Armour and shielding

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fr0stbyte124
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Re: Armour and shielding

Post by fr0stbyte124 » Tue May 21, 2013 10:28 pm

ACH0225 wrote:Good, that's not here. Btw, fr0st. Read my sig. It has been more than five months.
Paper is being peer-reviewed. I will keep you posted.

Regarding locomotion, it is worth remembering that currently, interplanetary travel is not based in Newtonian physics, but rather the shape of the subspace envelope. Additionally, blocks in Minecraft don't have mass, and the existing interactions fundamentally bypass Newtonian physics. Including it in regards to mobility is no easy task. We probably need to do a little bit of calculation with kinetic energy for things like collision, but for general maneuverability, I am completely okay with approximations. The important thing is that vessels handle the way players expect them to handle.

Dr. Mackeroth
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Re: Armour and shielding

Post by Dr. Mackeroth » Thu Jun 06, 2013 5:49 am

Yes, we want big ships to have big inertia, and little ships to have little inertia. I don't care how it's done, but the simpler and less resource-intensive, the better (and better to be simple and inaccurate than complicated, time consuming, and accurate).
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fr0stbyte124
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Re: Armour and shielding

Post by fr0stbyte124 » Thu Jun 06, 2013 8:36 am

I'm not sure we really want to play inertia straight. For instance in a realistic space sim you couldn't accelerate for more than half the trip because after that you could never produce enough energy to slow back down. Other games, space is a viscous substance, and you slow down quickly regardless of your mass and speed (of course how speed works when everything is moving is a whole other can of worms). What we probably want is to control acceleration and handling rather than inertia itself; leave the real thing for unpowered floaty bits.

And in any case, rigid physics are always computationally cheap until you start getting into the thousands of unique entities. That part won't be a problem regardless of what we do.

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