In the pic below, the blue boxes have physics applied so are simulated with forces and collision - imagine the blue vertical line is gravity and the boxes are falling downwards, spinning and colliding.
Then inside the blue boxes the orange cylinders are falling and colliding with each other and their parent box’s sides, using their own local simulation (the axis labelled Z is gravity).
So you have one physics system that is operating within and maintaining reference to another, which seems fairly unique and somewhat challenging.
I think maybe you don’t understand what the difference being described is.
Like, from that video a few months back. I got into another dude’s ship, snuck around on the inside, then after he left the armistice zone, i went into his cockpit and shot him in the head, then took control of his ship.
Like, in Halo, sure… i could have multiple guys manning fixed positions in a car. But that’s kind of different from what you can do here.
Uh sure so like Sea of Thieves ships, and guns of icarus, or boats in ArcheAge online, ships in Rodina, Starmade, space engineers, and I know there are others that have multiple people vehicles that aren’t just static attach points. Each of those use a different to a different degree change how gravity and normal velocity is impacted by the vehicle they are considered on.
Physics is just an application of forces being applied or not being applied to objects based on where they are located, and there’s not anything special that hasn’t been done to some extent in other games. Saying that SC’s physic boxes are any different than things like Subnautica’s different physics when you are in the water vs out of water is really giving SC more credit than they warrant. The video you posted isn’t wholly different than stuff that Infinity space game was showing off back pre-2010.
They may go deeper into simulation than usual in some aspects (like extra drag when going through the atmosphere) but as a whole nothing there is really that groundbreaking, especially from a tech demo and an unreleased game that doesn’t have a complete game loop to tie it all together. Maybe if they ever get it all working as a holistic game we can talk about pulling it off but they are no where close to being able to pulling off half of their ambitious goals into a fun and finished product.
I don’t think it’s as challenging as it seems. At a high level it’s all about velocity modifiers. If we extrapolate your example to SC, when you are inside the ship’s boundary you don’t inherit the ship’s physics system, but you instead calculate the player’s physics as something like
That’s why when you jump inside a moving ship you don’t get flung to the back of the ship, and why loose objects don’t go flying every time the ship moves. It’s the same basic concept as moving platforms in old Mario games, once your feet are touching a moving platform (even when gravity is reversed due to triggers) then you inherit the velocity of the moving platform (otherwise the platform would move and you’d just fall straight down). That’s also why moving platforms are used in speed running to help move faster. I have not seen any evidence to suggest that if you are on a ship that’s upside down in a planet’s atmosphere the player will run on ceiling, so until we see that I can only assume that the ship is overriding the planet’s physics system.
Once you leave the ship’s boundary you not only stop inheriting the ship current velocity. The game determines if you are in the defined area of a planet’s gravitational pull and if so then you get that planet’s gravity affecting the player’s velocity, otherwise you have zero gravitational changes to your velocity. Likewise if you are not on a ground surface with gravity then the game doesn’t let you move and relies on you affecting your velocity via jets (or whatever propulsion they give players).
Atmospheric drag is also done the same way. If you (or your ship) is within an atmosphere bounding area, the game will apply inverse velocity compared to your current velocity based on whatever drag calculation they want (so you don’t end up stopped and floating in mid air if you aren’t accelerating).
Now most likely they are doing a lot of faking of this anyway. I have a feeling that a fast moving ship would cause a lot of jitter with small objects if the game was making every player and object be moving at hundreds of game units per second (or whatever the ship speed is). That could easily be fixed by keeping the ship and all players/objects within it locally with a zero velocity and move the world around it at the correct speed.
Yes I’ve heavily simplified a lot of it and I’m not saying this is 100% trivial work, but it’s not nearly as mind blowing or unique as SC is hyping it up to be.
Also another good example of a game with all kinds of physics modification systems in play is Outer Worlds.
This is exactly a thing you can do in Sea of Thieves, minus the “Armistice Zone”. They even have a name for it - “tucking”
You can sneak on a crew’s ship while they are doing, say, a Skeleton Fort, and lay down in their Crow’s Nest, or Captain’s Quarters. There’s no fixed positions - it’s a ship you can run around inside, that is also on an ocean with it’s own physics rules. So you just pick a spot in the ship, and lay down in wait.
They bring the loot from the Fort to their ship, and set off to an Outpost to sell it. While they are focused on the wheel and sails etc., you stealthily move all of their loot to the rowboat hopefully affixed to the back of the ship (or signal your buddies on your own ship to move to intercept), and then drop the rowboat, and take off with all of their stuff. If they were foolish enough to store the loot in their Captain’s Quarters, that is, instead of below deck.
