I split the gameplay elements of v0.3 into two parts, concentrating first on flying/piloting stuff, and then on laying the foundation for space trucking. The focus for the piloting update was just to make the moment-to-moment flying a bit more involved, but this will be evolving as I add in ship systems.
WARP/SAN LIMITING
Stations are now equipped with some sort of magical warp inhibitor that automatically drops you out of warp if you're within a 500 km radius. This is not exactly what I have in mind for the final implementation, but it was easy to set up as a placeholder. I wanted to do this for a few reasons. First, it makes sense from a world building perspective as an in-universe safety precaution. Second, it forces players to take orbital mechanics into consideration when approaching a station, rather than just warping to like 1 km away. Finally, the physics system bugs the fuck out when warping or time accelerating near stations and this was an easy band-aid.
But I kind of hate it. This is not what the final version will look like. While this solution does do what I wanted it to do, it also introduces some major annoyance as you're constantly kicked out of warp. I have some thoughts on how to smooth this out, maybe even for v0.3, but more on that another day.
WARP MECHANICS
The warp system, like all ship systems, will eventually be fairly involved. So there's nothing final about this, but I wanted to make entering warp feel more meaningful. Now, you need to face the ship prograde and hold it there for a few seconds in order to achieve a warp lock before engaging. Once locked, warp is engaged by throttling up to 10%; this feels pretty good, like you power up and then suddenly slam into warp. This also disincentivizes using warp for short jumps, since starting out at 10% power makes it easy to overshoot. Similarly, you now drop out of warp by throttling all the way down to zero. Again, this just feels right, and avoids the weird situation where you could just sort of halt yourself in time and space by warping at 0% throttle.
BURNING FUEL
Thrusters now burn fuel! This includes attitude and translation thrusters. More powerful thrusters like the main boosters are more efficient than weaker ones like the docking translators. This makes sense in rocket sciencey way (probably?) but also, more importantly, for gameplay. Boosters are efficient enough for interplanetary transfers, while docking thrusters are inefficient enough that fuel still needs to be budgeted for close-range maneuvers.
BOOST MECHANICS
Finally, I made some tweaks to the main boosters. In maneuver mode, engaging and disengaging the deflectors is no longer instantaneous, with the physical mechanism taking a couple of seconds to respond. And in boost mode, the deflectors are no longer available. This was purely a gameplay decision. I just think it's fun to have to flip the ship around and burn when making big braking maneuvers.
The next task, before moving on to the second half of the gameplay update, was to, um, completely redesign the ship, both on the interior and exterior. It did not go well. Stay tuned!
