Plan for James "Defiant" Lupiani

Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing.

Or you can just reprogram the simulation. It worked well for Kirk, didn't it?

I finally took the plunge last weekend and completely redid the flying vehicle physics under a new SpaceVehicle class. Right now it's very simple, but it feels much nicer to fly. It seems realistic enough to not seem absurd, yet just about responsive enough to do some real dogfighting with. Along the way I found some weird things with the way the input system was handling Move updates. I think I'm just going to scrap the maxSteeringAngle stuff and make everything assume a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. It's much easier to handle forces acting on an object when you can just use it as a percentage.

So what I've done so far is separate control forces into five groups: lateral (strafing), linear (forward/reverse), pitch, roll, and yaw. Each of these forces has a corresponding drag value that controls how well it dampens itself out. Gravity's completely ignored for the time being, which makes some very weird stunts possible (flying up to another person inverted and waving).
Collisions don't seem to be putting up much of a fight right now. The only irksome part is when it gets stuck to the ground. I would like it to eventually be at rest with the landing skids on the ground, so before long I'll have to find the reason for this one. Still pending is a decision of whether or not to scrap the current CPU-intensive collision meshes and switch to a box model.