The gameplay scenario you describe certainly sounds fun, but not an original one.
Have you ever worked with a modern physics middleware (Physx, Havok…) in a demanding release environment? The naive solution you propose is not remotely close to solving the problems a solver would face in such conditions and it would likely collapse at much lower counts than a hundred physics objects (Not to speak of the thousand+ running at the same time in a complex game), specially given the relative speeds inherent to a space simulation game.
Again, you need to run several independent physics instances in parallel, and have a method of both changing an individual object frame of reference and transform forces applied to an object containing a frame to objects within the frame.
The render meshes are then transformed according to a series of operations depending on the frame of reference their associated physics object is in, to paint a cohesive picture of what in effect are several game instances running in parallel. Not un similar with what networked games do, but way more intense.
Conceptually it’s not that complex, but given how modern physics middleware works, it’s a significant endeavor, since a lot of the optimizations the physics middleware uses to run efficiently work against such a framework.
Despite all the other issues with the project, SC is perhaps the most complex such system I’m aware of as being released, distant from other games (Sea if Thieves is the only one mentioned that comes close, and the scales there make naive solutions easier to accomplish. But that game is also a technical accomplishment) and it’s a little bit silly to try to say this in particular is not an accomplishment.
They appear to be having another free fly event next week. From their e-mail blast:
Come Monday, you can test-fly five of Star Citizen’s latest and greatest ships for the whole week, and get in the game for free. What’s more, if you refer a friend and they end up backing Star Citizen, you’ll receive your very own Kruger P-52 Merlin. Spread the word and stay tuned for more updates on Monday- there’s never been a better time to jump into the 'verse.
Not being snarky–don’t really have a dog in this fight–but can we honestly refer to SC as “released,” in any meaningful way? And no, I am not prejudging the answer, I’m just asking what folks think. As a comparative outsider looking at this stuff, I tend to think “released” means a viable commercial product, which would not include stuff still under major development, but others may have different viewpoints I’m sure.
The “brick” in this case actually has a large wing surface, the overall structure is just less aerodynamic than the other ship (and it certainly handles worse as a result).
What was added into 3.5 was exactly what bluddy was suggesting was missing. That is, the atmosphere now affects ship flight. So the ships can do things like glide now, where as previously once you got near planets, they basically flew the same as in space, but with gravity pulling on you. Now the atmosphere applies force to the ship (as well as heat when applicable)
It’d be interesting to see what happens with one of the huge cargo ships, which really are shaped more like a big brick, but I’ve not flown one since that time when I stole a starfarer from an NPC. (I only own a few tiny cheap ships bought early in the process, like the 300i and hornet, which are basically fighters)
That’s totally possible, I’ve never played that game, so I have no idea how that feature compares.
I was just pointing out how its clearly different than the examples Kal was presenting, of multiplayer vehicles in Halo. That comparison suggested that he didn’t really know what kinda of stuff was taking place, currently implemented, in Star citizen.
So, I only fire up SC every once in a while now since it still mostly glitches out on the simple delivery missions I “test”. To be more specific: SC has become a LOT more stable and the explorable areas much more vast over the (unacceptably) long development time. But any game play task you have successfully completed one time may also be completely incompletable the next attempt.
SC still will not complete the basic and supposedly most simple “pickup and deliver a box” missions reliably.
I wish the “game” was what CIG says it is. But imho it is not. However, it is far, far more than what the opponents say.
Again, this is all my opinion. For those who do not know for themselves, and what to try, there is the upcoming freefly.
BTW… the regular SC “players” HATE these freefly events since it introduces so many noobs to the instances. Ie. players asking “how do I find my ship?” in chat. I also find that quite annoying…
So what would you say the “game” is right now, if anything, then? If missions can’t be completed, what is there, really, to do? I was interested in Elite Dangerous but never bought it because the criticisms of it all revolved around how little there was, beyond flying around, to actually do. How does SC differ at the present time, if at all?
Kolbex, I can’t really tell you. I, personally, have not tried any of the other possible “careers” in the “game”.
Personally (again), I do not want to kill or be killed by other players. Kinda like in real life, I guess.
So the only missions I have “played” over the years of the SC releases are the simple “pick up and deliver a box” ones. And those have become much better than three (3!) years ago. But they still break quite often in my experience.
From what I have read online and in the forums there are people having a blast with PVP spaceship and FPS combat. That is just not what I want to do, so I haven’t tried it and, so, don’t know.
I think there are a BUNCH of roleplaying options in SC right now. But no real gameplay (ie. did I win?) loops.
SC is basically just a sandbox imho. Don’t buy into it expecting anything else! But you do have another (annoying?) chance to check it out coming up, so I read.
