OK, should be fixed now - thanks for your patience.
It works now though I still see all my kills from -unknown-, but at least I have access again 
thx!
And nicely played tonight Storm! Me and Erran were swearing your name all evening xD
Heheh… I was trying to prop up the honour of the red team; sadly failing to do so!
You two (and Psycho Romeo, plus Practical Chrome) were hard cases! Also, wheniaminspace was a new entrant on the “wow, there are some good players out there” front…
A lot of fun, even when getting completely hosed! Many thanks.
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Many thanks to you guys for creating the game ^^
Definitely a lot of fun, and Ozy was also driving us crazy, a pretty good pilot!
I didn’t actually get in to shoot something, but I wanted to check if controls were the same as before. And they were. How about physics? You have a speed dial, as if it was a racing car, and you turn at constant speed as if it was an airplane. What, would you argue, limits the speed in space? No friction, and if you apply an accelerating force you would keep going faster! It would feel awkward at first, since you would swish past and then have to wait while accelerating in the other direction before you got used to it.
And turning? I have a feeling that “forward” is always in the direction of the movement vector? How about turning fast and keep accelerating in the direction you are facing? Or have another player steer. But most important, in space you do not continue with constant speed, turning “as fast as you can” - you would turn facing direction fast, but keep moving at a constant velocity vector.
Please study Newtonian physics, and make the acceleration realistic!
It looks good, but it doesn’t feel like a space battle would.
So it appears GM Stormcrow learned the anti-romeo maneuver outlined a few weeks ago. Argh.
I also noticed the top 9 players on each team element wasn’t working for me at all. It was blank.
I really slipped up today. I think I contributed the three of the team’s first seven deaths. Will verify that when match stats come up. I tried to take a video but it didn’t record properly :\
Actually now that I look at my score I’m almost certain I died more than 8 times… is that really true? I was dominated pretty hard by ubluntu and I think GM Stormcrow beat the crap out of me too.
I noticed that I had a lot of trouble controlling my speed. I would throw the mousewheel down to come to stop while turning, but I would notice my speed only dropped to 230 or something. I threw it down again and it didn’t change. I’d throw it down a third time and it would drop to zero. I would say that something was up with my mousewheel, but I noticed the same kind of unresponsiveness with my booster as well. Speaking of booster, I do like the effect.
I also noticed that you guys started blocking our player names to hide our identities. I don’t think I died a single time when you guys did that, in fact I hardly got shot at at all. You know what that means? Means red team is jerks 
I also noticed that the playing player base fluctuated to a huge degree, very suddenly. Are there multiple servers to play on and did they get combined at one point or something? Is there a huge Age of Ascent convention happening out there and all the players just logged on at the same time? Did you guys merge the players from the other planes of existence into one playtest server? The world may never know.
While I agree with Konduurr’s first point regarding not being able to escape, I am personally finding the second element regarding not being able to figure out who’s shooting you not as frustrating as they do.
I noticed that the further away your target is, the easier it is to hit them. I brought it up in the Tuesday session and the score is that the plasma weapons we currently have used to be laser weapons, and have had their graphics changed since. When it’s put that way, I feel that the whole shooting dynamic we’re facing is a little more justified, but I personally never want to come across something that is impossible to defend against. One way I feel this is being targeted at long range. The only option is to close range and try to out turn them, while praying you don’t take too many hits to do so. Another way I feel this is when people just stop dead and I have to fly circles around them trying to confuse them long enough to get a shot. I’m looking at you GM Stormcrow
I think both of these really powerful elements require too little opportunity and skill to pull off effectively. I don’t know the exact situation because I don’t play the game, but I feel they would be viewed the same way that [generic console fps] views cheap grenade launchers. However, I have also noticed that the more I am exposed to this the better I get at dealing with it, so it may just be emergent behavior that needs time to be worked into the system.
As for the second point regarding figuring out who is shooting you, I feel that it’s rather appropriate that if you are shot at you should not be told who or where exactly. I think it’s one thing to indicate direction subtly, say with sound or an HUD element (though I like sound better). But I think that were it to be made too obvious, it would begin to diminish the effort and the skill of the shooter to be attacking from an obscure direction. I know that when I choose a target I make special note of their behavior (though at this point just knowing their name is enough) before I begin firing. I know that some people like to boost and arc away and others like to try start doing rolls and evasive maneuvers (and some just ignore it), and I can modify my approach accordingly (though usually it just comes down to how I fast I fly in).
That being said, I think things change significantly when things like flight mechanics and weapon types change.
Now that the scores are up, I see that I did in fact contribute two or three deaths in the first five minutes. And jeez, that guy whenamiatinspace has a pretty ridiculous score, as GM Stormcrow said.
