TL;DRJumping from a moving ship keeps only part of your momentum, capped at a maximum, and thruster packs impose a speed limit, because full Newtonian physics would be too costly and unfun for the game.
So, yeah, it's a complicated question. We don't have real simulation for this. So it's not keeping all momentum. Part of its momentum will be kept, I believe it's 36 meters per second maximum we have. And if you use the thruster pack, the thruster pack will enable a speed limit for this, which will be, at least for now, 6 meters per second. That's what we have.
So it's one of those things, it's got to be accounted for amongst all the other physics-related necessities of the game, ships and items and stuff like that. Obviously, I think anybody who's followed our programming for a while knows just how strenuous physics is on CPUs and the process and stuff like that. We're often quoted as saying we'll bring it to the point of realism, then bring it to the point of fun. But the close cousin of that is bring it to the point of realism and then bring it to the point of what's performative for the universe. And yeah, so having just a one-to-one fully Newtonian thing is a little much for a giant fully formed universe with as many players as we're hoping to get in there. But we have a lot of things that can approximate it like you talked about.
TL;DRCurrently EVA speed with the tractor beam and thruster pack is about 10 meters per second, not 15, chosen as speeds they think are fun and open to change based on player feedback.
Currently, we can even have this speed if you use grapple hook mode along with the thruster pack. So if you use the grapple hook and drag yourself, it will be exactly 10 meters per second. So yeah, you got it.
And that's to say, these are the speeds we think are fun, the speeds that we enjoy. We're playing it right now, but you guys haven't had them, right? So you'll obviously be able to give us feedback and say if you're enjoying them and if you need to go a little bit faster maybe, but it's what we think works well, and we're in development still.
So just to be clear, you're saying the 10 meters per second now. We were talking about the 36 meters per second before, that was jumping out of a vehicle.
K
KianLead Gameplay Programmer
Yeah, around 36, I think, is the overall cap for an actor's movement in the game at the moment.
So 36 is the cap jumping out of a fast-moving vehicle until you eventually slow down. And then just you on your own with a grappling hook, you can potentially get up to 10.
And just to clarify, when I'm saying grappling hook, we're talking about the tractor beam. There's no physical ice hooks. Not yet. For 3.23, it's just the tractor beam.
So yeah, if you attach, theoretically, it's still work in progress, so we didn't test it yet, but I can guess it will be a systemic reaction to external g-force. It will just push you from the ship, or you lose consciousness, and yeah, it will do the work.
So if we attach, and again, the hand traversal is not in 3.23, but when that's there and you attach onto a ship and someone tries to shake you from the ship, you're saying it should throw them or it should not throw them?
TL;DRThe transition from EVA to gravity is intended to be very quick and seamless, the ISC clip was work in progress, and the developers say it feels fine in game.
I want to preface this by saying what you saw in ISC was absolutely work in progress. You're looking at a feature that's not scheduled to be live for a couple of months yet. But how is it supposed to work, that transition from EVA down to...
Very quick and very seamless. Yeah, that's the intent. And that's how it feels as well. I mean, it's never going to be 100% without mild vomit inducement if you're doing like a 180 turn and intense acrobatics, right? So what you see on screen, in first person especially, is not always going to be non-vomit-inducing, but it's meant to be smooth and quick. There shouldn't be any sensation of, oh, I'm waiting for the animation to finish, or that sense of loss of control. It's so snappy that it's not really there.
I even tried it in game and it's perfectly fine, in my opinion. You can land, spray the bullets and keep a steady position and fire. So yeah, it's fine.
Yeah, I can answer this. Right now, in lore, we have the idea that the thruster pack compensates for weapon recoil. So yeah, you keep steady. It's not working for the case where you don't have a thruster pack. So the short answer is no, we don't have it yet. But we have this idea and it'd be nice to implement maybe someday.
But again, not for 3.23. It's worth mentioning as well that for the next few releases in terms of EVA, we're not considering that for what we're working on immediately. So if we do do something like that, it'll be further off for sure.
So yeah, this figure doesn't have moving arms, but yeah. So when we approach an obstacle right now, we have our hands in front of us. So you can go feet first if you want. Theoretically, yes, but you don't need to. You go hands first. That's logical.
But again, that's the systemic stuff, right? Our fall damage is based on, I think, velocity rather than your falling. So if you're hitting something really quick in space, that's the same as falling really quick somewhere else. So there is a good chance you'll kill yourself.
TL;DRThe team describes EVA as full of edge cases, citing face-planting, inheriting a spinning plate's rotation, and flipping to the wrong side of a surface when attaching, and says it's now in a good place.
EVA in itself is a complex system. We're trying to combine coupled and decoupled modes for movement. And for rotation, it's an interesting combination of regular FPS rotation, but as we're in space, we rotate in any direction, full 360 rotation. So yeah, it's full of edge cases. About what fun bugs we have: not too much, except face-planting most of the time, at least in an older version. I can recall one when we worked on attaching to surfaces. Imagine you're flying through debris, metal plates and boxes and stuff, and you press attach and you attach to some small metal plate which is rotating, and you inherit the rotation and you start to rotate as well. It's weird.
I think the most frustrating one was every now and then you'd sort of attach but flip onto the other side of the surface, so you'd just be killing yourself every time, basically. Yeah, that was more frustrating than funny, I guess.
K
KianLead Gameplay Programmer
Yeah, it's been a fairly awkward one in general, because the development of it has gone on for a while and there have been different approaches tried and things like that, and finally we're at a good place with it, but it's been awkward to get to this point.
Not in 3.23. It's not EVA, basically. It's extravehicular, and it's an activity. Jumping out of your ship to your death is an extravehicular activity. Maybe not one you want to embrace, but...