What types of things do you study to learn how to make additional flight improvements?
TL;DRThey study physics, talk with real pilots, and look at how other games handle flight, but stress that it must ultimately be fun to play rather than strictly realistic.
We study a lot of physics. I don't know how to say that in a really exciting, cool way. We do a lot of research, and we have a lot of contacts that are real pilots, and we ask them a lot of questions and learn about their experiences and the sort of things that you might not get in a textbook for physics or even a manual for a plane. And that stuff is all brought together, along with a bunch of other research, to get a picture both of the technical details and the experience of using a plane or a jet fighter or something.
There's a lot of hands-on, not that we go out and fly spaceships. But there's obviously a lot of games. They do things differently. We're always looking at how other things do it, and sometimes there's nice bits in there that work nicely but that wouldn't work with Star Citizen, so what about if we did things like this, on top of all the research, on top of all the simulation? At the end of the day, it's got to be fun to play. If it's not fun to play, then nobody's going to play it, so it doesn't matter how realistic it is.