collision detection

[Hylie Pistof]

It would be nice if the collision detection system could be worked on. It is probably not possible, but it is very irritating as it is now.

Here is a screenie of the aftermath of the battle with the Animist frigate. The ships have been spinning for a while and are slowing down. My ship took almost no damage at all in the actual fighting.

 

[Armada]

I'd imagine the only thing we can do is re-export ships with bad collision detection; the actual mechanics of the way ships collide with each other is probably hard-coded (unless anyone knows otherwise).

Is there an official list of ships with bad collision, anywhere? If not, I'd suggest starting with that, so modellers can work through re-exporting them when they're available.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Well, that's the problem. This is a global situation where good ships go bad. In this case 4 ships were packed into that small bay and spent all their time bouncing off each other until it just went crazy. The ships involved were the Animist frigate, a Postillionen, a Fragata Latina (your light frigate with different masts and sails), and a Heavy East Indiaman.

This happens in the open sea too but not as bad as the ships can get away from each other there.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

What exactly is the issue? In this case there seems to be "tacking" involved.
The way that works is by adding "extra impulse" to the ships which overrides the normal physics system.
Maybe that throws things out of whack, especially in close areas?

We could get rid of the "tacking code" again, but then we'd be right back where we started and we only just got that sort-of working.
Unfortunately the AI doesn't understand the concept of "wind direction" at all and there is no way to "educate" them on it either.
So all we can do is to use manual overrides. But we need to be careful with that because those can very easily mess things up.

Or otherwise disable the "tacking code" if within a certain range from land to prevent ships from going nuts in close quarters?
That distance would need to be island-dependent then though for reasons that @Armada probably remembers from his Worldmap remodeling.

Long story short: Definitely not easy and I cannot really think of a proper solution.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

When it started no ships were tacking. We were just all banging into each other and spinning around until the animist frigate got pushed against the island and took off at 100+ knots. That got all of us going around sideways in big circles. They could say they were tacking but we were all completely out of control. Note that my ship is going -65 knots and slowing.

When it started the Animist frigate was the only one trying to tack, but couldn't because one of my ships was banging into it from 2 ship lengths away.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Maybe the problem is because Realistic Game Mode has ridiculous numbers for ship inertia.
Normally that works well, but the game was never meant to work like that.
So maybe that is what is throwing things out of whack then.

Which reminds me: do you still get onscreen messages about your ships tacking?
I meant that for debugging and probably forgot to disable them afterwards.
Would you consider those logs to be useful in any way?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Yes I still do get those ship tacking messages and no I do not need them anymore. I can see what the ships are doing and they are mostly keeping up just fine. The different ships have their own personality and one ship will fall back in one wind condition and then the other will fall back in other conditions. But when conditions are right they catch right back up again.