The game requires Direct X and .NET - chances are you already have both of these if you play any games.
A brief shakedown on equipment, you might want to put this in OP so people know what to expect:
Normal engines work at max thrust all the time. These provide constant thrust and are used for your forward motion.
Maneuvering engines provide a lot higher power for their size, but after a few seconds they lose a lot of thrust and need a brief period to recharge. This makes them good at quick keypresses to turn but makes them bad at long duration travel.
The two other types of engines are the jet engine, which is a scramjet and only really "kicks in" at high speed, and a liquid fuel rocket that's more of an afterburner because it has limited charges.
The game takes place in atmosphere, probably. The server host can determine the atmospheric pressure, from 0% to 300%. At 0% you have no friction, and your ship will slide off the edge of the map unless you do something. At 0% control surfaces and airbrakes also become worthless. At 300% all ships move slower due to drag, and if you've installed control surfaces like fins or rudders they'll become so potent as to make your ship locked. Default setting is 80%.
You can change your direction on two ways. The first, and most obvious, is unequal thrust. If you have an engine on one side but not the other side, then when you thrust it you'll turn. By default, drive engines are on w/s and maneuvering thrusters are not on any keybinding because you need to rotate them. You need to put the maneuvering engines on usually the rear of the vehicle, although the sides and front would work, the center would not. One engine can be placed parallel to the ship - if it's on the front or back then the engine should face left and right. If it's on either side, it should face up and down. You then give it keybindings, usually a/d but you could really tell it whatever you wanted. Now, when you use the engines, they'll apply force and turn your ship! Most times, I use two maneuvering engines in the rear, canted 45 degrees left and right.
Pretty much everyone uses the Stabilizer software though, available from the beginning. You place it onto the hull, and then "add" and attach it to your maneuvering thrusters. Then you set keybinds for left and right, and the software will decide "If this engine fires, then will it rotate the ship?" and will handle it for you. It also provides compensation. Normally when you turn, momentum keeps you rotating around and you overshoot, but with the software it'll fire the engines in the reverse direction and try to keep your rotation stopped until you hit a key. Stabilizers are practically required for sniper platforms, although certain high speed craft could get away with not having one, because they use different ideas for direction.
The second way to change direction (remember there were two?) is control surfaces. Since the game is in air, you have aerodynamics. Each item has a drag and mass, and the drag means that it'll add more air resistance. Control surfaces provide specific air resistance, particularly fins, rudders, and airbrakes are available. These all work relatively simply. Fins try to convert any movement into forward movement. If you're flying sideways, the fins will try to keep you flying forward. So when a high-speed fighter turns, it won't drift around the curve, the fins will "bite in" and it'll get "friction" that lets it take sharp, concise turns. Rudders work similar to fins, but can be angled easily. As you would expect, when you use a rudder it changes your aerodynamics and helps to change your direction, although the specifics rely on how forward or backwards your rudder is. Airbrakes are much simpler, because when activated they just stop you.
Components may also be mounted on turrets, weapons AND anything else. An experimental platform of mine had an engine mounted on a turret and it didn't rotate, it only moved around the field by changing the direction of its engine-turret. Similarly, fins and rudders may be mounted to turrets, which would turn a fin into a rudder and a rudder into something very confusing. You can mount one fin onto a rudder, or you may put on a platform extension and mount several fins at once.
Because of aerodynamics, it's entirely possible to mount pure drive engines, fins, and rudders, and have no maneuvering thrusters! However, your functionality will be "I can fly straight" if the server happens to be 0% air pressure. But no one uses that setting.
Engines are the hard part. Weapons are much easier. You mount them onto your ship, and they can be fixed-mounted and fire straight, or attached to a turret. The weapons are all pretty straightforward, so I won't explain what each do. However I will explain a little specifics. Namely, fixed weapons can fire directly, but this doesn't have to be "forward".They can be tilted to fire at an angle. This can be useful for a flak gun, if you want to make a spread behind you, you can mount 3 flak facing behind, behind-left, and behind-right, allowing you to cover a wider area and shoot down missiles more reliably (or use a flare launcher, but those don't matter to dumb warheads). I've also seen players use bomb launchers or mine layers on an angle, on very fast ships. A quick fighter can have bomb launchers mounted sideways - bombs being slow-moving, dumbfire, heavy warheads, good for hitting slow or stationary targets - thus letting the player making literal bombing runs where they fly very past nearby an enemy and toss bombs.
The real thing about weapons, though, is turrets. Turrets are simple in theory. You set a turret, set something atop it, and then you set the keybindings or you make it follow the mouse. You can directly mount a weapon to a turret, letting it pivot quickly so you don't have to use your ship to aim - this is particularly important for sniper platforms, since your mouse is more accurate than your ship's direction. You can also mount a platform onto a turret, and then equipment onto the platform. This is significant because turrets and software are expensive, I was able to mount 4 guns on turrets, or was able to mount 10 guns on a platform on turrets. For 50mm guns, this let me tear through lower enemies and hit higher enemies hard.
Those who have seen the teaser video may also notice the tentacle ship, with several platforms waving around. These are done with turrets, by putting a turret on the hull, a platform on the turret, a turret on the platform, a platform on the turret, etc...
The rest of the game is pretty easy. Armor, sensors, hull type, is all pretty straightforward. It's maneuvering engines and turrets that are the most complicated. The real complications in the game are more meta though. The rules are simple, how you exploit them is what matters. My favorites are the ramming ships, which have no weapons but score kills by speed and armor, and my own directional platform, which has layers of armor in the front and moves at a snail's pace, but is mounted with so much armor and weaponry that anything coming at it from the front is dead.
Author
Topic: Gimbal: MP space shooter with player-built ships (now on Steam!) (Read 38836 times)