How is drag calculated for each ship? Currently they have weird values, with some bricks being very aerodynamic while sleek ships are super slow. How do you plan to improve the system?
TL;DRDrag currently comes from a voxelized ship's surface area per direction; weaker thrusters now allow lower drag, and they're exploring, at an early stage, using shield SDF tech so ship shape matters, if it works.
I have a really good answer for this. This is interesting to me. So currently what we do is we voxelize the ship. So we take the shape of the ship, we break it up into little cubes, and then in each of the dominant directions, we'll calculate the area of those cubes. So we get an idea for the surface area in different airflow directions. And then we'll use that surface area to control how strong the drag is. So for example, if you're flying a Gladius like this, the surface area is this little tiny section here. If you fly like this, the drag is significantly more, because it's this huge section. That's what it does now. But there's another bit that's complicating this, which is that on a lot of ships, the main thrusters are super, super powerful, and they can overpower the drag a lot of the time. And so this is what we wanted to do with that thruster efficiency curve thing: because we've reduced the strength of the thrusters, the top speeds of the ships are now significantly lower, because the drag was so high previously. So now we can decrease the drag and make it more in line with what it should be, because the thrusters are so much weaker. And then it behaves a lot more correctly. But there's an extra thing that we're exploring, and we're just in the early ideas of seeing if this would even work, which is using the SDF tech that we're using on the shields to work out the shape of the ship, so that instead of just having a surface area in front of the ship, we can use the SDF to figure out the actual shape. So for example, a wedge shape like this would behave differently to a shape that's a flat wall like this. And the SDF would give us that information. And depending on how that exploration goes, that could result in the shape of the ship mattering a lot more than it does now, because you could have two surface areas that are the same, but they have a different shape, and so they'll behave differently. And that will make a huge difference, assuming it works.