I am always of the opinion that everything about our game can be improved, including the flight model. That said, it's been heavily tested (although I agree there's some big flaws in it, still), and changing it is usually met with umm.. well, lets say I get a lot of flack from our users when I even do minor ship rebalancing ;).

However, there are some things that I've wanted to look at, in our flight model, for ages and ages. Lack of ability to turn under turbo, re-examining our various turbo constants and other flight determination factors.. perhaps making them more configurable to the actual ship/engine and thus adding additional configuration factors to vessels. Plus I always wanted to make a special addon that would allow additive turbo along any axis (ie, turbo+left-strafe gives you turbo on the left strafe axis, and so on), but my coworkers were against this back uhh.. 5 years ago or something. I think it would make for neat, highly maneuverable combat.

The flight model may be the most tested part of the game, but it's also the oldest part of the game.. things like no-turn-while-turboing was actually added to fix some problem so long ago that I can't even remember what the problem was. So all of this is due for re-assessment.

But, quite frankly, I won't be re-assessing it in the immediate future. We have a whole list of major stuff we need to redo right now (the Hive, NPCs, the mission system, adding various and sundry other things).. our game lacks a cohesive purpose (and it's kind of boring), and I intend to add that purpose as soon as possible. If I can tinker with the flight model as well in the meantime, that'd be cool, but it's not my top priority, you could say.

To everyone else who panicks and says "OH GOD INCARNATE'S GOING TO BREAK THE FLIGHT MODEL!@#", don't worry too much. If we make changes, we'll test the living hell out of them first, and they'll probably be more.. subtle than anything. I do not want to reduce the game to a basic flightsim, but I do think some parts could be made better and more interesting. The feel of flight and combat in Vendetta is the beating heart of the game, and open-heart surgery must be done rather delicately.

OH GOD INCARNATE'S GONNA BREAK THE FLIGHT MODEL!!@#@!

I can see why people were against side-turboing. It strikes me as something that would essentially make it impossible to hit you...

Well, incarnate, you just told me what I wanted to hear. I have given this game a broad girth because I realize how few people are on the staff, and how close they are to the game. I figure that makes any change difficult to implement and time consuming.

To hear a developer declare his own game boring wasn't on the list of things I expected to hear. However, the thing I didn't want to hear was that the current flight mechanics were set in stone. Some of the upcoming content may give me something I can get into, since there will be more than one aspect of game play to focus on.

As far as flack goes, I have developed a selective reading ability. If someone isn't contributing something of merit to the conversation, the post may as well not even be there at all. My mousewheel works fine.

Have you given any consideration to a secondary, unisector "arena" test server for allowing (selected?) players to test upcoming changes and tweaks, such as modifications to the flight physics or ship balances?

hrm this is just an idea, but how about make a special mission string that ends up with you finding a "hidden" wormhole (which disappears after you enter it) that leads you to an alternate universe (aka test server) for say, 30 minutes or an hour, would be a neat way to give players a peek at things, and you could limit the mission to say, once a week or so per player to keep everyone from livin on the test server.