Posted: 09-02-08 In: Mods By: Munro | (11) comments | Add your comments

The Eternal Silence mod have a new update. They have released some information about changes their making to their space flight system in the upcoming 3.0 beta.

We've gotten many comments about the ES flight system in our past betas, and Beta 3.0 will mark a pretty big shift in the way it works. We've taken feedback from numerous sources and came up with a system that benefits the gameplay as a whole.

The main complaint we got from a lot of people was that the flight system was just plain too hard. We've done our best to simplify things for everyone. We've taken out the newtonian toggle and replaced it with a cut engines key, we've also made the ships react much quicker to input and we made them just generally easier to use. In 2.3, pilots spent most of their time flying straight. In 3.0, pilots will fly in squadrons and teamwork will play a much more central role, since the flight is now much simpler.

The cut engines key, which I mentioned before, is simple. It simply shuts off your translational thrusters allowing you to drift in one direction and turn around. Your ship's turn rate is doubled while the engines are cut. This allows pilots to pull of BSG style flips. A skilled pilot can also use it to gain an edge on turning when combined with the boost key.

Another complaint we had about the flight system of previous betas was that the ships felt too much like noclip. We've addressed this by going for an arcade style physics systems where your side thrusters no longer need to compensate during turns. This means we can turn down the accelerations on all our ships and really give them some weight. The new turning style means that turning is easy and unless you use the cut engines key, you are always flying relative to the direction you are facing.

They also have a few new screenshots of the NGM fleet firing up an interceptor on Cerbera. If you look closely you'll also see the new HUD coming to 3.0. View more at their website.