Well I hope you manage to pull it all off. What about missile flight models/dynamics, are you intending to/have you implemented how gravity, air density and drag etc will influence those yet?
*Takes cover in the event of Nuke's brain exploding*
gravity works well for everything, though i want to add support for more than one gravity sources (large asteroids, comets, juggernauts, small moons). gravity can be either planar or spherical. while the planar type gravity is for objects that are too large to fit into the box that is an fs mission, spherical gravity can be used on objects that can. and it would be cool if we could have more than one. the idea would be to model sections of asteroid fields where all the large rocks have gravity and other objects orbiting them and all kinds of cool stuff. problem is that right now all gravity objects are assumed to be fixed. i need to change some code around to allow gravity objects to move.
not sure if i want multiple atmospheres though, usually atmosphere is only used with planar terrain models and nebulae (planets use complicated barometric modeling, while nebulae use a fixed density value), but i would like to use it with smaller objects like comets so you would have localized atmosphere on a small moving object.
drag works well for ships (weapons not so well, since they usually decelerate too fast in atmo), lift works for ships (some missiles may get "wings"), thrust works for everything. collisions tend to screw up, also homing missiles crash the game. i think all the crashing bugs most likely come into play when lua's 8 byte floats are converted to freespace's 4 byte floats, so while lua shows a perfectly valid number in all the debug info, freespace freaks out because its out of range (too big or too small to be represented by a 32 bit float). fixing these problems would require better physics scripting options such as the ability to override default game physics, and probably a better physics hook that runs for every object in the game, where the game gives me info about an object. such as: handle to it, its "breed", what the ai/player is doing with the controls, a list of collisions, with info on what collided, how fast the collision took place, where it happened and in what direction, then i can plug all that info into some formula, then output the ships new velocity, angular velocity (position should be handled by the game even with an override, so should collision detection, though i should still get to decide how that collision affects the object).
*brain reaches critical mass*
