Hey guys, I’m here to drop a sneak peek for the passion project I’ve been working on for over a year.
Solar Frontier will be a spaceflight simulator that pulls from Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen and combines them into a format that isn’t too complex but isn’t too boring either.
I would like feedback on the most important feature in the game - the flight system. While not finished, it’s definitely now in a playable state, and I’d like some to hear about changes I could make before I fully commit to this.
As of now, it features basic 6 degrees of freedom motion, and a stabilisation system (which was a headache and a half to figure out) that, similarly to Elite, will maintain a forwards trajectory.
There is also a boost mechanic, which strongly multiplies your main thruster’s output for a short time, useful for quickly changing your trajectory.
Just remember that nothing here is final, there are still many tweaks to be made, especially in how “big” the ship feels. I also plan to let the player pick between a long but slow afterburner or a short but strong boost later on in development.
I think the basics of your system are excellent. I’d suggest you add an option for mouse control though, and a camera that follows the rotation of the ship while in the exterior view. It looks rather static in my opinion
Thanks for the feedback! I was already planning on improving the 3rd person camera later, but it isn’t my top priority right now.
What do you mean by mouse control? The controls will be similar to Elite, where LMB and RMB activate hardpoints/weapons (you can customise which hardpoints are assigned to which button, and there will be fire groups too).
I can totally make the controls as customisable as possible, but I only plan to do that once most of the default controls are implemented.
Unfortunately I designed the input handling entirely with first-person in mind. However I might implement this later on for when you’re in 3rd person (and I don’t think it would be hard).
I can’t say exactly how long, but I started working on the game back in early 2023, and I’ve been continuously building on different methods of creating this throughout that time, along with figuring out how to create the stabiliser. If I knew exactly what the method was, I would have been done with it much quicker, lol