I’m no astrophysicist (though I’m pretty sure they have one on their dev team) but wouldn’t you only be able to go as fast as your accelerating force? After that point, wouldn’t the particles from your accelerating force leave the thruster at the rate that you were traveling, and not have anything to push against therefore not move the ship at all? I assume the situation would be similar to a propeller plane that is 500m/s worth of thrust (analogically the space ship’s thrust speed) in a headwind that is blowing at 500 m/s (analogically the space ship’s current speed). Assuming the plane didn’t fall out of the sky, wouldn’t it stay completely still as far as the earth is concerned?
And at any rate there was a video or something where they talked about the space physics, or many it was a past play test where I had an insightful discussion on the matter.
Lastly, regarding the scoreboard, I can’t see how many assists I have anymore
But I had lots of fun today. See you all next week.
Hi Nesse,
I talked at some length about Newtonian physics representations and why we have to have upper limits to preserve the integrity of the game environment in this post here:
Out resident Physicist, Stew, also talks about our treatment of relativistic effects in this video, if you’re interested.
Best,
SC
Definitely, a number of items on the the to-do list have shuffled in priority.
I was debugging it when it all went a bit crazy; which caused the knock on to the names getting lost - its one thing changing the engine on a slow moving car - and another for that car to enter a race at the same time! Was pleased it failed gracefully, and then came back, will tick that off my testing list 
The lost names caused these errors as I wasn’t catering for that eventuality, and they are now shown as unknown.
We had 287 players today, however a lot of them did very badly; we are thinking of changing mouse controls to be easier for players to pick up immediately and would appreciate your feedback:
http://forum.ageofascent.com/t/controls-change/181
As mentioned in an earlier post, I can’t use the keyboard controls because of my particular layout so I’m playing with the mouse. I’ve had a pretty good experience so far, I think for most of the piloting it’s better because it offers a nice flexibility in the controls. The downsides are when you need to turn around 360° then you need to re-position your mouse a couple times instead of staying pressed on the keyboard key. Also, in full screen in Chrome when the mouse goes up I have the message saying I’m in full screen. It’s not a major problem but annoying ^^
The ideal would be to have the Xbox 360 controller available but you’ve already told us it would come in the future so I’m just mentioning it.
I think for first-timers the mouse is quite good.
Hey - in discussion about the physics - we’re using the idea of an Alcubierre drive as our main form of both energy harvesting but also propulsion. We have adopted the idea that our max speed is really a function of being able to shape a spacetime envelope without crushing your ship and then using that envelope to move you across the local spacetime brane.
Two factors are at work here - the energy needed to create and then the energy needed maintain the slanted gravitational gradient without turning your ship into a very tiny piece of ultra dense material with really bad navigational capacity.
I’ve not been in the last couple of play tests - but I will be there soon!
GM Stew
That’s fascinating. so what I understand is that the drives used basically create gravitational forces in front of your ship to pull it along?
How does that affect things like inertia/momentum? Would the iconic battlestar galactica slide still be possible?
Hi Lomdok,
Yes, as part of our mission to get the science right (as much as possible) we’ve been in contact with Miguel Alcubierre at the UNAM Nuclear Sciences Institute, as his concept is very much our preferred method of travel across longer distances.
I know we also considered Bussard ramjets as well as Casimir vacuums, Heim theories and some of the Lorentz-symmetry-violators; but it all rapidly gets a bit complicated for my poor brain to process. At the end of the day, that’s why Stew (our resident PhD theoretical physicist and Keeper of the Backstory) is here to help guide us through
Regards,
SC
Technically you could mimic any sort of inertial movement you wanted - you could also pitch and yaw to your heart’s content. The best thing is that you could fly within the limits of human reactions even when actually moving at very high speeds - so it allows for good old fashioned dog-fighting without the threat of having to navigate relativistic effects - cos let’s face it, when it takes two days to slow down, no one’s getting an adrenaline rush.
@GM_stormcrow - I am Spartacus…or maybe just Stew 
LOLOLOL. Now my post makes no sense at all. You need a "GM " in front of your name XD
I read the other post as well.
However, the “forward velocity” is just not how it would work. You would have a velocity vector, full stop. Then you could choose to apply acceleration in an arbitrary direction - with forward being a conveniently simple version of that. However, the feel of the game now is driving a car - you keep going in the direction you are pointing in. Think hovercraft instead - you keep going in the direction you are going and then accelerate to change direction of movement. Changing direction is by turning quickly to face the other way and then accelerating while slowly losing the speed and regaining speed in the new direction.
And a speed dial? Sigh! The speed is relative to what?
Speed relative to the mothership might be convenient and possible - but do you keep track of the relative motion of the different motherships? Because there would be no reason whatsoever for ships arriving to a battlefield to match speed and more likely than not, they would both be accelerating - one to get away and one to catch up. Or do you count speed relative to the moon, orbiting earth at a speed of 1.023 km/s(wiki)? Or relative to Earth, orbiting the sun at 29.78 km/s?
