AI Ship Speed

It seems that AI ships aren't governed by the same laws of physics as the player's ship. This is most obvious with escorts, where Leviathans can be seen matching the speed of a Manta and manoeuvring crazily around behind it. Some people also suspect speeds of not being consistent when flying at 45° angles vs flying vertically or horizontally. It has also been noted that negative recoil works on AI ships while it does not for the player.

Just recently, I've noticed two rather odd things myself:

1. When the player's ship fires a weapon with recoil, it cannot be accelerated beyond its top speed. This is not true for AI ships. Give a weapon a recoil of 10000 and watch them fly across the system.
2. Negative speed does nothing for the player's ship. Again, this is not true for AI ships however it does not make them fly backwards. Give a ship a speed less than 1 and watch what happens. I haven't worked out exactly what's going on here but it is a bit strange.

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It seems that AI ships aren't governed by the same laws of physics as the player's ship. This is most obvious with escorts, where Leviathans can be seen matching the speed of a Manta and manoeuvring crazily around behind it.

Fun to watch and convieniant but rather odd, perhaps having an escort top speed...

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2. Negative speed does nothing for the player's ship. Again, this is not true for AI ships however it does not make them fly backwards. Give a ship a speed less than 1 and watch what happens. I haven't worked out exactly what's going on here but it is a bit strange.

I am putting a përs with negative speed into my plugs from now on...

Names: #1 Chauffering Co., and, Stupid Imported Engines.

Interesting find Guy...

This post has been edited by IT 000 : 15 August 2008 - 01:39 PM

Negative speed with positive accel doesn't cap on the AI's speed. This is different from 32767 because AI ships start out moving at their speed value, so a reasonable negative speed will start the AI moving backwards at that speed, whereas a high value will make the AI zip around the system too fast to control.

Negative accel makes the AI move backwards up to a maximum of the absolute value of its speed (negative speed and positive speed of the same absolute value have the same effect.)

Negative turn makes the AI not turn.

Ah yes, your negative speed description makes sense with what I saw, though I didn't pick up on them starting moving backwards. I'm not sure what you mean with the negative accel though - as far as I can tell negative accel is no different to 0 accel.

I always thought that escorts moved at the speed of their leader to keep formation, physics be damned.