From the Depths - Propulsion Tutorial

hello everyone and welcome to my propulsion tutorial my breadboard and pid videos rely heavily on getting this right so i'm finally getting around to addressing this i will go over this quickly though and discuss some pretty niche stuff because i think people usually get this more or less right but i want to be sure that this is at least somewhat useful even for more experienced players now as usual you'll have the timestamps below as well as the newish chapter feature alright so thruster placement one neat little trick is to use the lines that appear when you try to place a block and to rotate it so if you hold the rotate key and imagine that the center block is your vehicle and you can clearly see the lines for yaw pitch and roll and those are the same for your vehicle right so for example if you wanted to control pitch you just have to place thrusters along the blue line when looking at it from this angle be careful because if you look at it from a different angle suddenly the blue line is roll so it's camera dependent but the idea is the same so if you follow the blue line on this perspective and you place your thruster facing up or down where the blue line meets the red line so that it's kind of pointing the same way the circle is going then you would control pitch but you can also do the same thing where the blue line meets the green line if your thruster is facing front or back that will also control pitch and there's also another little thing about placement and that is the distance from the center of mass there's a bit more involved in the effectiveness of your thrusters than that but basically it's the idea of leverage so if i place yaw thrusters here there's a certain amount of distance from the center of mass and that distance is essentially like a lever so i get a certain amount of yaw based on that distance now if i place it further my lever is longer and i get more yaw for the same amount of thrust for the same number of thrusters so that's very important to keep in mind another way to do this is to simply place thrusters really and hitting the q menu so for example i have this thruster placed at the back and if i look at the presets that are available turner is grayed out because i simply cannot use this thruster for turning but the roller preset and the pusher presets are not grayed out and if i click them it actually shows you which way to do it now you can do this manually as well to fine tune it and if you hit right click it will add these yeah it will add the different axes instead of overriding everything right as you can see this is shifting it's removing them this is adding now this interface actually lies it does not like to do roll when you're placing a thruster above the center of mass as you can see here it's grayed out but it's technically entirely possible if i do this it should work it should roll the vehicle now it's not necessarily very strong because of its placement but it's a possibility and it's the same for placing it above the center of mass it doesn't like to let you control pitch that way but it absolutely works if you do it manually now for my first big brain magic trick if i can say so myself you can use a relatively new feature of propulsion to control role for example with forward propulsion and now bear with me for a second so right now you can see that it's rolling a little bit using my breadboard because it's relatively stable but it's going to try to compensate oh i already changed this all right and that would be why there's already some roll but if i do the opposite on one side then now one of these thrusters is pushing up and the other is pushing down on each side and if you draw the circle that is roll and the way you can do this you need acbs right so right now i manually changed one thruster you would need to rename the thruster using shift n and putting in some kind of unique name and then use an acb to oops that's the wrong block for example you would say okay roll command when it's like that control propulsion component set its pitch to something and whatever and then you need another one right to reset it so if there's no roll command then it resets right none like this and you can get pretty creative with this as i'll show you with another one of my vehicles this one oops hopefully i didn't make you sick if we dig into the bowels see it has hover thrusters you can see they're perfectly stable now if i do this spawn a marauder and boom the hover thrusters are turning to create strafing and to create mobility backwards this hover is currently backing up from the marauder without any thrust backwards it only has forward thrust and the hovers actually change their angle to basically back pedal so hopefully that helps you need to get uh you absolutely need to rename the thrusters to do this otherwise as you can see at the bottom name change to hover if you don't do this your acbs will change the angle on all of your propulsion on your vehicle and then that's not what you want right so that's one trick moving on next tuning propulsion now this is a bit of a boring bit and problems with tuning might not be obvious right sometimes you'll think you're having issues because of ai because of your pids or even because of damage and sometimes you're absolutely right but there are times when tuning matters where you could prevent loss of control with good tuning and you don't usually need to be super precise if we look at my tank again you'll notice that my front thrusters are tuned for 100 pitch among other things and that the ones closer to the center are half as powerful for pitch now that's just good practice because if you remember earlier when i talked about leverage basically the further away from the center of mass the more powerful