Suggestion for better Cyclops Drivability
1badninja
Oklahoma Join Date: 2017-03-19 Member: 229043Members
Oklahoma Join Date: 2017-03-19 Member: 229043Members
The devs are planning on improving the drivability of the Cyclops. Rightfully so as its horrible to drive as is. You're driving blind 90% of the time and you have to literally run around the thing just to turn lights(that dont help at all) on or off. I actually can't stand driving the thing. I just take it near where I need to be and drop either the Seamoth or the PRAWN and go from there.
My suggestion is instead of the cockpit/drivers seat being a standing area where the player doesnt move, make it a seat that spins and tilts on a gyro in a glass hemisphere to maximize visibility. The driving is still controlled by the keyboard but the mouse turns the seat/player giving the player an almost unlimited field of view to see whats going on. As it is right now you are pretty much stuck looking straight ahead all the time. You can look down and to the sides a bit but not nearly enough.
The next big problem is lighting. The flood lights pointing straight out almost never help, as you need to mostly be looking at the sea floor, but the cyclops doesnt tilt. Instead the lights just point straight out into an endless abyss giving an effect like brights on an extremely foggy night.. in other words it just seems to make it worse. So maybe add lights that point in every direction or add a couple of player controlled/movable spot lights.
Now the next problem is not being able to see where the tail is without switching to the rear camera. So maybe add a small monitor that you can easily look at to see if the tail is in danger of hitting anything without having to switch to the camera view.
Something that would be a big help in agility would be some side propellers/thrusters(or whatever tech they use) to be able to move it side to side. Now I understand the Cyclops is a massive vessel and shouldnt be able to just glade perfect and nimble like the Seamoth. So of course leave it a little sluggish with the side to side reponsiveness. But still it would help a tremendous amount just able to push yourself to one side or the other.
As far as the lights and turning them on or off, there is something really cool about being reminded you are in a big vessel that is meant to be piloted by multiple people. So a part of me really likes that. But then again it would be really nice if you could just bind the lights to hotkeys.
Maybe offer all or most of these things as tech upgrades, rather than including it with the base cyclops build? Improving the drivability of it would be a great and worth while thing to work for.
My suggestion is instead of the cockpit/drivers seat being a standing area where the player doesnt move, make it a seat that spins and tilts on a gyro in a glass hemisphere to maximize visibility. The driving is still controlled by the keyboard but the mouse turns the seat/player giving the player an almost unlimited field of view to see whats going on. As it is right now you are pretty much stuck looking straight ahead all the time. You can look down and to the sides a bit but not nearly enough.
The next big problem is lighting. The flood lights pointing straight out almost never help, as you need to mostly be looking at the sea floor, but the cyclops doesnt tilt. Instead the lights just point straight out into an endless abyss giving an effect like brights on an extremely foggy night.. in other words it just seems to make it worse. So maybe add lights that point in every direction or add a couple of player controlled/movable spot lights.
Now the next problem is not being able to see where the tail is without switching to the rear camera. So maybe add a small monitor that you can easily look at to see if the tail is in danger of hitting anything without having to switch to the camera view.
Something that would be a big help in agility would be some side propellers/thrusters(or whatever tech they use) to be able to move it side to side. Now I understand the Cyclops is a massive vessel and shouldnt be able to just glade perfect and nimble like the Seamoth. So of course leave it a little sluggish with the side to side reponsiveness. But still it would help a tremendous amount just able to push yourself to one side or the other.
As far as the lights and turning them on or off, there is something really cool about being reminded you are in a big vessel that is meant to be piloted by multiple people. So a part of me really likes that. But then again it would be really nice if you could just bind the lights to hotkeys.
Maybe offer all or most of these things as tech upgrades, rather than including it with the base cyclops build? Improving the drivability of it would be a great and worth while thing to work for.
Comments
They probably just need to mess around with the terrain a bit to make some areas more cyclops-friendly. Most notably the Lost river entrance from the Deep Grand Reef. The brine waterfall into the skeleton chamber is just never quite wide enough to fit the Cyclops through without banging into the walls.
Hmm. Usually, if you drive from either the Keel, or the Conning Tower camera, you can see all around (and from the Conning Tower you can see the tail a lot more clearly). Each camera has its own floodlight assigned to right-click as well. Not saying it doesn't need a lot of work, but that's how I usually drive, Keel or Conning Tower Cam. I usually only use the main floodlights to illuminate an area that I'm diving to explore or collect resources in. If I do drive with the main viewport, I'll turn off the interior lights as that seems to help a little (same reason you keep dome lights in a car off at night unless you really need them for a bit).
a small underwater reconnaissance vehicle that is single-seater or two-seater with pilots adequately fastened to the seats do not have problems and they can tilt the vehicle as they want without putting himself in danger or in trouble themselves. On the other hand, a real submarine, with a crew of at least 3 people who must move freely, should remain in a horizontal position, as if tilted, would slip and fall everything is not perfectly anchored, crew included, causing considerable damage to the vehicle, killing the crew and weighting greatly to the bow or the stern of the submarine preventing them to resume the horizontal position.
In a real submarine tilting it is a very serious problem and I do not think they should allow the Cyclops to do this.
My two cents for improvements:
1. Faster top speeds (the Cyclops has an engine bigger than the Exosuit)
2. Faster turning speeds (it runs off of six power cells, why doesn't it go faster?)
3. Ability to strafe left right (the current motor design wouldn't allow it, but it could have port/aft aquajets)
4. QoL improvements (camera reworks, ugly bridge UI controls, sonar pings please? - Think 'U571', IMO the best submarine movie ever)
Sorry if this became a rant, I like the Cyclops but I don't love it like the Seamoth or the Exosuit.
Err. Have you ever tried to push a canoe sideways when it's flooded? Also if you're in a river and fall out, and it's flooded and turns sideways into the current and you get pinned by it it can easily crush you. Water has a lot of force when it's got a large surface area, and the reverse is also true: to push an object that large directly sideways would require a crapton of effort from the motors. Not saying it can't be done, but you would move extremely slow.
Now, the Seamoth has about the same surface area all around, as it's more of a round-ish bubble, so sideways movement is only slightly harder than forwards movement. (Or, it would be as long as the pumpjet can point in any direction.) Try looking up videos of tugs pushing ships to dock sometime, and remember, that's with the tug and the ship working together, and only the bottom of the ship is in the water. A sub is mostly or completely underwater.
I have never pushed canoes anywhere but I know about todays ships a bit at least those within the inland shipping segment anything from the 500 - 5.000to range. Most modern ships have a "small" Aquajet like engine beneath their bow to help them navigate narrow ports or just to make tighter turns. Even the biggest ships on earth the huge container ships use those 360° Aquajet engines to be more agile if that word fits at all for such a huge ship.
I know with a fully submerged ship the water resistance has to be even bigger but it should still be possible to move sideways slowly. Maybe only 0.25 or 0.5x as fast as the normal forward motion but it should not be ultra slow nor impossible to do. And to further fortify my point I still have the Sci-Fi argument on my side. Maybe the subs surface is extremly "aquadynamic" and Cyclops engines deliver way more power then todays engines could?! I think with those facts and fiction in mind it should be able to move sideways at a slower but still decent speed to navigate thos narrow spots of the map.
I'd like the feature, it just wouldn't apply the same as a Seamoth, where you can scoot sideways almost as fast as you can forwards (or maybe just as fast, I'm not sure). The ability to "crawl" sideways, though, would be awesome.