This is not exactly true. Most fish are not in equilibrium density with their environment.
Swim bladders are not found in all fish. Many cartilaginous fish, such as sharks, can control their depth only by swimming; others store fats or oils for this purpose.
OK it is true that some fish such as sharks do not have bouancy control, I wouldn't go so far as to say
most fish are not in equilibrium with their environment. All open water species of boney fish and a large proportion of reef fish are able to control their bouyancy. Whether they use fats and oils or swim bladders or whatever, they still have methods to control their mean internal density such that they can control their bouyancy.
At present pond mode implies only the way in which light is distributed in the sim. What if I want to run a sim with a gradient for the vegs in a total vacuum? I'm certain I mentioned this when I split corpse mode and pond mode apart into their most core features. I removed the hooks to the other concepts (such as gravity) in order to allow the end user greater freedom in simulation parameters.
If you want to simulate a light gradient in a vacuum then you could just click the nice handy toggle that disables Bouyancy in 2.37.6. You know, the one that isn't there in 2.4X
You may well have mentioned it but if you did then I was probably too busy with something else to pay much attention. I definitely don't remember it.
Gravity doesn't cancel out. Having more gravity will increase the magnitude of the resulting force. Objects that float upwards at X meters per second on Earth will float X/6 meters per second on the moon.
Yes you are right that gravity would have an effect on the
magnitude[/b] of acceleration forces caused by bouyancy but for a robot that has neutral bouyancy w.r.t. its environment the net change in acceleration due to a change in gravity would be zero.
I meant in the DB universe there's nothing to construct to make you less dense. And while we're on the subject, swim bladders have a whole set of gotchas and consequences fish have to deal with. Among them they'd explode if they tried to rise too quickly.
In all 2.3 versions of DB there IS something to construct which can make a robot less dense. I put it there. It doesn't matter what it is. Maybe robots are more dense than the surroundings by default and ned to actively spend enrgy to become neutral. Doesn't matter what the mechanism is any more than it matters what mechanism is used to rotate or accelerate or fire shots. The mechanism is simpy there.
In 2.4 you just removed it.
If you want to simulate exploding because of rapid rising through the medium then fine. Do that. That wouldn't bother me. I don't really see the point but it wouldn't bother me. Just arbitrarily removing a whole chunk of pond mode is another matter though.
Override the physics system or override the physics constants? Those are two very different things.
Yes they are though from my point of view it doesn't make a bit of difference so long as the sim does what I want it to do. I need my robots to be able to control their bouyancy. That's all. they have a sysvar to set it and another to read it. in 2.4x they simply don't work. What more do I need to say?
I'm sorry you feel like this, but most everyone else I've heard comment on them feels they are a step in the right direction.
It isn't a case of not being a step in the right direction. I can see that a lot of the underlying physics are becoming more accurate. It is just that so much of the system is just "missing". I know you kind of left 2.4 as a half unfinished project and that (most of) the stuff that you actually did made those finished bits better, but the missing stuff just makes it unusable to me.
The older physics was so absolutely unrealistic you could never really compare it with real life so its flaws were a little better masked.
Yes this is true.
Possibly the entire allure of DB (at least to me) has always been its differentness to reality. If we go 100% realistic, then how do we reconcile the way they move, turn, shoot to feed, fire ties, read each other's minds.
There really isn't much about DB that is technically realistic when it comes right down to it.
Why should the physics have to be a mock up of the reality that we know?