Will we keep up our momentum if we jump out of a moving ship in space?asked by Wicked Wookie
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 why is it that it's not just as people might expect it? Why haven't we built an entire universe of fully physicalized entities?
Well, because, yeah, physics is cool, but we want to make a game which you can play. If people can accelerate indefinitely, what could it be like?
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.
Yeah. For regular activities, enough.