A new day, a new blog post. This time, it’s about more environmental vehicles! If you missed the last time we talked about these, please check out Environments Part 3. Among other things, it goes over Emmanuelle Le Nouaille’s contributions to the game, which we’ll be going over more of here.
In the linked post (as well as in the first demo if you played it) you may have noticed that the sky around Driftwood Island is populated by little hot air balloons and even a blimp. These are fairly self explanatory; they float around, look pretty, and generally stay out of your way. What you might not have noticed is that they actually have physics and can be destroyed! If you hit one too hard, they’ll explode somewhat unceremoniously. But if you gently nudge them, they’ll actually give way and move in the direction you push them. If you want to, I’m pretty sure it’s entirely possible to push the blimp all the way to the ground. I’m not sure why you’d want to do this, but maybe it’ll be pivotal to some obscure speedrun technique discovered 11 years from now.
Docked behind Kunimitsu Airport, you might have also noticed the yachts we showed off previously. Like the balloons, these also have physics! They bob with the water, but you can also push them around, to sometimes fairly silly results based on the antics we’ve already seen some people get into.
On the southernmost end of New Yoke Island you’ll find something special: a train! Yup, you read that right, we have a train roaming around the area, traveling between two points of interest we’ll talk about later.
The train and its various pieces were modeled by Emma, with @RailfanEthan providing a lot of helpful knowledge for the details of its design, as well as the layout of the railway itself.
As you would probably expect, the train travels along a preset path, carrying important cargo to wherever important cargo is needed, and it does not care if you’re in its way. You can ride it though, in-case you manage to get Chad stranded on the railway. Or, if you don’t care for the [redacted] economy (or for trainhopping Chads), you can use explosives or concussive force to derail the train and ruin fictional peoples’ days in your imagination.
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