Ship physics for Pulse - Analysing the past

[Asayyeah]

Turbo start easy... yes if you are talking about 'common' turbo start but i am not sure you know there's a real big 'turbo start' which is purely so difficult to do. For example triakis may have a better start than an AG Sys or Assegai if this tricky TS is done ( even if he is 2nd on grid).
You can hear difference by a different sound the engine is doing, it's like a double 'Whooosh' in a row.
I'd like to see the return of the countdown ( 3,2,1, goooo ala W3O) with the same way of TS we saw on Pure but they should increase the speed of the hard but rewarded mega Turbo-Start : something really noticable and give a real clear advantage

[xdirex]

As much as I like the tapping method of turbo start that was found in all of the original games, I really like the fact that Wipeout Pure's has been made easier.

Why?

Because after 10 years of playing Wipeout, can you imagine how many times we've all tapped the X button in preperation for a turbo start? I work on computers for a living (Graphic Designer) and I'm starting to realise that all of these fast tapping motions that we all do on keyboards, gamepads, mouses, etc, does have an effect on your hands, and can introduce that nasty term RSI (or carpal tunnel syndrome). I don't want to sound like I'm whining, but I'm getting to the point where I need to be quite conscious of this.

Anyway, it's not like the old method was really any harder (WO1 excluded), it's just different, really.

[RJ O'Connell]

For Pure, and Fusion, it was well too easy to turbo-start.

There needs to be a much smaller timeframe to decide whether or not you rocket to the front or just get off the grid normally. In other words, make it harder and more rewarding!

There's my $0.02 USD.

[lunar]

I like mad hardcore stuff, like the WipEout start system, but I wouldn`t want such insanity in Pulse. I like the Pure system - the turbo start is easy, but still missable in multiplayer when you`re under pressure. And there`s a super-turbo start which you can get if you guess the timing, but you risk a stall. Maybe this feature could have been made slightly more obvious, or there could be a slight variation in quality of turbo starts depending on how fast you react.

[Asayyeah]

I agree with you stephen a slight more obvious turbo starts idem for a variation between them .

[RJ O'Connell]

I like Lunar's suggestion the best.

[rageagainstgeorge]

I didn't like the barrell rolls either. They didn't seem to fit, if you know what i mean.

I also love the Hyperthrust from W3O. It required good sense to use it well. It's probably the reason i'm shite at W30...

[RJ O'Connell]

Hyperthrust: I'll agree with you there. The trick is knowing when and where and how long to use it, given each speed class and what track and ship you use. Then in Single Race mode, you pretty much have to either 1) not get hit by enemy fire or 2) pit every lap if you do to get the most of the system.

Personally, hyperthrust didn't fit very well either. That's just my $0.02, but hey.

[Chill]

When scraping along side walls... in Pure, it only slowed you down, which was great, but you stuck to the wall. I would've thought that something would of been made of counter-act with this. Bouncing off of the wall would've of been good, like W3O, but without it speeding you up, ya?

[Dogg Thang]

I was playing the original WO yesterday and I noticed a huge difference in how it works. Now I noticed it in Pure before but it really hit home going back to the original - in Pure, the movement of the ship is rooted to a spot just in front of the nose. Everything rotates around the nose of the ship. It actually looks quite unrealistic once you notice it. It's really like you're flying a tiny dot with a ship hanging on to the back.

In the original WO, it is almost impossible to ascertain any root point. So the ship seems to be genuinely free-floating. It can move all around the screen.

I'm wondering - is that just the camera position creating that feeling? Is it that the camera in Pure is rooted to that nose spot whereas the camera in the early WO games has more freedom? Or is the 'flying a tiny spot on the nose' theory actually the way it works?

[q_dmc12]

umm....yes?

[Frances_Penfold]

I enjoy the barrel roll mechanic in Pure but worry about the extent of its use in Pulse. As other have said, at high speed classes good players can do it so many times, that only a smallish number of vehicles become viable for high-level competition.

Anything that shoehorns players into a small subset of vehicles is bad for racing games.

A larger issue is that it could irritate casual gamers much like "snaking" did in Mario Kart DS. Snaking and barrel rolls are pretty analagous, each requiring skill and obviously building on an intended game mechanic, but, taken to the maximum, end up dominating the gameplay.

I really think that average gamers would be PISSED to see experienced players barrel rolling past them during the first lap of every race.

[Dogg Thang]

At least barrel rolls were limited by shields and looked cool. Snaking in MK had no such limitations and looked ridiculous.

[Frances_Penfold]

But like the barrel roll, snaking (back and forth mini-turbos on a straight away) limits the number of ships you can effectively use, requires skill to implement and is the "logical end result" of an intended game mechanic.

