The first iteration of “flying” was just moving the position of the spaceship, which really didn’t feel like flying. As a next step I introduced a force based approach, thinking that would be a significant improvement. With this approach forces are applied to the spaceship’s rigid body to accelerate and rotate it. There is very little damping or friction, and I chose not to enable gravity for the spaceship. The resulting control system is really unwieldy, but I learned quite a bit from this experiment. I added some placeholder jet bursts at different locations on the spaceship to show where the force is being applied (roughly). I added some placeholder sound effects for kicks.

Also in this video are some animated windmills and a landing pad that I added recently for a bit of terrain variation.

The next steps after this are to come up with a better control system that is more than just moving the ship’s position around, but also allows for more control rather than just applying forces. Additionally, the static camera is quite jarring, and I’m going to explore some options to make this more fluid.