the thrusters are and this should be reflected in your tuning it's just a good idea rule of thumb further away from the center of mass the higher your roll or pitch or yaw numbers should be i also recommend against making thrusters just for one axis for example i could have the thrusters closer to the center just be up propulsion for instance and have thrusters further away on the side just for roll and same for pitch i could have the front ones just for pitch but if i lose some of those thrusters the other ones can act as backup it can keep your vehicle from becoming unstable when damaged and there's virtually no drawback from doing this as long as you tune it properly it'll work and it'll just make your vehicle more resilient and finally we're on my borrowing old wooden platform for the actual q menu what do all of these buttons do so starting from the top left you have the resting drive and the current drive current drive takes into account any other settings that you may have crazy a little bit here so there we go if i set this i have input currently going there it's telling me it's doing something but you can also just click there or type in a number and that will give it a resting drive meaning it will fire regardless of the input there's also this button i'm not sure why it's all the way down there but basically the default behavior is if you have a resting drive and then you have input there then you hint yeah the input will override the resting drive if you do this it will actually do math with the resting drive to get somewhere in between or the sum of the two uh inputs um then you have the particle effects which is just what it says if it's off you don't see anything if it's on you see something the apply to all button is just for the particle effects as well it's not all of the settings uh yaw angle is self-explanatory as you can see you can visually see it turn and it does affect the thrust pitch angle is the same reset is obvious copy and paste is obvious you can also use ctrl c and ctrl v spread to neighbors basically if you have a chain of thrusters that are touching each other and you press that button then all of the thrusters touching each other will have the same settings afterwards it can be useful definitely the presets as i've mentioned earlier they just either toggle or if you right click they add each other they turn green but if you're manually setting things up and you're doing it wrong it will turn red and that should be a sign that you should question your life decisions then you have the actual bars for each of the axes which you can move this is essentially a percentage so at one it can use 100 of its thrust for that axis if you do 0.5 well it's gonna use up to half its thrust for that axis and so on and so forth now you can press these buttons and most of those just add options so we didn't have strafe and hover before now we do we didn't have the secondary and tertiary drive before now we do same for abcde it's just ways for you to get creative to control your propulsion more precisely probably with breadboards maybe with pids or something like that custom access is only for lua i believe so i'm not going to talk about it further and advanced settings i can make a whole video on instantaneous you probably shouldn't touch it if you don't know what you're doing you really really need this non-reversible is a bit complicated to explain so i'll demonstrate it for you right now we have this responding to forward and strafe and it's currently on max thrust and this one is also responding to straight to strafe and forward and this one is on 0.9 the difference is the non-reversible option this one is ticked now all it does is if there is a negative input on that specific axis it will be ignored if there's negative input coming from the other axes they won't be ignored even so even if this one is on full thrust and you say non-reversible it does not prevent the thruster from reversing if other axes are reversible and are actively trying to reverse it just prevents that one axis i'm not going to get into it much further it's a little bit complicated and it's not helpful maybe but i'm gonna recommend that you experiment with it if you need it you probably don't need it but whatever at the bottom you have the summary it's kind of helpful and you have the output scale this is basically a multiplier usually you should probably leave it on max because pids will use the thrust proportionally so there's really no drawback it just prevents the thruster uh or just allows a thruster to use even more thrust you can set it lower if you wanted to prevent from either being less efficient because the higher it is the less efficient it is in terms of power consumption so you can just kind of hard cap it or also if you just want to limit the amount of power the thruster can use and finally an awkward cut because the original recording glitched so there's a whole other tab here basically it's all of the keep that you can press either with an acb or manually or with a complex controller and so on and so forth i believe those are the main drive the secondary drive and the third sherry drive and basically what it does if you press once it turns green and that would be a full 100 thrust when that key is pressed and the opposite if you make it red and that's the gist of it so please like and subscribe if you found the video helpful leave a comment if you have questions or if you would like to suggest topics for future tutorials and thank you for watching bye bye

Channel: Ohm is Futile

Views: 1,008

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: ftd, FTD, tutorial, tips, tricks, From the Depths, gaming, propulsion, q menu, plane, hover, submarine

Id: irC-AdGxeLk

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020