Azrapse: Okay, I have come to a point where the real ship stats start to matter in the simulation.
I have checked the ship stats from the BFlight.OVL file with the ship editor and, I have most of them.
However, I need to make sense of some of them to implement them in XWVM.
Let's see some examples:
X-Wing Power: 300 Hull: 2100 FShield: 2500 RShield: 2500
Speed: 225 Accel: 12 Roll: 44 Pitch: 15
Y-Wing Power: 250 Hull: 4200 FShield: 3750 RShield: 3750
Speed: 180 Accel: 8 Roll: 28 Pitch: 13
A-Wing Power: 400 Hull: 1500 FShield: 2500 RShield: 2500
Speed: 270 Accel: 16 Roll: 60 Pitch: 18
B-Wing Power: 250 Hull: 6300 FShield: 5000 RShield: 5000
Speed: 205 Accel: 12 Roll: 36 Pitch: 14
TIE-Fighter Power: 100 Hull: 1000 FShield: 0 RShield: 0
Speed: 225 Accel: 15 Roll: 48 Pitch: 20
Lambda Shuttle Power: 100 Hull: 2500 FShield: 5000 RShield: 5000
Speed: 150 Accel: 10 Roll: 40 Pitch: 13
Power Looking at the different ships, it seems that all AI-only ships have Power 100. So I will assume it is a placeholder value, and has no purpose for the AI.
However, what does that stat actually do for the player? I know you can see the power rating changing on an instrument on the dashboard as you tweak the LSE configuration with F9 and F10. But what does it mean?
Speed and Acceleration I think the speed in m/s is the Speed rating divided by 2.25, resulting in the Speed at 100% Throttle when the LSE configuration is at the default balanced state. That would give a speed of 100 to the X-Wing, that sounds spot on.
Now, is the acceleration rating given in straight m/s^2 or should it also be divided by 2.25?
Does an X-Wing speed up by 12 meters per square second, or by 5,3?
Roll and Pitch Okay, these are the hard ones. Is this rating in degrees per second? This cannot be. Otherwise, a TIE Fighter with a pitch rating of 20, would do a 180 degree turn in 9 seconds by pitching up or down. That's absurd.
Maybe it needs to be multiplied by 10?
Then a TIE Fighter would do half a loop in 0,9 seconds, while a Y-Wing would take 1,38 second, with its pitch rating of 13.
Does it make sense?
Okay, Pitch is quite understandable, if only we need to find the right multiplier, but for me the Roll rating is a tougher bone. I just don't know what it means.
It clearly doesn't mean the angular speed of the ship rotating around the Z axis (being the Z axis the one that goes into the screen from the player position).
When you press your control left or right, your ship doesn't just yaw or roll, it does a mix of both, right?
Anyone knows in which proportions?
I don't know about the low level operation of the game beyond what I can infer as a casual player, but I did a quick bit of experimentation if it helps:-
-Speed
In X-Wing 1993, using an X-Wing starting from a fully stopped state (speed 0), going to full throttle (speed 100) in a balanced power configuration (maintenance level for shields and lasers) takes 20 seconds, i.e. a measured acceleration of 5 m/s.
-Pitch
Again, in X-Wing 1993, an X-Wing at speed 0, pitching directly up using the keyboard, takes approx 8 seconds to pitch 360 degrees, i.e. perform a full vertical loop in a static position.
In the same Speed 0 state, using the keyboard to steer right does seem to do a mix of yaw and roll, resulting in an arc that forms a rough circle if the origin position is 12 o'clock. However, I say rough circle because using input that is only the right key, the original position is not returned at 12 o'clock, but is instead a few degrees higher (i.e. origin y + ~5 degrees). I would speculate that this is due to inaccuracies / rounding errors in the original flight engine.
I also found two documents online which may be of some use, both of which are vintage x-wing editing documents that contain observations about some of these features.
X-wing Ship Editor Readme -
http://www.rebelsquadrons.org/xwing/files/xwse30.txt X-wing Ship Designer's Guide -
http://www.renegadewing.com/assets/zips/XWMDG.PDF (see page 34 and also Appendix A)
In the case of the latter document, one of the editing tools seems to use the following scales (it is implied that different editing tools use different scales):
Power
This field allows you to set the engine output of the ship. This affects how much energy is available to
recharge shields and lasers. The exact correlation of Power to recharge rate is unknown.
Hull
This field allows you to set the hull strength of the ship.
FShld
This field allows you to set the shield rating of the craft towards the front. Typically it should be identical
to the value for the rear shields.
RShld
This field allows you to set the shield factor of the craft towards the rear. Typically it should be identical
to the value for the front shields.
Speed
This field allows you to change the maximum speed at which the craft can travel when shields and lasers
are at normal recharge.
Accel
This field allows you to change the acceleration rate of the ship (change in velocity per second).
Roll
This field allows you to change the rate at which the ship rolls around its axis in degrees per second.
Pitch
This field allows you to change the rate at which the ship can change its angle of attack in degrees per
second.
Hopefully this is of some help!