Space sim movment

[Cleves]

Hey,

I'm working on a space sim, and I'm looking for a good movment system using the mouse.I've played freelancer, and I remember there was a good system,but it was long ago and I forgot how it was :dry: . I was thinking maybe you can get me some ideas.

Thanks
Cleves

[Mihail121]

Well, for inship camera you use simple UVN camera system - really easy to code! But for the rest you will have to code a complex quaternion camera system with interpolation between rotations and the whole shit :)

P.S.
You can check the excellent camera system articles at GamaSutra!!!

[Cleves]

I'm leaning more towards anoutside camera, like a 3rd person camera.

[Methulah]

Freelancer had 3 main types of movement. At any stage in any of these systems you could use the mouse, which was caled "mouse flight" to point you in the right direction.

When you clicked and held the left mouse button, arrows would come up between your ship and your cursor, and you ship would alter its direction towards to cursor. The further away the cursor was, the faster (tighter) the ship would turn.

Freelancer also had "cruise engines" these wre engines that let you go quite (300) fast, but your weapons were offline and could not be used during this time.

Freelancer also had a good way to get around the galaxy. Different solar systems had "trade lanes" that could be used to move very fast from one pre-determined point to another. Trade lanes ran from one important point to another. Trade lanes were made of different rings spread 7k apart each. One could attack these rings and that would stop anyone coming onto that ring, so that it would be possible to attack them.

In Freelancer, one could go in between solar systems with a simple jump gate. This gate would take you from one solar system to another, and was the only way for inter solar system transport.

This is a discription of the three types of transport in Freelancer.


Free Flight
This system (as makes sense) was just you flew straight ahead. You could use "mouse flight" to control your ship and it flew in the direction you pointed it. You could use the cruise engines if you wanted to get there faster.

Goto
Goto flight was a flight system that flew you stright towards you target, be it a waypoint or whatever else you might have selected. You could use mouse flight, but as soon as you let go of the mouse, it would turn your ship back in the direction. Goto had limited pathfinding that allowed you to ovoid some obsticles like asteroids and things. Goto stopped you when you arrived at your target, and charged your cruise engines automatically if you were more than 1000 units of measurement away.

Dock
Dock was a system that allowed you to dock your ship. It was exactly the same as goto, except you couldn't use dock unless you were less than 10K away from your target.