🚀 go-pugleaf

Delance@ (Delance) writes:

>	Why do you think WC engine arcade inspired, and X-Wing is
>realistic? This is completely wrong... In fact, X-Wing's flight engine
>don't even features inertia and ships tend to fly like they were in
>atmosphere, not space, while WC engine, specially WCP, is much closer
>to what a space ship would be like without making gameplay boring.

WC is arcade because it doesn't have any angular momentum.
When you move the joystick, the ship turns at a constant
rate and when you center the joystick, this ship stops
turning instantly.  Freespace and IWar (and the original
Descent games) use a more realistic physics model which
features angular momentum.

>	If you consider X-Wing realistic just because the ship rolls
>when you turn left-right, this is not realistic in space since, as we
>all should know, there's no atmosphere nor gravity in space. And since
>WC3, WC games have this "alternative" flight mode option...

Actually, there is one good reason to use banked turns
in a space fighter: human physiology.  A human pilot can
withstand more vertical Gs than lateral Gs.  Thus it makes
sense to perform "coordinated turns" to keep the ship's
acceleration vector aligned with the pilots body.

But, this is all a lot of hooey because neither WC nor XvT
nor Freespace even pretend to use thrusters to turn a ship.
They all use some mysterious unseen, unnamed force (well,
the Star Wars books make mention of an "etherial rudder"
whatever that is...) to control attitude.  So it is kind of
hard to say that any of them is more realistic than any
of the others.

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