Space Engineers

Space Engineers

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Slight over-speed of speed limit, but ONLY when thrusting
While the speed limit officially is 100m/s, a player can go 110m/s which makes sense to allow a player to move around a ship going at 100m/s. Objects can also fall up to 104.38m/s into gravity.

Well I think this is a minor mechanic that can be small enough to implement with little issue, while being worth it to do, if my understanding of how speed in the game works is right. In games like Freelancer, you could use afterburners to temporarily increase your ships' speed, but this increase would only work with the afterburners on and when not using them, the ship would return to the regular non-boosted speed.

Well the idea is, maybe so long as your thrusters are still thrusting the ship can exceed 100m/s, maybe for instance some speed between 100m/s and 110m/s, maybe that number is also somewhat dependant on the thrust override level too, but killing dampeners and otherwise coasting would not allow a ship to go past the 100m/s limit and the ship drops back down to it. It would also give a more satisfying reason, with feedback to the player, for pushing their thrusters to the limit even though their speed would otherwise be maxed out.

This would also have an effect on gameplay where players onboard an over-speeding ship would feel a 'perception' of acceleration in having to try harder to move forward relative to the ship's direction of travel than backwards, because of the player's speed limit of 110m/s.

In terms of how AI works, AI blocks will not exceed 100m/s anyway, but maybe an option for over-speed can be added for the purpose of things like missiles to still work.

To give this small mechanic more depth, a steep curve in power needed to get to over-speeds can be implemented, i.e. maybe it takes twice as long to get from 100m/s to 101m/s as it does to get from 99m/s to 100m/s, then twice as long again to get to 102m/s etc. This way, there's a good but balanced reason to design ships which accelerate fast and it gives just a bit more differentiation in 'speed' between big huge ships and smaller ships. Allowing smaller ships to better eek out full-speed pursuits or escapes, even though technically they are bound to the same limitations.

If you wanted to get REALLY cool with it, extra effects like camera warping and shake can be added as the ship goes more and more into over-speed while thrusting.
Last edited by Blackout4711; 19 Jul @ 2:05am
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Showing 1-3 of 3 comments
UbioZur 22 Jul @ 2:24am 
The reason the 100m/s speed limit exist is for the physic engine.

100m/s is the speed that KSH have decided will cause the least amount of collision bug.
Anything above (You can use mod to increase/tweak the max speed), and you have an increased risk of phasing through/inside objects (either it be voxel or grids).

Currently, with the physic engine running at 60ups (update per seconds)

Any two objects colliding (at 100ms) that have a diameter lower than 1.67m would have a high chance to never collide.
Last edited by UbioZur; 22 Jul @ 2:29am
ShadedMJ 22 Jul @ 5:18am 
The 110m/s limit for engineer is to catch up to their 100m/s ship they accidentally left.

Though I agree with UbioZur, I wanted to add that 100m/s works good for servers. 300m/s works equally well for non-server games.
Guys I'm aware of the limitations and reason for the speed limit. I think maybe I haven't explained properly...

The idea is that maybe the speed limit for ships, only WHILE thrusting, can be up to 105 or 110 m/s (A VERY small increase and isn't game breaking, ships also fall at 104.38m/s towards gravity anyway with only the occasional clipping issues so 100m/s isn't a hard limit), but when NOT thrusting i.e. you stop holding W, the ship goes back down to 100m/s. You hold down W again, the ship will SLOWLY creep back up to the new 105 or 110 m/s limit, but its much, much exponentially slower to get every extra 1m/s past 100m/s, making it not efficient but good for gamefeel, good when in a pinch and not game breaking.

The end effect is like an afterburner thing where so long as you are holding down thrust or using thrust override, you CAN go just a little bit above 100m/s, albeit from 100m/s to this theoretical 'new' top speed, 105 or 110m/s i think is a good number, It's just a very, very small extra boost and takes time to creep up to that speed once you've already hit 100m/s. It becomes like an extra gamefeel thing that makes holding W in space during a heated battle or escape feel less futile, while actually still respecting the limitations of the game. Players onboard a ship which is continually thrusting will also perceive the illusion of the acceleration beyond 100m/s, because they are still bound to their 110m/s limit too. It also means you can catch up with ships falling into atmosphere.

I think there's little reason not to, ships already go faster than 100m/s as I said, when falling. Also, players can go up to 110m/s so that they can still move around on ships which are going at 100m/s, as long as they ships do not exceed 110m/s, so just having a slight boost in speed only when maxing out thrust isn't an issue.
Last edited by Blackout4711; 22 Jul @ 6:20am
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