Scraping

[G-Hob]

One of the best bits of Wipeout 2097 was getting just close enough to the wall to scrape against it sending sparks flying, but without losing speed. In Wipeout 3 scraping actually increased your speed which was a bit weird, but at least you could still do it.

In Wipeout Pulse it seems impossible to scrape against the walls and I think that's a change for the worse. But perhaps I'm just not good enough to get close enough to the wall to to barely touch it without losing speed.

[Lance]

I think the turbo-scraping in WO3 was an interesting and useful technique, even though I'm not good enough to do it consistently well, but I think most people hate it and are glad it's gone. Not that I think the majority is always right. :g

[zargz]

I'll take any day scraping (with no boost) over 'gluing' :?

[Frances_Penfold]

I agree, Zargz. I have decided I don't care much for the wall collision mechanic in Pulse-- though luckily, it's pretty much a non-issue in good time trial runs!

[Lion]

a scrape should slow the ship. it's friction after all.. but it is somewhat exaggerated in pulse

[phl0w]

I noticed that the "glue" effect in Pulse only occurs when your ship's nose touches the wall. Not when it's just the rear engine/ wings/ stabilizers. Often enough you get away with a scrape, but more often than not your ship gets tilted towards the wall because of the friction at the back, thus the nose scrapes -> severe speed loss. Now I can adjust my racing line to that, however, it's completely unrealistic because at WO's velocities and ship's weights the engines would break off or damage the tracks' boundaries rather than act as a pivotal point.

[Lance]

WO1 had the nose-sticking mechanic also. It wasn't happening to me when I got involved in the Medusa-Lunar Karbonis record fest, but earlier when I was less familiar with the game, it did and I hated it. It put me off playing the game, so it was a long time before I came back to it and got better. The nose can stick to the wall and bring you to a complete stop in WO. Does it do that in Pulse?

[Rapier Racer]

Actually I don't think it grinds you to a complete halt just severely cripples your speed. The walls in Wipeout 1 are the reason I don't play it much.

[Lance]

Perhaps you were not as unskilled as I was; the nose of my racecraft would stick to the wall and either come to a complete stop or judder in little jumpbumps about a foot at a time at about one per second. For all practical purposes, I was stopped. I was, of course, nearly sideways across the track at the time.

[Rapier Racer]

Sorry I mean in Pulse the walls don't do that.

[Lance]

Ah. Clarity ensues. :)

[AG-wolf]

wait wait wait... you got a BOOST from scraping in WO3?! It never connected with why I would suddenly find myself going faster every now and then around corners or something D: I LOVED that you could drag along the wall in XL/64/3, and was severely disappointed with Pure and what little I've played of Pulse so far.

Considering there are downloadable packs and stuff, I wonder if the game could theoretically be patched to fix this problem... SCEE MUST know that Wipeout has a dedicated fandom, I can't imagine they don't keep tabs on consumer response to it... Granted I doubt it could ever happen, it'd would be cool if we could rally together and get them to come up with some kind of downloadable fix :P

[Kb0nEZ]

Wow, so something like this actually exists. I would always "wtf?!" whenever I skimmed a wall in Pure and ended up getting a little speed boost (I always thought it was in my head). I think it's a great addition, too bad it's not in pulse. Did anyone out there ever master WO3 scraping too the point where they were using it consistently on a track to get better TT times?

[Lance]

I bet Al Sartwell [JABBERJAW] did!

[Frances_Penfold]

Scraping, snaking...

Why do all of the 1337 techniques start with "S" and end with "ING"?!

Is it because of the "Samus" and her encounters with the "Ing" in Metroid Prime 2? Oh noes!

:dizzy

By the way, just for my curiosity's sake, anybody know a video of the scraping-moves-ya-faster thing?

[phl0w]

[wise-ass on]No, but I know of the start-WO3-and-see-for-yourself thing ;)[wise-ass off]

[Asayyeah]

I love scraping walls ala 2097 it gave such an incredible feeling : it was quite easy to reproduce on every part of the tracks ( the final long right curve from Sagarmatha anyone?) especially with the non-piranha ships. The counterpart of wall scraping with those ships is to be a bit too arcadey (imnsfho : Al if you read me ;) ), Piranha it's less wall scrapes and imo more like a simulation.
W3O added turbo scrapes on walls in certain circumstances : to get them easily when you got a left curve, be close from the right wall but not too much, twist your negcon on the left to follow the curve and hit your right airbrake: if you did it perfectly at the right distance of the right wall you gonna scrape it and get a pretty interesting turbo boost.

