How hard has the localized physics been while at the same time trying to emulate space, such as explosive decompression or even a ship rapidly speeding up or slowing down?asked by Sohonor Nalfain

Certainly we've had problems with the transitions between different physics areas, like going from open space into the back of a ship, and we've kind of conquered some of that. There's a lot of work that has yet to be done, and we have some temporary code in place that's making it work, but we know there's a solution that's going to make it much better in the future.

The localized physics grid specifically stops that interaction from happening. The whole point of it is that I want to be standing on a ship which itself is moving through the universe. Implementing it in this way specifically breaks that connection. And so in these specific cases where we want there to be a connection, where you want to have momentum carried through the space, where you want to have physics interaction here interact also in the interior physics grid, those things have to be now built in specifically, because that way they can behave the way we want them to and not the way that whatever the physics code might believe they might work, which tends to be much more chaotic.

It's pretty challenging making flying FPS levels through a larger space level and then being able to transition out of one into the bigger one and then into somebody else's. It's probably one of the most ambitious aspects of this game. I'm constantly amazed at our progress with it.

Even just on the PTU right now, I was kind of blown away Monday getting in and seeing the handful of videos of people who did figure out a clean, functional way to pull the Merlin inside the back of the Starfarer. And that's dead on what it would have to be because, no, you can't just fly it in nose first because of how the wings handle on that. Getting it in cleanly, getting the door shut cleanly, getting it landed and seated cleanly. You can already see the improvements to the physics grid, because in the live version, you try and do that in, say, a Constellation. Well, no ship that you can sort of cram in there is going to sit cleanly on the floor. So as soon as you go into quantum, it detaches, it flips back, it blows your ship up. But now with the scope and the size of the grid in the Starfarer, it's like, okay, well, this is big enough now. This is almost safe enough now for how it's compartmentalized to let you bring that ship in and have it sit down cleanly. Doesn't mean you'll get 20 of those Merlins in there, but being able to pull a couple of those things in, we definitely do want to make sure that works, and it has to play nice with the physics grid. You blow up when you go to quantum.

I'll believe you can't fit 20 Merlins in there when I see it.

OK. You can't fit 20 Merlins in that you can cleanly fly out without at least 12 of them exploding.

As for the explosive decompression, that's another thing that has to be specifically built. But I've actually seen some designs being worked on that seem pretty well featured. Those are still in the design phase, and I'm not directly involved with it, so there's no telling how that'll shake out, but I know that we want to have atmosphere.

We've seen the very beginnings of it in the pipe system preview that we had on ATV Fast Forward the last two weeks, shooting out the glass and watching all the cargo that's in that room fly out and stuff.

I think CryEngine has some kind of object that can actually pull along a stream. So we're kind of planning on putting those at the airlock areas. And if you breach it, it'll just kind of suck in what's in this cone. And so we should get that nice effect.