[Kobrar44]

In FRED in ship editor in misc there's "Affected by Gravity". What's this? How to use it? What does it do? I tried it and nothing.

[Snail]

Currently it has no effect.


The code that makes it work is still WIP.

[Sololop]

What will it do eventually? Pull you towards planets? Or large ships?

[dragonsniper]

That would be awesome. If that's what it is (in the future), then I'm using it for sure.

[Droid803]

Or would it be like the thing that happens if you have a GTD Planet and it goes 'too close to planet' or something?

[JGZinv]

Me and Bax came up with a GravCube™ that emulates the in game effects of gravity,
but it currently only works in his builds. Probably could use some refinement,
however it serves it's purpose.

Hopefully the code freeze will end and we can play with it some more.

[Aardwolf]

The problem with gravitation is that the effects of it wouldn't show up unless it were applied unevenly (that is, the direction and distance from the center of mass of the affected ship to the gravity source were not approximately equal)... so for planets, it'd basically be meaningless, and it wouldn't make sense to have any [significant] gravity from something with small enough size that you could fly around it in any reasonable time.

[Scotty]

Well, not really true.  In free fall, if two masses come into close proximity, a new 'center of gravity' is established between them.  It sort of stabilizes and orients the objects.  Besides, think how cool it would be to curve a missle or primary around a ship and into a target?

[karajorma]

Cool, maybe. Realistic, not in the slightest.

Even the really big ships in freespace would have next to no effect on missiles. Not unless they're made out of neutronium or something.

[Black Wolf]

Cool, maybe. Realistic, not in the slightest.

Even the really big ships in freespace would have next to no effect on missiles. Not unless they're made out of neutronium or something.

The kind of damage they supposedly soak up makes that not entirely unlikely.

[Herra Tohtori]

Well... having subspace vortices cause gravitational effects, and being able to orbit planets (provided that models of sufficient size would be possible some day) would be pretty cool. Quite obviously it would require FREDders to do a bit of homework to set the ships to a stable orbit from the beginning of the mission... and ships jumping in would need to aquire orbital velocity upon emerging from the vortex. Or the vortices should sync to the orbital velocity. And obviously all this would require full newtonian flight model, and I shudder to think of what changes would be eneded for the AI to make the computer controlled ships behave in any comprehensible way instead of becoming atmo pizzas in first two minutes of the mission.

...so yeah, it would be almost impossible to do in a way that doesn't make everyone pull their teeth off and go play Orbiter instead for relaxing afternoon activity. At full difficulty.

[Aardwolf]

You couldn't do any of that stuff without getting rid of the mysterious 'drag' force that FreeSpace has (and effectively making the game newtonian)