Anyone else out there exploring this game? Yeah, it is in alpha and buggy as hell, but it's pretty damned fun and the devs are pretty quick on the patches. The game just keeps getting better and better!
For those who have not the foggiest idea what Hellion is, it's a space survival game. You wake up in a life pod, with barely any life support, broken parts, and drifting through space. Everything will degrade over time, even the oxygen quality onboard a module. You need to get power and life support online ASAP, and start locating new parts to build up your module into a habitat you can survive in, as well fix your ship up to navigate a fully rendered solar system with realistic orbital mechanics. Full Newtonian physics, too. It's pretty wild!
It's pretty crazy. You plot warp paths not based on direction, but based on time. In other words, you predict where your ship will come out of travel at a specific time in space, which puts you in a physical location generally near where you want. The travel time accounts for the orbit of the planets, moons, and other celestial objects in the system as they rotate around the sun and one another.
Meanwhile, the game can play out like the most complicated erector set ever. I managed to take a starter life pod, essentially the very first room in the following video, located other modules in space, towed them back to my starter pod, and built out a station around it. Docking maneuvers are difficult, at first. Made all the harder given both the module and your suit only has so much RCS fuel, and your suit only has so much oxygen. Take too long, or be too wasteful in your movements, and disaster is in the making. Plus, with the Newtonian Physics, it is entirely possible to put too much thrust in a given direction to easily compensate for.
Several examples of navigation and warping can be found in this stream recording (a fresh start happens at 9:30ish due to Alpha related bugs):
Edited by Pariah Devalis, 21 March 2017 - 10:32 AM.
Lily from animove, on 22 March 2017 - 03:50 AM, said:
ohh i was reading about it and got scared when readong "newtonian" because many games who cliam that aren't doing it right at all.
Everything is in constant motion in this game. Once you move, you won't stop until you try and stop, and even then the closest you can easily get to actually being still is computer assisted velocity matching between you and another object. Otherwise, you will keep any and all inherited momentum.
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