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Anyone know of a good realistic space combat sim for windows 7? Apparently Independence war 1 and 2 don't work. Freespace 2 works but isn't very realistic. Any suggestions?

I-War 2 works after some convincing. Patch it and play with compatibility settings.

Oh okay, thanks.

You could play Starshatter: the Gathering storm. It's realistic, just kinda pretty bad. Pretty really bad.

It is sorta fun sitting in the CIC though of your carrier, watching the wings of ships go about their missions. And to see if they can take out the enemy battlegroup pickets before you scramble off to join them. Then again, godawful game.

Nephtys wrote:You could play Starshatter: the Gathering storm. It's realistic, just kinda pretty bad. Pretty really bad.

It is sorta fun sitting in the CIC though of your carrier, watching the wings of ships go about their missions. And to see if they can take out the enemy battlegroup pickets before you scramble off to join them. Then again, godawful game.

Why's it so bad?

What about that crazy B5 flight game? Better than Starshatter.

Stark wrote:What about that crazy B5 flight game? Better than Starshatter.

Is that game finished yet? Last I checked, it was 'Zomg, this is so close to completion!' for 3 years. All while it had like, a grand total of two levels or something. B5: I've Found Her is a damned strange name too.

Anyway, Starshatter is a bad game for many reasons. Chief of which probably are it's terrible controls. It's very, very, very hard to do anything. Driving a Destroyer or larger ship makes it even worse, since the game kills your capital ship in one shot. Also, the AI manages it's own point defense lasers which are pin-point accurate and vaporize any fighter that comes close, such as your fighter. However, if you are manning a capital ship, your point defense lasers are manually controlled. While you're steering too. And trying to aim your main guns. And your missiles. And your flight wings. So you die a lot.

Poor Space Sims.

I have no idea; I just remember it being a get lost simulator. But 'proper' sims are always dead boring or heavily automated.

Or just really badly designed lke Starshatter.

Stark wrote:I have no idea; I just remember it being a get lost simulator. But 'proper' sims are always dead boring or heavily automated.

I have The babylon project- a freespace 2 mod. I that what your thinking of?

I haven't tried I've found her. Does it have newtonian flight?

I've Found Her has full newtonian flight. It's damn near impossible to hit your enemy. Also, your guns fire like three 'pew pew' shots, before overheating and needing like 30 seconds to recharge. Oh yeah, and your missile tracking is dead terrible.

It also has the best level ever: 30 minutes of trying to navigate Hyperspace, which is totally empty except for red swirly dizzylights, where you fly towards nav-points. WOW! How ultra-realistic!

Nephtys wrote: It also has the best level ever: 30 minutes of trying to navigate Hyperspace, which is totally empty except for red swirly dizzylights, where you fly towards nav-points. WOW! How ultra-realistic!

Actually, IIRC, there is something there only you can just barely see it and will probably miss it if you're talking about what I think you are.

Nephtys wrote:It's damn near impossible to hit your enemy. Also, your guns fire like three 'pew pew' shots, before overheating and needing like 30 seconds to recharge. Oh yeah, and your missile tracking is dead terrible.

None of which corresponds to the show. I remember downloading IFH years ago to try it out and after about five mins of trying to fly my Starfury, and failing to hit a single target in a dogfight, I gave up.

I'm sure there is a way to implement a Newtonian flight model in outer space without crippling the game into unplayability, but the guys who made IFH haven't found a way.

Yeah, it's called 'flight assist'. I have no idea why people think 'newtonian' means 'player must calculate trajectories in real time'. I-War was newtonian and not retarded.

Stark wrote:Yeah, it's called 'flight assist'. I have no idea why people think 'newtonian' means 'player must calculate trajectories in real time'. I-War was newtonian and not retarded.

I-War is one of those games I wish I had played when I had the chance, because I can't find it anywhere anymore.

Stofsk wrote:

Nephtys wrote:It's damn near impossible to hit your enemy. Also, your guns fire like three 'pew pew' shots, before overheating and needing like 30 seconds to recharge. Oh yeah, and your missile tracking is dead terrible.

None of which corresponds to the show. I remember downloading IFH years ago to try it out and after about five mins of trying to fly my Starfury, and failing to hit a single target in a dogfight, I gave up.

