Tonight’s build is mostly fixes and work towards fixing the controls. I learned how I should be handling animations with PlayMaker, so they’ve been updated to work that way. Overall, it makes handling the animations significantly cleaner. Now, the pieces that control the animation and the input (along with ship rotation in the tunnel) are separate, meaning I can tweak them separately without having a negative impact on any of the others… In theory.
Along with those changes, I totally changed the speed system, but right now it’s in this weird intermediate state where it feels a lot worse than before. I think I’m working with a more solid foundation but it’s going to take time to figure out what’s right again.
With that in mind, I’ve got a teeny debug window running in the corner that shows animation speed and animation time. The normal turning animation is 0.5 seconds long. Each ship’s turn rating determines a speed multiplier. A turn rating of 1 is equal to a 1x speed multiplier. For each point above 1, there’s an increase of 0.02 to that multiplier, with an extra boost to 1.2x at rank 10. This multiplier is combined with your current speed to determine the animation speed. So, with a speed multiplier of 1x, and a speed of 5, the animation runs at 5x speed, or 0.1 seconds (assuming my math is correct). This results in really quick turns for even the slowest of ships. the highest multiplier of 1.2x at speed 5 results in 6x speed, or about 0.083 seconds.
I think what I’m getting at is that a flat multiplier like this probably isn’t going to work. The minimum animation speed should maybe be around 0.8x (0.625 seconds), and the maximum around 2x (0.25 seconds) or maybe 5x (0.1 seconds). I’ll have to whip out Excel and make some graphs. (Whee! Numbers!)
Anyway, despite the problems with this build, I’ve decided to put it up here anyway, if only so I can look back and see how things changed over time.