MAJOR FLIGHT COMBAT CHANGES - Ballistic Ammo Increased, MASTER MODES, Evocati | Star Citizen Leaks

-Alpha 3.20 kicked off its Evocati testing a couple of weeks back, with a pair of limited playtests focused in Arena Commander, and specifically testing the new Master Modes System. Let's take a look at the changes.

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Star Citizen is an open development, crowd funded project from Cloud Imperium. Consisting of 2 games, Squadron 42 a single player, story driven campaign putting you in the middle of the Vanduul attacks as an up and coming UEE Navy pilot, and Star Citizen, a highly detailed
first person MMO set within a persistent universe where there are no limits. This includes, space, and ground aspects, massive spaceships with full interiors and interactions, a full dynamic economy which reacts to the players actions allowing for anything you can imagine.
It is all being built on the StarEngine (a modified version of Amazon's Lumberyard Engine).
Please bare in mind that this is heavily WIP and in an alpha state in which much of the foundational tech to make it a reality is still being developed. Both games do not have set release dates yet but you can play the alpha build for the PU MMO which makes consistent progress
with quarterly patch releases throughout the year.

I am an independent content creator and a fan of the game, I am not paid by Cloud Imperium however I do accept ships from them to giveaway to my community but this will by no means influence my opinion or what I say and believe about the project.

[TenguOmen-SC]

Tricording is using 3 sets of thrusters at once (Usually the main thrusters at the rear, your underside thrusters (which are the strongest thrusters other than your main rear ones), and either your left or right strafe thrusters to move at a diagonal vector very quickly with the combined effort of those 3 sets of thrusters.

To visualize the flight path, the easiest way is to go into Arena Commander, at a healthy distance point your ship at a stationary object, and hit W, A, Spacebar, and Left Shift at the same time but, the best way I can describe it is imagine a hollow pyramid, just the 4 walls coming to a point at the top and forming a square at the base. Your ship is inside the pyramid with its tail at the top point and its nose facing the center of the base. If you only use your rear thrusters, you will draw a straight line from the peak of the pyramid to the center of the base, if you add strafing up, down. left or right you will travel down the the middle of one of the 4 sides. If you tricord though, your line will run along the diagonal path of one of the corners, from the top of the pyramid to a corner at the base, moving further away from the center all while the ship's nose still faces the base.

So the term doesn't mean you're moving in 3 directions at once, the "Tri" in Tricording is referring to the 3 sets of thrusters at once. Because of the added use of the 3rd set of thrusters, is the fastest way to cover a large distance in a short time. I know that sounds confusing but if you try it out in the game you’ll get understand the vector pretty quickly.

[Rms]

I know there are already several explanations for tricoording here in the comments, but I’m going to try to explain it in a way that will make clear why CIG wants it gone. Firstly, it’s important to note that Star Citizen uses a Newtonian flight model (though it has been tweaked for balance reasons). This means that each ship has a fixed mass and will accelerate at a rate directly proportional to the amount of thrust it is producing. Now, in service of an accurate damage model, CIG made it so that each thruster on a ship produces it’s own thrust vector so that when a thruster is damaged it will cause the flight characteristics of the ship to change in response. This caused a problem, however, because it isn’t practical to have a developer tune the output of each thruster on a ship individually to keep it in line with the performance goals set out by the desired combat meta, which CIG subsequently solved by making an algorithm that sets up the thrust values for each arbitrary set of thrusters by back-computing from just a set of desired maximum vectors, defined according to the X, Y and Z coordinates of the ship (along with pitch, yaw and roll axis which aren’t currently relevant). The intention was simply to make it easier to adjust the flight performance of each ship, but the algorithm has a weakness: because it only takes defined inputs on the cardinal axis, there’s a potential to exceed and of the designed thrust maximums by taking advantage of thrusters that wouldn’t ordinarily be firing when making simple maneuvers. If you imagine a ship moving on the vertical up axis, it’s pretty easy to see that only the thrusters mounted on the bottom of the ship will be firing. But if you thrust forward as well as up, you now have those thrusters firing at their maximum power along with the primary rear-facing thrusters, adding to your total thrust. You can the add a final, third thrust axis and see that some of the thrusters on the side of the ship are now firing, while in most cases the bottom thrusters will gimbal towards the thrusting side in order to contribute thrust more efficiently. Since you’re now taking advantage of a much higher number of thrusters than the algorithm was designed to compute for, you produce a greater amount of total thrust, which produces a greater total acceleration than was intended by the developers to be possible. So, regardless of the benefits you can achieve in racing and combat maneuvering, you can now see that the ship was not intended to be able to accelerate that fast, which is why CIG is adjusting the algorithm to take into account the multi-axis maximum acceleration, which removes the exploit.
As for why it’s called Tricoording, this is because your total thrust vector can be computed as a composite of three vectors each aligned to a different Coordinate Axis, making these vectors Coordinate Vectors. “Tricoording” is a type of technique that takes advantage of Three Coordinate Axis, or a “Triple Coordinate” system, which is shortened, as a noun, to “Tricoord” or, as a verb, to “Tricoording”.