I'm sure there is a way to implement a Newtonian flight model in outer space without crippling the game into unplayability, but the guys who made IFH haven't found a way.

IFH had flight assist, which tried to replicate a more traditional flight system if you needed to turn it on. The problem was however, that a Starfury literally only had thrusters facing 6 axis. So it couldn't thrust to a diagonal angle directly, it had to simulate it by firing off specific thrusters about the rest of the ship. This doesn't quite work the same though, making 'flight assist' feel awkward in a strange way, since sometimes your ship wouldn't behave as you expected it to, because of the thrusters.

It was made a bit harder by the fact that relative acceleration was pretty slow. It became ludicrously easy to accelerate to 1KPS or faster while trying to approach the enemy, and overshoot the target, and spend a good minute trying to recover and rebuild a new vector.

Yeah, joust combat in newtonian games is a common pitfall. If only they weren't all one-seat fighter games?

Stofsk wrote:I-War is one of those games I wish I had played when I had the chance, because I can't find it anywhere anymore.

It's so old it's clunky ugliness makes it really hard to enjoy these days. Some of the missions are mission control docking simulator stuff too. It was just ignored by all the nerds who grew up to be indy game developers for some reason.

Stofsk wrote: I'm sure there is a way to implement a Newtonian flight model in outer space without crippling the game into unplayability, but the guys who made IFH haven't found a way.

They managed to get pretty close with Colony Wars over 10 years ago on the PS1.

I only ever played the CW demo Sony sent out in those demo disks. It seemed pretty cool.

Stark wrote:I only ever played the CW demo Sony sent out in those demo disks. It seemed pretty cool.

I think you can still buy a used copy off Amazon for dirt cheap. It was a pretty fun game when it came out though.

Stofsk wrote:

Stark wrote:Yeah, it's called 'flight assist'. I have no idea why people think 'newtonian' means 'player must calculate trajectories in real time'. I-War was newtonian and not retarded.

I-War is one of those games I wish I had played when I had the chance, because I can't find it anywhere anymore.

You do know that GOG.com has it for just under $6 don't you? It'll work with XP and Vista, don't know about Windows 7.

Its a damned good idea for a game but Stark's correct in as much as its a bit clunky, the second game had a more polished control method, but didn't attain the popularity. Given the deal GOG has, I wouldn't be surprised if that also finds its way onto their site.

Another suggestion is Darkstar One, but its NOT Newtonian flight, also on GOG, its an okay, but unspectacular game. There are a few small companies making space combat games, like Akella who have made games like Dark Horizons, Tarr Chronicles etc but they never seem to do well.

Jade Falcon wrote:
You do know that GOG.com has it for just under $6 don't you? It'll work with XP and Vista, don't know about Windows 7.

Usually vista games work on 7

Stark wrote:Yeah, joust combat in newtonian games is a common pitfall. If only they weren't all one-seat fighter games?

Joust fighting just requires different tactics, and well, missiles. In I-War 2 you just soften the target up with missiles, shoot guns at close range, turn the craft around and keep shooting until max range, shoot perhaps some more missiles, then rinse and repeat, or if you have about 10 missiles tracking you, you might have to try to shake them first. The whole experience is more about proper tactics and weapons management rather than über-piloting skills, which are more suitable for gun era flight simulators, but unfortunately many people stupidly expected that kind of experience from their space combat games (not sims for fuck's sake!), because Wing Commander and X-Wing had already established it. The I-War games of course had assisted aiming of the guns; making the pilot to aim like a WW2 fighter would have been stupid. You could avoid joust combat by matching speed with the targets if they were slow, but that was always risky, because it could make you a sitting duck for missiles.

No, joust combat sucks shit and is boring as fuck and any game relying on it is shit. If the game uses decent controls and design it isn't necessary (like I-War or even Starshatter). This isn't Space War anymore.

You're right, of course, that newtonian games need to be far more about actually putting yourself in the right place with the right vector and doign the right thing than ZOOM PEW PEW PEW NEEEEEEROING PEW PEW like a 'space flight simulator'. That's why they're not as popular.

I'm not even really sure why IWar tried to be a flight game at all; if it had been more a bridge game it would have been less fiddly and annoying (trying to dock = lol). Games like Elite are pretty much the worst possible implementation of newtonian flight + no combat assist = shit combat.