David Colson · Gameplay Programmer, Product Owner of the Vehicle Feature Team

So I do have an answer for this. Having moving objects at rest on moving platforms is a really hard problem. And obviously physics grids solved this problem for inside ships, but elevators and ramps and stuff, they don't use physics grids. And it's partly because the way the physics grid system and vis areas work means that having exterior physics grids has some weird issues. Like the vis areas will cause shadowing artifacts and other issues that we haven't been able to resolve yet. There's also the issue that John mentioned earlier that we can't have multiple physics grids on one ship. The alternative is then to not use physics grids, but then we have these elevators which teleport their position because they're animations, like the ramp is an animation and stuff. When you have teleporting objects trying to interact with a physics collision system, the system gets very confused, because the objects move in ways that are not predictable to the system. If it was just a velocity, it would be predictable, right? And so if you imagine a really complicated suspension system sitting on a teleporting platform, the collision system gets quite confused. So we either need to break out those parts and simulate them manually with velocity and everything, or we need physics grids to work in a more complicated way. It's a really, really hard problem to get that right. We're still trying to work through the issues that we have with getting that fixed.