in opposite direction).

Large grid block has size 2.5m - thus it is possible to miss crash if grids are 1 block wide. Not probable.

But you could have outer armor layer without scratch with damaged interior that was supposed to be protected by armor.

The situation is much worse with small grids, as their block size is 0.5m.

If you were to double the max speed, the situation will worsen - more grids not colliding, more damage that phases through armor.

For this to improve a substantial changes to physics engine would be required - something like local tick speed increase for grids that are suspected to collide (it would of course increase CPU load). But I think it is not feasible at this stage of project.

Tick frequency increase would be bad idea.

I'd say OK if there would be some max speed slider in experimental mode - because that means you expect some discrepancies and are OK with them.

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Auhrii ●

That's the thing - the "bullet through paper" effect used to be a huge problem up until mid-late beta, I think the update before the new netcode was introduced. After that, it seemingly stopped being a problem at speeds up to around 300m/s (including head-on collisions between ships at max speed, as I said in the post).

It would need wide testing, of course, but I'm pretty confident 200m/s is still safe.

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Nybbl er ●

I get this potential problem but how often are two ships flying straight at each other at max speed? Again my point is just to have to option there, in experimental, people can test how the speed increase plays out over a long time. If it's a serious problem people will put it down. I think letting people play test a variable speed limit and getting their feedback would be valuable.

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Konstantin ●

To increase, but to attach to the mass of the ship, the greater the mass, the lower the limit.

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Toshiwo Araki ●

I imagine that it was already mentioned, but, for the tunneling problem, there is an approach that can be used, it's called CCD:

https://digitalrune.github.io/DigitalRune-Documentation/html/cd2fc090-d3fd-4a0f-a7d3-1759241c8545.htm

Another problem I imagine the game would have is the collison damage calculations, but at high speed I would simplify them, like having most of the blocks simply disintegrated.

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Vas Vadum ●

Or you could just get a mod to do it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=744903379

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Auhrii ●

I already use a mod for it, thanks. Most servers don't, though, and moving around feels exceptionally slow when you're stuck back at 100m/s.

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Doomed Person ●

200 m/s either doubles the collision phase distance at max speed or halves sim speed, while not solving any other issues. Which do you want?

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Auhrii ●

Physics is not the sole determining factor of sim speed, so no, it would not "halve" it. Grid phasing is imperceptible from every test I've done with 200m/s speed mods, and believe me I've crashed a lot of things at top speed, head-on, with both objects travelling at top speed against each other.

Small grids, large grids, asteroids, hell I even flung a single small armour block at a large grid antenna and it impacted. It didn't phase through.

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Doomed Person ●

Considering that clang can cause massive lag, I'd say that the majority of cases where the sim speed would dip are because of the physics. And having twice as many ticks requires twice as many calculations. So, yes. It would often halve the sim speed in the cases where sim speed is actually an issue.

A large grid antenna is a pretty big target. Launching small blocks at other small blocks makes for a much more effective demonstration.

And if the tickrate is limited, then where did the issue go when you started testing? Other people have observed this as well, suggesting that there might be an issue with the methodology of the experiments that defy logic to avoid showing that the experimenter's suggestion has problems.

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Andy Blackmore ●

Add the ability to change the maximum speed as an option either on thrusters or cockpit

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