How do you plan to handle, if it's possible with CryEngine, transferring the mass inertia of a ship to its passengers? For example, pilots will red out and black out. Will those effects transfer to the people riding as passengers in the ships?
TL;DRWithin a local physics grid like a Constellation, occupants don't feel g-forces, so passengers won't share pilot effects; the team wants some damage reactions for people standing there, but no inertial dampers exist now.
It totally could. And that's a really good question, and we've talked about this a lot. And let me take you through... I always turn these into a story or a history. Okay, so the best way I can explain it is that with the g-forces, there was an initial implementation of how the pilot reacted to g-forces, and it was pretty crappy, if I'm honest. The next thing that we did was re-implement it, or refactor it basically, so that it uses a blend space. What a blend space means is that these g-force reactions are parametrically driven, which is super cool, because you can pass the g-force data, whatever the value is, to a single animation set, and it's just going to blend based on whatever that might be. The question that came up, and this is now a little bit more on the actual topic, the question that came up during that is: what happens in a local physics grid ship like a Constellation? Does the pilot sit there reacting to the g-forces whilst he's got a co-pilot standing literally right next to him, not doing anything? And what we ended up coming up with was that within the local physics grid, no, you would not actually feel any of this gravity change. I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but when you're in a ship that has artificial gravity, it's going to compensate for this effect.
Star Trek called them inertial dampers.
Inertial dampers, right. Now, there is kind of a problem with the design here. When you're a Constellation pilot, you still red out and black out, but yet you're not doing any real g-force reactions. So does that really make a lot of sense? Not really, but it's balanced, is kind of the thing. What we do want, though, is damage reactions. Star Trek, shaking in the seat, whatever. But then we want people that are standing there to have some level of reaction. We can't take control away from the player, but have some level of character reaction to the damage and the things that are going on within the ship. Do we have inertial dampers or anything like that? Not really, not right now. And how it all works is just, if you're within that physics grid, you basically don't react to those things.