Uh…, so, what we have right now isn't, uh, what I'm happy with, uh, so we are, actually, uh, bit of a spoiler alert, working on, uh, some stuff, skunkworks things I'm doing to, uh, address some of the issues, uh, that I have currently with what we're doing.
It - This is always a difficult one because everyone has slightly different, uh, opinions or visions of it. Uh, A lot of stuff has been informed by things like Star Wars, which is basically taking World War II aerodynamic, uh, maneuvers and having them happen in space. Uh, a-and I've alwa-, y'know, when we started- started star citizen. Now, I kind of, sort of pitched this idea of having it physically… better, like we have newtonian mechanics and everything sort of operates inside that, and it does in the current system too. I know a lot of people feel like it doesn't, but that's mostly because in a lot of ships in the current system, the amount of, uhm, force that can be exerted by any of the thrusters is huge.
So, y'know, when any one of your maneuvering thrusters can exert 6 g's of thrust, then, it means, y'know, basically, hanging around in an atmosphere doesn't really matter, your gravity doesn't, you don't, y'know, you can go left, right, up, down, whatever. Uhm, so, I actually feel like we…, uh, uhm, over…powered the maneuvering, and you always do a differ-, you do a balance between this, because if you have, ah, more realistic forces from, say, your maneuvering thrusters, ah, it means that, it all- y'know… you will move a turn slower.
So, I mean, there's a tv show - I think there's quite a lot of people have watched, called The Expanse, that actually does a good job of being real science about it, uh, and I wouldn't say that I want to go all that way about it, because, y'know, at a certain sort of speed, you'd, you'd take forever to turn around, and all the rest of the stuff. But if you watch The Expanse, it does a good job of sort of showing the realities of it, and would - and also gives you a good idea why, for instance, you'd want to keep your velocity low when doing, like, radical maneuvering in a, in a dogfight, because, yknow, if you want to… change your heading by 180 degrees, and you're going, y'know, too fast, the amount of g's that would take on the human body is, is, y'know, is life-threatening, basically. Uhm.
So, what I really want is I wanna have the dogfighting work within the parameters of proper physics; I want to bring back, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the balance on the ships in terms of not overpowering the thrusters, 'cause… there's all these different, y'know, people want their six degrees of freedom, and they want to be able to strafe up and down, and do this, and they wanna be… so everyone- all - what I feel has happened in the past is everyone's had all these competing things they want to see, they wanna see their WWII style dogfighting, and all the rest - and so there's, there's been too much of it sort of coming in and, to, to fix one thing for this one particular sort of point of view has sort of stomped on some other stuff, and I feel like everything's become a sort of a mishmash, and everything's become a bit too overpowered, and so what I want to move towards is, uh, more distinct personalities on the ships, and I don't want ships to be so powerful they can adjust their course as quickly as they currently do, uh, but we don't wanna go too far in the other direction cause otherwise people will be, like, "uh, I turn, and I'm still going this way and I slide forever," and that's super-frustrating, too, so it's a balance.
And I also want to make sure that the, uh, the- the, uh, sort of, allocation of your power - uhm, y'know, whether you're sort-of overpowering your thrusters has an affect on it's sort-of heat output, and also whether that thruster may misfire or not, or, uh, if you get your thrusters damaged, could also affect your ability to maneuver, and all that's not particularly done or simulated very well, so we've been working, uh, for a while on the sort of new version of IFCS that works inside the new item system, which is all fully sort of multi-threaded, batched and everything.
Uh, it's not ready to deploy yet, it's sort of what I'm hinting at that we'll be showing… perhaps we'll show a preview at CitizenCon, but, uh, we'll see, uh, but it's on our schedule for the end of the year, uhm, and, uh, it has a sort of full-over holistic design, as far as this goes, to deliver something that's closer to what I like, which is basically, I want trade-offs, I want pro and cons to doing certain things, so, uh, you could potentially overpower your thruster to be able to exert a bit more force to be able to turn a bit quicker, but if you're doing that, you're uhm, y'know, potentially overheating it, which could potentially cause it to, uh, well, definitely wear more, and could potentially cause it to misfire, so, there's a balance, uhm.
There's a model, that, uh, that, uhm, you know, it's sort of, ah, there's, ah, there's a couple of sort of modern, uh, current? sort of plasma thruster designs, uh, so that's kind of what we're doing, where the idea would be, that, << phone rings >> ah! you know, my phone! Uff! How did that happen. Sorry. I thought I put it on silent, sorry guys! Uhm, anyway, so the idea is that, uhm, you basically would, uh, you know, you need power, and you need a sort of, uh… matter, which would be…uhm, y'know, whatever, hydrogen, or, argon, or whatever, that you would then turn into plasma and then you would eject by magnetizing it as fast as possible out, so therefore, your sort of power…, y'know, input, or power that you can pull to your thrusters helps the amount you can thrust, and then also whatever you're storing as your raw matter that you ionize and eject.
Ah, so we're, we're sort of running on all that stuff, ah, so it'll be much, ah, I think… it will, it will, it will… hopefully have a lot of nuance, and a lot of trade-off and balance, ah, and, but of course, on the basic level, we'll want to make the simple ifcs handling within certain parameters easy for someone that's just getting in and playing the game, but if you're a, y'know, you're an expert, you're pushing it, you're learning how to fly, I think oyu'll be sort of fine tuning your uhm your power output and thrusters, and balancing them by running them as you go along, in a, uh, in a manner that could, y'know, potentially give you that little bit of an edge in a dogfight.
So, that's kind of, uh, that's what we're going for. Talked about a lot of this in the past, I sort of feel like the current system, aah, y'know, never really delivered that, because it sort of, uh, was trying to do too many things, and it was also very designer-driven in terms of, uh, y'know, the designer would, "Ok, I want it to go…roll or rotate or strage at this rate," and then the algorithm figured out "oh, well then you need this much thrust." And then you'd look at it, and you'd go, "there's no way that this ship should really exert this amount of thrust through one of these maneuvering thrusters, it, that's ridiculous, you couldn't do that on something this size." And so my big, uhhhh, sort of direction is being, look, we need to make sure that we're realistic on our masses, we're realistic on the amount of power or, or… thrust, impulses, we can deliver on our ship to move around, ah, y'know, within a balnace so it's not, like, fully like the expanse, cause that's, << unintelligble >> not be quite fun, but, but walking the line between kind of where it has been which I feel is too overpowered, and something that's more realistic, but underneath it's all underpinned fully by physics, and the physics system itself is going through a major refactor, uhm, which is still a few releases away, but, again we're refactoring a bunch of stuff under the hood on the physics, for better performance, better scalability on the server, and out on the client, aah, and uh, and uh, we're looking at a different rigid-body uh, simulation, uh, that's going to be more reliable, uh, than the, uh, the old one.
So, I think all these things added together, ultimately, will provide a, uh, a much better experience.
So there you are, tht's my one-word answer.
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