Comparisons to Mario Kart aside, there's already a sense among franchise veterans that the barrel roll is overused and obnoxious in Pure. Newcomers will be even less enthusiastic, I suspect.

We'll find out soon enough! I myself don't mind the barrel roll much, and know that Pulse will be my favorite game of the year

[Cannon_Fodder]

Out of interest, how did you decide that franchise veterans find the barrel roll obnoxious? It seems a little like a sweeping generalisation to me. Sure, there are people that don't like it, but I've seen plenty of people comment that they do like it.

Or do you really mean that you find it rubbish? If so, why is that?

[infoxicated]

I think it sucks because I don't see the connection between doing a barrel roll and getting a boost. It's an anomaly in a universe that has (despite the anti-gravity thang) has at least tried to keep some grounding in reality.

Plus it was ill thought out - the fact that you can do more barrel rolls in a Triakis than you can in an AG Systems means that the former becomes the dominant ship in a barrel roll intensive course and the latter becomes useless on tracks that require more than a couple of barrel rolls per lap.

The barrel roll also turned some of the classic tracks into a complete joke - Porto Kora in particular just becomes a barrel roll festival that feels more like a comedy cuts Crash Team Racing kind of experience than the reasonably sophisticated experience I'd normally expect from WipEout.

Although the barrel roll flaws have been addressed somewhat for Pulse, the implementation and saturation of barrel rolls in Pure is one of the reasons I wont be going back to the game when Pulse comes out.

At the end of the day, I don't think it added much - if anything - to the game. Also, if someone was trying to come up with a game mechanic designed to break the console it was being played on, they couldn't have come up with something more destructive than "frantically waggle fragile analogue nub", other than maybe "headbutt the screen as hard as you can for a speed boost".

[Task]

Wipeout:Headbutt - comes with motion-sensing attachment for PSP-headbutting speed boosts! Let's be fast! And buy new PSPs!

So far, I've found that very little in WOure has the solid grounding in physics that I'd hoped to see. Get hit by a rocket from behind and you come to a sudden stop? Get hit by another weapon from behind and start to MOVE BACKWARDS?!? It's like explosions create a vaccuum that you move into or something. I don't know what it is, but it's not physics. There's the effect of gravity on banked corners, but there's no centripetal force AFAICT.
At least for Barrel Rolls I can assume that we're being rewarded by the racing system for "looking cool" and entertaining the crowds. Just like the track enables the weapons already loaded on board, the track can enable an instant speed boost on landing.

Yeah, definitely reaching, but at least I can get there. Still prefer Hyperthrust.

[Dogg Thang]

Although the barrel roll flaws have been addressed somewhat for Pulse

Are you allowed say what's changed?

You're absolutely right about the logic of the barrel roll - there is none. I'm actually slightly surprised it was kept in Pulse. I think I'd prefer a more controlled system of boosts - like every craft gets 2 to use at its disposal. But then, that wouldn't really add anything to the normal pick-up system, which works fine.

There is something slightly bizarre about the difficulty in the physics in general since the game moved from PS1. I'm not a developer or programmer so I have no idea how different systems affect things but almost everyone agrees that the physics in 2097 and 3 were just lovely. Now, they came with other problems - being able to fly through scenery for example. But in terms of ship handling everything felt right. Fusion dropped all the floatiness completely and Pure got some of it back but in a way that is just ever so slightly off. At higher speeds, serious cracks in the physics began to appear.

I wonder if developers have more realistic physics engines at their disposal that actually makes control far more complicated than it has to be? It's like the first three games worked on certain reliable behaviours rather than actual physics.

[Frances_Penfold]

How did you decide that franchise veterans find the barrel roll obnoxious? It seems a little like a sweeping generalisation to me. Sure, there are people that don't like it, but I've seen plenty of people comment that they do like it.

Sorry for the over-generalization. Reading through this thread convinced me that lots of Wipeout fans really dislike the barrel roll move, though it's definitely true that some do appreciate it.

Myself, I don't think about the physics that much, for better or worse (probably worse). I AM worried that the barrel roll mechanic makes the gameplay unbalanced and that this will become much more of a factor for Pulse, given its online play.

[Colin Berry]

I'm not sure if it makes it unbalanced, except some people cant do it and some can, but then some cant take corners without clipping the wall, some can. Its a skill albeit a different one to the normal racing skill set. It is less of a divider in Pulse though as the boost received from a barrel roll has been reduced (as indeed has the boost from a trubo start), plus the energy drained from performing one is now a % not absolute figure meaning each ship can in theory perform the same amount.