[SOTMead]

'no more pitch+yaw' I think you got some signals crossed, that's absurd.

[dracoflame]

Tricording is using, for example forward thrust, upward straft thrust and left strafe thrust simultaneously resulting in a faster acceleration than what would be normally possible. This can oc be used with other combinations of thrust

[AntiTheory]

I'm most excited about the ballistic ammo increase. Would be nice to not run dry on ammo after a single engagement for a change. Even doubling the amount of shots we have currently would be a huge improvement, especially the size 4 gatling with it's pitiful 240 rounds.

[h.-robertmatthes]

Interesting. Such shield behaviour in NavMode even sounds kinda logical-ish:
one can imagine that while traveling fast, the shields are configured to repel micro-meteorites and space dust, so they have to change calibration/emitter frequencies / to repel weapons fire when flying slower.

[mattp]

Tricording is a simple exploit of the raw fact that the diagonal of a cube (or a square in 2D games) is longer than a side. Specifically a cube diagonal is √3 = ~1.73. So move in all three directions at once and you move 73% faster.

The fix is trivial of course: the game should calculate a unit vector in the desired direction, though that is going to incur a miniscule performance hit.

[Furnace-cziy]

Especially now that we have some kind of ballistic resistance on ships I am very happy with the ballistic ammo increases. I like the idea of the decision being "deal with shields ordeal with reloading"

[Alexati]

Gimbal size 3 for my scorpius would be nice

[sketto]

NAV MODE. How will be explore with no shields in hazardous environments while crawling along at 300scm.

[rakaydosdraj]

Tricording- You know those old videogames where you can run faster by running and strafing at the same time? That's bi-cording. Tricording is that, in 3 dimentions.

[Furnace-cziy]

As far as the removal of tri-cording, I'm not too surprised given that if you watch the engines of a ship while tri/bi cording The main drive engine almost kills out. So it's a limitation of the engine not of the individual thrusters.

[squirrellordsgaming]

Thank you for the information my dude😊

[impy]

It's good that they're bringing the power of maneuvering thrusters relative to the main drive thrusters, but my fear is in the realm of "how much". Like you said, I'd love to get my hands on it first before I make too many assumptions. I'm only worried they'll hit it too hard and leave us for months in a renewed, increasing gap of light fighter superiority where the maneuvering thrusters and roll rates can't keep up on larger ships, so reorientation and alignment to target will go out the window.

[rhadiem]

How does decoupled work in flight with master modes?

[dallasscandling]

Oh yeah I remember them talking about this last year. Hopefully not too much further off…

[fishsticks]

It really is exciting however i just feel like i wont want to practice a lot until we get master modes & flight controls

[caaront]

CIG, taking the fun out of playing a game and making it a full-time job. They love overcomplicating everything, reminds me of an LT in the Army who just got his rank; we needed to do combat tactics as efficiently and simply as possible and would develop the best way to handle a given scenario and perfect it, but then an LT would decide it was too simple and would not impress the brass and would draw out a long overly complicated plan of attack and look like a damned fool.

[BradfordMelluish]

What does it even mean that pitch and yaw can't be combined? Like you can't move at a diagonal now, everything is up/down OR left/right? That sounds...terrible.

[gregderm]

Hold on a minute pitch and yaw can not be combined . Thats going to make flying through the old eye of needle a bit tricky😱😱😱