Disembodied wrote:I can't shake the feeling that there's maybe some way of fiddling the torus drive here ... perhaps if it could be linked to the compass? Maybe the torus will only work if the player is flying towards the target selected on the compass - i.e. its icon is green and more-or-less central? I don't doubt that this might cause problems, especially with some OXPs requiring long-distance travel off-lane (although usually these journeys would be towards a destination with an ASC beacon, so the torus would still work). It would make it a lot more time-consuming for the player to go off-lane to begin with.
I've been playing a bit with this, by just limiting myself to only using
the torus to fly towards a destination on
the compass. I picture a circle, half
the diameter of
the compass itself, and as long as
the compass target is green and within that circle, I allow myself to use
the torus. So far, it hasn't made any significant difference to my game.
The only thing it's stopped me from doing - a bit - is using
the torus to quickly shuffle between floating cargo pods that I want to snaffle up; even there, all I have to do is target
the pod, and then set
the compass to my current target, and zap, I'm away.
What it does do is make it a lot more time-consuming to avoid
the lane. I can't pitch 90° up and scoot off
the lane, and then take a long parabolic arc through empty space and round to
the station. It's not impossible to go off-lane; it just takes a lot more time to get there, and if I want to stay off-lane all
the way in, I have to spend a lot of time travelling.
It does change my attitude to
the torus drive: it becomes something I have to be much more deliberate about. It's not just, "Scanner's clear, hit
the button" any more; I have to consciously check my compass, set my heading, and
then hit
the button.
So far, I have to say, I quite like it. It feels more like navigation, rather than just flying really fast (you have to get used to not steering around during torus travel). Of course, it has other effects: it makes
the ASC a much more important piece of kit, and without it
the player can only use
the torus to head to
the planet, or to
the sun, or to
the station once they get close enough. It means that any off-lane destination has to be marked on
the ASC (which - so far, in my game - they have been). It also means (I imagine: I haven't tried this!) that
the player can't use
the torus to chase down
the Constrictor (not a bad thing).
It's a major shift in functionality from
the original game (but then,
the original game didn't have persistent NPCs, and
the "off-lane" dodge didn't work). But in all honestly I can't say it
feels all that different - and where it does feel different, it's a positive thing, not a negative one. I don't doubt that there are areas of gameplay which might be negatively affected by this, but so far I've not found any. I also have no idea how difficult it might be to code this into
the game, if this was felt to be a desirable change. But so far, in my unofficial and unscientific testing, I can say that it doesn't seem to cause any huge gameplay inconvenience; it makes
the hitting
the torus seem like a more significant action; and it would do a lot to persuade players to remain within a broad space lane, while not preventing them from going outside it if they really wanted to.