[With the Reliant variants in the works,] can we finally get the ability to manually change the state or rotation of the ship? Right now, we have to drop the landing gear and go into landing mode whenever we want to rotate the ship.
TL;DRManual ship state changes won't be in 3.4, but work has begun on a vehicle state machine for 3.5 that decouples animation from flight states, though not every ship may be ready on day one.
In 3.4, no, you won't be able to do that. But in 3.5, in fact, this week, Dave Coulson started, he's working on the IFCS improvements. He's started on a very rough version of the first vehicle state machine, which allows you to decouple vehicle animation states from flight states. So you'll be able to have your ships with VTOL engines do their VTOL stuff without putting their landing gears out, like the Sabre and Vanguard put their wings out without being in landed mode, and the same for the Reliant.
That's huge. We've been waiting for an update to the vehicle state stuff for a while now.
Yeah, it's going to be a big change. I don't want to commit to every single ship having all their animations done, because obviously at the moment, to get that to work, we've had to bake the animations for every ship's landing gear and vehicle parts. And there's a lot of ships that have had that done. So we'll try and do as many as we can for 3.5, but not all of them might hit day one.
But eventually, when that vehicle state machine is up and running, we'll be able to rotate the Reliant without having to go into landing mode. And then the big one, VTOL, being able to rotate the engines without having to go into landing mode and stuff.
And it also is one of the blockers for a ship we'll talk about later.