With localized physics grids being in the game, have you ever considered using them for more unorthodox means- for example, space ships or stations with varying directions of gravity? I'd be thinking of something like circular space stations, or space stations where the ground just 'continues' up a wall(Inception style),or space ships where on one deck the direction of gravity would point outwards, so the hull would act as the floor. How cool would it be to look up and see people 'hanging' from the ceiling doing their normal business? Speaking of circular gravity, are planets going to be basically enormous localized physics grids, or is there more to them? If so, can you explain a bit about how they're going to work in that regard?asked by Oberscht

Alright so these guys are always sneaking two questions in aren't they? There's like a main one, but oh by the way,Forrest Stephan: 20 for the Developers.

Procedural planet something right? No and it's cool, I'm so...

It's such a cool question, you can see why it spawns more questions because...

Yeah I'm super happy that everybody is so into the planets because that's gonna be such a huge unique point to Star Citizen anyways.

Right.

So the first question really is about localized physics grids and using them in a more unorthodox way. We've done this internally a lot actually.

Yup.

You can have a lot of fun with the physics grid. Doing a circular space station is very much possible so that way you can have a localized direction of gravity all throughout the localized physics grid which is quite cool. The other thing, again this is something Chris Reign had worked a lot on is that we've got a sparse voxel representation of the physics grid meaning we can shape it how we want. We give the system a model and it gets as close as possible to this particular piece of geometry. Now the higher poly the geometry is, the more expensive, the more difficult that check is to make, but absolutely we've done this kind of stuff internally.

We've even messed with magnetic boots.

Grav boots, yup.

So, yeah.

I think we actually took them out of the build for a little while because the animations looked so weird on them.

Yeah, yeah, but that's the thing...

We'll be putting those right back in. So not only will you have the localized physics of say, just like he's talking about like a circular space station or something like this, but you'll also be able to magnetically connect yourself via your magboots or whatever.

Which is probably super helpful...

To pretty much..

On the outside of the ship right? To get around, especially for the bigger ships.

Sure, totally. It's also kind of fun.

Yeah it's super fun.

I mean it's a neat thing to mess around with, just like he says somebody is going about their day to day business and they're hanging upside down from you or something like this.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah that technology lets us do all this kind of work. Speaking of circular gravities, are planets going to be based basically enormous localized physics grids or is there something more to them. There's a lot more to the planets. One of the tricky parts again and I think I talked about this in another 10 for the Developers is that we can't possibly store every single piece of physics collision on the server all the time, right?

Right.

So this is something that we've gotta generate on the client side at runtime somehow. So there not big physics grids essentially. They have their own gravity, it's completely implemented independently of a physics grid. Uses the same concept I suppose, but it's not a physics grid entirely. It would be far too large and it's not even close to a granular as what we even need.

It's different than when you enter a ship for example right where you setup your boxes and everything.

Exactly, it's very, very different. Again if you think about it right? You've got a very different shape, you've got a sphere and everything's gotta be a local gravity.

To the centre.

To the center of the sphere whereas in a local physics grid it's kind of defined. It's either a box or you can eve do a circle.

It's a box, this is the gravity, this is the ground.

And then everything is going in that direction, but yeah it's a little more difficult to do on a planetary scale, but it's not a big physics grid, it's... not to be condescending at all it's a lot more complicated unfortunately than that. I wish it was easy enough as making a big physics grid, but that wouldn't really work for what we need.

No, definitely not.