WaterRace Physic Engine
The physic engine in WaterRace is very detailed and realistic for an arcade game: each ship has over 50 unique physic parameters (mass, rotational inertia tensor, Cx, engine power, turbo power...) and the physic engine takes into account many physic forces... It even considers bearing pressure forces while the ship is in the air so that it can fly correctly.
Such a wide range of parameters allowed us to create ships with totally different behaviors: offshore racing ships, indoor Formula ships but also HooverCraft ships and more. We also designed ships that do not exist in reality and we were able to emulate in a realistic manner their behavior as if they existed, like the Drag Boat for example.
Here's an example of how precise the physic engine is: while we were tuning the ship physic parameters, we discovered that one of the ships was almost impossible to slow down in a short distance even when setting the motor to full reverse power, while it was OK with the other ships.
We first thought it was a problem in the physic engine or corrupted data, but we eventually discovered that it was simply due to the shape of the ship: it was a very long and thin ship, and such a shape has very low frontal friction forces, which is the most important factor in slowing down the ship.
For the people of the team who worked on the game's ships, it was really like building a real ship and trying to adjust its shape, size, mass to get the best performances and driving.
It's important to notice that although it is doing lots of computation, the physic engine is optimized for performances e.g. it is able to drive 8 different ships at the same time without any noticable performance hit.
The WaterRace physic engine brings a new dimension to racing games.
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