As (sort of) promised, I did manage to work on system scale & close range physics this month, but just barely. System scale is working, but the close range physics was honestly wonky as hell before and I'll need to take my time getting it right this time around.
Lots of other shit to talk about this month as well, but the TL;DR is that everything's going pretty damn smoothly.
Attitude Stabilizers
The gyroscopic stabilizer system is pretty much complete & in final form. It mostly works the same way as before, with the main difference being that the system is now breakable, fixable, and upgradable.
I've added an auto-stabilization feature which will be available from the cockpit, with independent toggles for all 3 axes. I think this could be useful for docking, and some pilots might find it convenient to use full-time.
The ship can only be stabilized in this way on any given axis if it's angular velocity is less than that of the flywheel's saturation velocity, which will vary depending on the installed model of stabilizer, but overall it means that attitude stabilization has been significantly nerfed. You can no longer just hold tab to bleed off arbitrary amounts of rotation. To make up for this, I've added an RCS-based auto-stabilizer as well. Of course, this will use fuel, but it should be helpful for managing wild post-collision spins and the like.
Propellent System Hardware
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| Prop System Diagram |
Virtual implementations of the various bits of prop system hardware are in place, with the exception of the utility dock & refuel valve. The rest of the engine room equipment that you can see in the diagram above is all working, and will have player-interactable entities after I reimplement the first-person scale.
The manifold can be used to choke or open fuel flow on individual outputs, pump power can be adjusted to balance thruster power against efficiency and wear damage, and injectors can be adjusted to similarly affect thruster response. All of this only half makes sense, of course, and is geared more toward gameplay than accurate simulation.
Some of these adjustments will only be available from the engine room, but a few important ones will have cockpit controls as well. For instance, there will be an overall RCS pump power selector as well as an RCS injector on/off switch in lieu of the old docking mode button for fine maneuvering control.
System Scale & Related Sidequests
There is once again a vast solar system to explore, so that's cool, but it's just 2 different colored cubes a few billion kilometers apart from each other, so that part could use some work still. There's somewhere to boldly go, anyway.
This was a pretty simple task that boils down to implementing a floating origin, but I took a couple of detours along the way. In order to test the system I needed a way to find distant objects & a way to keep the camera on the ship for the journey, and instead of throwing together quick temporary solutions I decided to build out the base of the sensor system and implement a new & improved chase camera.
The chase camera has a bunch of new functions, nothing fancy but you can actually zoom & pan now. You can also pause the game, and I added an in-game screenshot capability which is just perfect now that the game looks worse than ever. Pausing the game, which seems like a pretty simple thing, is actually a pain in the ass for a game like this, so that was it's own sub-sidequest, but it needed to be done sooner than later, anyway.
As far as the sensors go, I'm waiting until I reintroduce space stations & docking before I really flesh things out, but the base architecture is in place. The biggest change from the old system is that sensor pings are now modeled as radio waves propagating at light speed, rather than being magically instantaneous. This will introduce some weirdness once I reimplement the warp drive; I haven't quite decided how I'm going to deal with that, but the warp bubble will probably just block outgoing radio waves, which might make for an interesting mechanic.
Coming Up Next
As I said up top, I'm still working on close range physics, AKA running into shit. I've got a busy couple of months coming up, so development will be taking a bit of a backseat. My only plan is to keep plunking away at physics range & collisions until I'm happy with it.
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