Speed upgrade?

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Speed upgrade?

Rebelyell
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Post by Rebelyell » Sat Nov 28, 2020 6:42 am

I dont know if this has been asked before, but can we up the speed on the craft without destroying balance? I love Xwa and xwaup but one thing that that bugged me was a lack of sensation of speed, especially when going past capital ships. I was wondering what cannon speed looks like vs in game so I tried an experiment. In ROTJ when the fleet is amassing at sullest the falcon does a flyby of home one and in that clip we can see it takes about 10 sec or so for it to go from front to back. Now we know the falcon has other ships trailing it (including b-wings) so we can assume its not traveling at top speed. We can also assume that home one is moving forward as well, but for the sake of this exp lets say it was stationary. Now recreating such a flyby in xwa is easy enough in skirmish so I set it up and found at max speed, with everything diverted to engines it takes the falcon over 20 seconds to make that flyby. To try and make it movie accurate with mvted i found to get near that 10 sec mark the falcon speed has top be aroung 360 mglt.
My question is if we base speeds off that and go through and modify the fighters and such ( not so much the cap ships as theyre supposed to be slower ), while also maintaining other stats such as acel/decel and mavnouvre would it break the game or make it more enjoyable as movie accurate?


edit: Btw i do understand this would make the ds tunnel run and yard fly throughs near impossible

Safe-Keeper
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Post by Safe-Keeper » Sun Nov 29, 2020 5:02 am

They also fly from Yavin IV to the Death Star in mere minutes, so top sub-light speed must be pretty phenomenal :p .

Firstly, keep in mind that you'll always feel like you're going slowly because you're in space and travelling pretty long distances, between fairly big ships. I was a tester for the First Strike mod, and our star fighters always felt slow in space, but if you put the same fighter on a vanilla BF2 map, you found it really flew much, much faster than the vanilla jets (later we added ground maps with fighters, but then we used cloned atmospheric versions of whatever fighters appeared, which flew a lot more slowly, and IIRC also maneuvered more sluggishly).

Having said that, yes, it would probably be nice if you could go a bit faster in XWA. In fact this applies to other ships than star fighters, too. Star Destroyers were crazy fast in the films, to the point where Han Solo had to do "a couple of maneuvers" to deal with them in both A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. I worked on a custom XWA campaign a long time ago that may or may not ever be finished, and one of the things I did was allow larger ships, from corvettes up to ISDs, move at much higher speeds than in the XWA campaign when I felt it made sense for them to do so.

As for how fast fighters and whatnot should move, I don't know. As you say, you have to think about both flybys (that feeling of flying past, for example, a Star Destroyer and actually feeling that you're going fast), and other situations like dogfights. Since Star Wars' dogfights are based on World War II (or was it even World War I?), I'd consider maybe reducing pitch and roll rates, too. Both fighters and the Falcon have pretty wide turning radii in the films.

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Vince T
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Post by Vince T » Sun Nov 29, 2020 3:24 pm

As far as I know there have been a few shipsets which also increased ship speeds, I remember Abolisher's Ashgard Campaign being one of them.
Generally you would have to increase the speed of everything from ships to lasers, however as far as I know, there is a maximum velocity that a projectile can go.

Either way, changing the speeds outside of a speciffic shipset or campaign is not recommended as it will greatly upset the mission balance in the vanilla game, as the way the missions are set up in both timing and flightgroup placement is based on the current speed of things. Increasing the speeds of ships will make some missions un-winnable, because, e.g. an approaching Star Destroyer will be in firing range much faster than it's supposed to. You would have to redo every single missions, moving flightgroups further apart, revising waypoint paths and event timers. This comes close to remaking the entire campaign.
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Rebelyell
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Post by Rebelyell » Mon Nov 30, 2020 5:25 am

i did at test run uping fighter speeds by 200% and while i was able to replicate movie quality speeds ( using the battle of endor and a lot of ship flybys as base ) i found two major problems. The first is closing distance in head on fights is super fast making head on starfighter attacks amazingly difficult. On thye plus side straffing runs against capital ships is incredibly satisfying. This leads to thing 2: at higher speeds than stock the ai for both capital ships and fighters cannot keep up and cannot easily target you or each other. had a 4 squad vs a 4 squad skirmish set up and it took forever because everyone was too fast to hit each other. When I returned to stock speeds the battle was over in less than 10 mins

Random Starfighter
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Post by Random Starfighter » Tue Dec 08, 2020 10:25 pm

Speed is one of the most significant mechanics affecting game balance. It's one of the main reasons why the TIE Defender is exponentially powerful compared to the stock rebel fighters, aside from shield strength. Going faster has a tremendous effect on your ability to dodge. Even if you're flying in a straight line you'll be harder to hit. In both cases you'd take much less damage than a slower craft, no matter who is attacking you. As it seems you've already noticed, things can get wonky when the craft speeds are pushed too high, since it also affects projectile speeds. The AI isn't designed to effectively calculate their leading distance, or even their combat maneuvers at those speeds. As for capital ships, their accuracy isn't very good, even against slow targets. Something as big as a Star Destroyer is easy to fool.

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Post by Safe-Keeper » Wed Dec 09, 2020 6:54 am

Have you tried increasing speed, but decreasing pitch and roll?

Rebelyell
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Post by Rebelyell » Wed Dec 09, 2020 7:22 am

I did not as it seemed more arbitrary then straight fwd speed. I can find movie footage to show fwd momentum like the sullest fleet or the battle of endor but finding something that can show roll and pitch is a bit harder. I will say though pitch and roll in game seems fairly accurate already. During the high speed testing I was able to replicate the instance where Wedge has an interceptor following him and he dives at the mon cal cruiser and rolls away at the last second to have the tie not make the turn and crash. I found it funny when i did the same and the int following me couldnt make the turn :)

Mr_Blastman
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Post by Mr_Blastman » Mon May 08, 2023 3:20 am

I did some reading on this and seems the consensus is the movies were about 2.4 times faster than the game, so take any value in the game and multiply by 2.4 to get the true m/sec value the games should be set at. They've always felt insanely slow, since way back in the early 90s. 75 meters per second is only 167 mph, which is essentially the speed the fastest combat helicopters fly at...

Pan_de
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Post by Pan_de » Thu May 18, 2023 6:40 pm

I changed the first few missions and they seem to work fine. Anyone up for modding this with me?

AnarchoMando
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Post by AnarchoMando » Mon Jan 29, 2024 6:27 pm

Mr_Blastman wrote:
Mon May 08, 2023 3:20 am
I did some reading on this and seems the consensus is the movies were about 2.4 times faster than the game, so take any value in the game and multiply by 2.4 to get the true m/sec value the games should be set at. They've always felt insanely slow, since way back in the early 90s. 75 meters per second is only 167 mph, which is essentially the speed the fastest combat helicopters fly at...
how would a noob be able to change the games speed easily ( I'm the noob here)

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