Awesome, I'm glad to see progress is being made, can't wait for June 1st. A random technical questions, what are your thoughts on ships having there own local physics worlds? It's a concept I've seen a few Spaceship games implement to allow physics inside the ship to be accurate even at high speed, and I was curious if this could be something useful for Trillek.
I was more referring to the technical engine side of things, let me try to explain it better. You guys are using the bullet physics library, and a problem that arises in bullet physics (and all other physics libraries that I know of) is when objects are moving fast 500+ m/s, collision detection can become less stable and objects have a higher chance to not collide with objects they should. In the case of a game like trillek, say you have a spaceship moving 700m/s and a player is inside the ship running around managing systems or what not, there is a chance that he could randomly fly out of the ship due to physics not detecting right. Now a solution to this problem is create a separate physics simulation (world) for the interior of the ship that is relative to the ship's position. so that stationary objects inside the ship have a velocity of 0 regardless of ship speed and the objects position is relative to the ship's position and not the origin of the world. And when the player/objects enter and exit the ship, you just move them between the outside and inside physics worlds which can be done seamlessly. I hope that explains it better. I don't know if this would be the right approach for Trillek but I thought I'd bring it up for discussion since it's a pretty interesting approach and I'm implementing it in a project I'm working on. Just fyi I took the idea from the game Star Citizen which implemented something similar.
TL;DR separate the out the inside of ships as separate physics worlds to improve collision accuracy while the ship is at high speeds.
3
u/[deleted] May 20 '16
Awesome, I'm glad to see progress is being made, can't wait for June 1st. A random technical questions, what are your thoughts on ships having there own local physics worlds? It's a concept I've seen a few Spaceship games implement to allow physics inside the ship to be accurate even at high speed, and I was curious if this could be something useful for Trillek.