To help keep my brain from turning to mush I decided to take a break from building the Bridge geometry to work on the Helm systems a bit more. Something I really wanted to do was have the galaxy be completely physicalised, which means having the ability to warp the ship at any speed, in any direction, so that you can literally travel between entire star systems at sub-light speeds if you were that insane.
Or to use a better example, have the ability to warp at relatively slow speeds around a planet to simply get to another point in orbit, but then change your mind and crank the throttle up to leave orbit and head over to the next planet. Only you’ve changed your mind again, so now you crank the throttle up all the way and you’re heading out of the system towards the next star. All without needing to drop out of warp or switch modes or anything.
And that’s exactly what you can now do! The galaxy has always existed as a grid of 10m km cubes, but now the ship is able to physically move between them in real-time. Here’s an example of what that looks like behind the scenes, with each grid cube representing 10m km;
If you take the cubes away a planetary approach looks like this, and the astute among you will notice the warp FX has been updated as well so that it responds dynamically to the ship’s speed;
You can see the dynamic FX at play here, so as the speed controls are adjusted the FX updates in response. I also added a little easter egg to test the ability to add and remove FX layers the faster you go. 