Honestly i think we were very close to have those wall scraping on Pulse : i got the UMD demo of Pulse which has a complete different gameplay to the original we all have bought recently. How to describe that clearly with my words? Ok, let's say this : if your ship is staying low on the ground and you hit a wall you will have a real mega glue effect ( worst than original) but if you got the chance to be a bit higher than normal ( like after a bump, a drop or simply after getting a boost due to a BR you often take off ) you allowed to scrape the walls and have an awesome turbo ( ala W3O but easier to acheive). But again after the 1st moments of excitation thinking :' WOW unbelievable gameplay!!!' i find it too arcadey, just too easy to use in any occasions. Honestly i prefer original Pulse we all have, it's more technical to master it.
my €0.02 :P

[q_dmc12]

...at WO's velocities and ship's weights the engines would break off or damage the tracks' boundaries rather than act as a pivotal point.

not unless its a titanium composite of sorts

[Lion]

by this point in the wipeout universe they've had flying vehicles for over 100 years and have taken a stab at colonising mars
at a guess I'd say that they would have invented some new materials that are stronger than anything we have today

[Lance]

I've always thought that hyperfilament [diamond crystal monofilament] bundles cast inside titanium would be a good structural material.

[q_dmc12]

hmmm, interesting - you might be onto something there...

[The Gracer]

Strong, yes, but diamond would be far too expensive to be practical wouldnt it? especially with the amount needed for a ship of FX league specifications.

Would diamond even exist in quantities large enough to execute that idea that far into the future?

Sorry to go and pour water all over your fire, but there is two sides to every argument :P

On topic, yes, scraping would be lovely to have back....the sparks and noise definitely added to the dark industrial feel of the earlier games, not to mention how cool it was :D

Perhaps thats why it was dropped?

[Task]

Nah, diamond is only expensive if you want it on a ring. It's just carbon, one of the most common elements around. We can currently manufacture diamond pretty cheaply, that's what serious drills use because it's most cost-effective.

[Lance]

Diamonds are a commodity whose price has been artificially set by the DeBeers company for more than a century. Making diamond filament is another thing entirely, and depends not on the supply of carbon already existing in diamond form and buried in earth, but on a yet to be perfected technical process. Hyperfilament is still essentially a hypothetical construction material that I first saw mentioned in Arthur C. Clarke's book, Fountains of Paradise. Clarke is the guy who invented the concept of the geo-synchronous communications satellite. But even ordinary graphite filament [carbon fiber] cast within metal would be a big improvement in durability over the easily broken carbon fiber composites made with epoxies and polymer plastics, which are very fragile and easily destroyed by impacts such as found in F1 racing.

The reason it could actually work is because the melting point of carbon is higher than that of metal.

[The Gracer]

If you cast the carbon fiber in metal, wouldnt it defeat the purpose?

The wings and body panels that are made of CFRP on a modern F1 car are used because they are brittle and break easily in a crash, so that they cannot pierce the safety tub that protects the driver in the event of an accident.

[Lance]

What I didn't make clear is that I wouldn't use it for a modern F1 car. I tend to think of it for airships and space habitats. Airships, for instance, need the elasticity to withstand impacts against their sheds during ground handling. That would smash graphite fiber/resin composites to a useless wreck that would take months to rebuild and and cost probably several million U.S. dollars and lost revenue.

[Delci]

Scraping is the number one death of gold medals in some challenges, shaving seconds off with every spark.
Some speeds call for such ridiculous maneuverability skills that you may find yourself bouncing back and forth on the walls like the Mach 5 bouncing off the Mammoth Car's wheels.
I've had some instances where my ship will (this is very odd) somehow become 'lodged' on a wall, by one way or another getting tilted perfectly vertical to the ground and...well, 'clinging' to the wall like it was a magnet. It has also pointed straight down and anchored onto the wall, before the game finally realized that it was stuck and reset it on the track. I've never had the nose of the craft bury itself into a wall, though.
Also, when landing after massive jumps (such as in The Amphiseum, I think), if your ship is tilted wrong, it will get flung way up into the air and point straight up while flying out of control. In this case...wheels are better! xD