More physics and math today!
Now much less sketchy internally and suitable for integration into the game. No more twiddling with frictionAir -- just some honest-to-goodness geometric series math to predict drift angles and a state machine that works the way I want it to.
I think I am arriving at a locomotion system that all the moving entities in the game can share with different parameters -- including maybe the orca? -- which would be really nice and simple from and implementation perspective but also give the game a consistent "feel". Maybe too ambitious?
The current knobs are:
rotationSpeed -- how fast to rotate (torque units)forwardSpeed -- how fast to move forward (force units)rotationWindow -- the delta angle to target under which we reduce torque (radians)accelerationWindow -- the delta angle under which we apply forward speed (radians)correctiveStop -- when coming to a stop how much of the corrective force to apply (0..1)bump -- multiplier for rotationSpeed to keep units reasonableAdded a few buttons with packaged values to capture a few different kinds of motion. Mix and match and see if you can make some interesting movement patterns!
Full thing here. Click around to make the capsule go!