Please replace the speed dial with an acceleration dial, keep track of velocity as a vector and acceleration as a vector and do NOT keep a speed limit. Then I might be interested in playing. If you feel a need to protect planets against impact, maybe have an automatic retrieval teleporter activate when a ship get too far from its mothership - that would bring back any stray players spending too much time moving in the wrong direction as well as any gaining too much momentum.
I did not listen to the talk about relativistic effects, simply because within speeds where you still have time to notice ships going in another direction in the time it takes to pass them you could be nowhere close to 300.000 km/s. (According to wiki, the current speed record on land was set in October 1997, and is 1227.986 km/h or about 0.3 km/s.)
Good luck with the game, though.
Hi Nesse,
We’re well aware of pure Newtonian physics and vector geometries! But, unfortunately, pure Newtonian motion isn’t fun for the vast majority of players.
You say “if players stray from the mothership a certain distance etc”; but what you’re currently seeing in AoA (ie a team vs team arena combat system) bears little relation to the full game we’re developing, which you can read about here.
What we’re currently demonstrating is a tiny - but critical - fraction of the full sandbox MMO game under development; a fraction that we’ve chosen to express in terms of a team vs team arena combat system.
In the full game, we might allow specific Newtonian physics arenas - essentially arbitrarily bounded areas to minimise interaction with the outside world. These would be large arenas where players can optionally choose to move to a pure Newtonian system, and we’ll allow them to fit multi-directional thrusters on any surface of their spaceship, so they can experience the fun/nightmare of balancing vector, orientation and rotation with differential thrust - much like the classic 80’s game “Asteroids”, except in 3 dimensions rather than 2!
But I’m pretty sure that’s a minority preference. And we’re definitely not going to allow full Newtonian mechanics in the full, larger sandbox MMO universe - for obvious reasons. And in such a sandbox, universe-sized MMO, relativistic effects certainly have to be dealt with.
Best,
SC
A dogfighting/fighter vehicle would likely operate via a computer interoperated fly-by-wire type system and a maximum speed is required to provide nimble course correction, else the engines would not be able to compensate for a rapid change of direction.
Perhaps a bomber would work at such high speeds; but then only against a stationary or orbiting target where its future position was known; however then the brief microsecond deployment of weaponry would require such precision it would have to be automated and not under human reflex control.
Full Newtonian manual control moves into eventual direction changing; the slow pondering of 2001: A Space Odyssey vs frantic action of Battlestar Galactica/Star Wars/Star Trek.
Following the idea through, this would probably result in a lot of abandoned ships, continuously travelling into the vastness of space. If you were accelerating for 10 mins in one direction; perhaps distracted, perhaps just flying the wrong way, it would take you 10 mins to slow down, 10 mins to return to the place where you started slowing down; if you knew what you were doing you’d start decelerating and in 10 mins be back in you start position (30 mins for 10 mins of flying the wrong way)
More likely a player won’t have started to slow down until they were near their destination so after 30 mins you’d be travelling twice as fast, which would cause you to overshoot; 20 mins more to slow down, and another 20 mins, assuming that the opposite acceleration was applied at the right time - overall 1 hr and 10 mins to correct.
Dogfights would likely become a yoyo affair where players occasionally met; and every target course correction would require a re-estimation of where will this ship be in 30 mins so I can intercept at extreme velocity; an a “can I headshot and destroy this ship in the split-microsecond it passes me” type engagement.
At this point the in space portion of the game becomes waiting and not doing much; with the occasional impossible to react to split second engagements; which would mean most of the time the game wouldn’t be very entertaining; when our aim is to provide entertainment for our players valuable time.
In a single player game we could always speed up time in these “slow bits”; but we can’t do that in a massively multiplayer game - where everyone needs to be progressing into the future at the same rate.
For our specific case as @Stew points out we aren’t using Newtonian mass ejection as our propulsion
I’m stretching but the ships “exhaust” would be unhappy space-time recovering from severe gravitational tidal forces in the opposite direction of the ships travel - like a car running over a bunch of glowsticks.
Of course if @Stew says that’s wrong; I’ll argue its computer added visual cues to aid human wetware in spaital comprehension much like positional sounds “external” to your ship would be.
I have a relevant comment:
I one saw a documentary on scifi spaceship dogfights and what they would be like. The theorists pointed out that standard winged flight and the traditional thrust/drag/lift/weight model of flight would become completely irrelevant. Wings are absolutely redundant.
The result, they theorized, would be basically cubes that would zig-zag around and turn at speeds that would create enough g-forces to kill someone.
I present this as another argument as to why the limitless acceleration thing doesn’t belong. I agree with both the theorists and with the dev team on their reasoning.