Hello there! I just happened to stumble across this thread before anyone tracked me down...
It's been long enough that I don't remember all the details, and I don't have the source code checked out so I can't see exactly what was in the commit in question (or later follow-up tweaks). I do remember writing reference here (which you should all read):
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ships.tbl#.24Glide:
So, some history, as best as I can remember it. I stumbled across BTRL, and was driven up the wall by the fact that you could exceed speed limits in glide by flying forwards and turning. I found myself getting ahold of the source code to fix this, and got pulled into FSOpen dev in the process.
Later, I ended up refining this for Diaspora (and for my own use in TBP) with the "dynamic glide cap" approach, trying to make it so that the basic ship flight envelope was the same in both glide enabled and disabled modes. Turning on dynamic glide cap supersedes the "max glide speed" completely, and IIRC has some fairly different logic to avoid having to interact with the weird behavior that you can get when you DONT use the dynamic cap. Diaspora *definitely* uses the dynamic glide cap.
I do seem to recall that the behavior where you can maintain your current speed in glide, even if it's over the cap, was desired or relied on by someone (TBP / Zathras, maybe?). Including the part where applying thrust would break you out of that magic state and slow you down.
This does seem like something that should be fixed. If someone wants to be able to maintain AB speed in glide, they can just set the max glide speed == max AB speed. If you want the max glide speed LESS than max AB speed, then I think it should behave the way Battuta is asking.
Assuming that nobody is currently using a max glide speed < max AB speed and depending on the current behavior, I think it can be treated as a bugfix without needing to add another table flag.
As already mentioned, I can't see what was in r8628, so I can't comment on whether or not it's safe to revert as-is.
Unfortunately I won't be able to help out with actually implementing a fix, my current employer is very lame about participation in own-time game dev projects. And frankly I don't have the spare time and energy anyway.
Some alternate ideas for Battuta that wouldn't require a code change (these may or may not be helpful, just brain-dumping):
* Use dynamic glide cap so the player ship can't maintain a high glide speed without keeping energy in engines?
* Use +Glide Accel Mult: 0 to prevent ANY thrusting during glide, as an alternative "tradeoff" for using it?
