Can't achive 150m/s on medium size ship?

[AcE Tech]

I have been pumping a lot of hours in getting max speed out of a ship build, but I'm running against a problem that I can't seem to get a grip on.

All speeds in this post are measured with the cargolock+range finder speed sensor and confirmed with station transponder speed setting.

My ship is running 147.11m/s with 42-box thrusters T2+T3nozzles. I wanna fly faster, so I enable/add 24-triangle thrusters T2+T3nozzles all firing 10.000, and my new speed of the ship is.... 147.11

I tested already different things like :
- FPS test : changing game resolution from 2560x1440 to 800x600 and lowering or turning off all other graphics settings
- Disabling the brake thrusters (forward pointing thrusters witch fire a little when flying.)
- On the 24x triangle only (no box thrusters) my ship reaches 72m/s, I think more then enough extra power to at-least make a 0.1m/s extra visible difference?
- Changing all triangles to T2 nozzles (so they are now full T2)
- Testing and tuning a lot with different engine name groups.

I just can't figure out why my ship is not going over 147.11 (unless I let it fly towards a moon)
When I load the ship with 74-crates of ores, I do see a difference in engaging the extra 24 triangle thrusters. For example :
empty all thrusters = 147.11
74 crates lukium with only box thrusters = ~124m/s
74 crates lukium with all thrusters = ~144m/s

It seems I'm hitting against an speed border that is under 150, and I would very much like to solve this or report this as a problem to the devs that needs some looking into.

 

[AcE Tech]

Also, most engines are put into 1 big group so I get a massive 10.000 thrust group (all straight facing back thrusters are firing 10.000). And other engine groups are made for keeping ship stable. The ship center of mass, and center of thrust are slightly out of alignment, but the FCU can compensate to the point that I can slap on a Warp-Core while the ship still fly's straight even while doing strafing (auto avoidance) during flight.

The main (10.000) group gives a nice 10.000 output most of the times unless you start strong maneuvering actions.

so i guess its also not an balancing issue.

 

[AcE Tech]

I just tripple checked if I really have a high FPS, but I noticed I'm actually running only at 45-50 FPS.
I checked again when lowering everything down to lowest settings en tested both borderless window and full screen mode.
Both still give me 45-50FPS. Thats not a lot for lowest settings with a GTX1080 card? And I would expect the FPS to go up a bit if I lower the game settings and resolution...

I checked if this might indeed be the limiting factor by force the game to have a max FPS of 30, and indeed. my new maximum speed is now ~144.6m/s, turning the FPS limiter up again and my speed also scales up.

So I guess my problem is solved when I can get the game to run at higher FPS. I will do some research why the game doesn't utilize my full 1080 powerzzz (its around 50/60% right now)

 

[AcE Tech]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm hitting against the FPS limit, also when looking at this video witch include test and numbers on FPS impacting max speed.

Basically it means, if you can't run the game at ~70fps or more, you can't reach 150m/s
30fps will give you ~144m/s max speed
60fps will give you ~148m/s max speed
100fps will give you ~153m/s max speed

I hope this gets solved somehow so everyone can fly the same speed what ever their hardware budget...

Personally I'm still confused though why my game doesn't want to run at higher FPS. I get ~120FPS now when in menu, when walking in station often ~111FPS. But when loading in my ship, it goes down to ~56FPS. That also means that bigger ships will most often not be able to fly max speed then smaller light ships even though they have enough thrust to go way over 150...

So medium ships at the end of the day are indeed slower then light ships if you take into account that most players will not get 70+FPS in bigger ships.

I really really hope a solution can be introduced at some point. As how it is now it again favors light ships more then medium or big ships.

 

[mrchip]

Honestly, who cares... 2.89 m/s...
Sure, the FPS dependent speed is a bug that needs to be fixed.
But for your ship, it's completely irrelevant...

 

[AcE Tech]

Honestly, who cares... 2.89 m/s...
Sure, the FPS dependent speed is a bug that needs to be fixed.
But for your ship, it's completely irrelevant...

The thing I'm aiming at is that it can be way bigger then just 2.89m/s from what I expect to fly. And that it can be exploited by people to have really big advantages with very big impact (ship+cargo loss). I have talked to people (pirates) that where able to fly over 170m/s using FPS tricks. Someone using v-sync (60FPS) will be more then 22,5m/s slower.

This ship project just made it clear to me how much impact this bug could have in game, and when I started searching for it I saw people exploiding this bug to gain advantage over others, with very impressive speed differences XD.


@mrchip Then for my ship speed being irellevant... Even if the difference was only as small as 2.89m/s, (currently much bigger is possible) for me this 2.89 is very VERY important! I'm dealing with a very competitive environment/goals. so I can't effort for multiple reasons to be even 0,4m/s slower then others. I'm not gonna share all ship details and use-cases here as its military classified, but know that it NEEDS to be a sufficient enough speed to "never" be an issue in competitive environments.

 

[mrchip]

Ok yeah, if you can get to 170, that's really bad.