The developers discuss the Hornet's roughly 100 damage states and 10 shootable parts, with the engine housing as the critical hit point. They cover damage persistence, dogfighting spectating, bounty and ship ownership, the Idris class, animation speed, ship AI voices, investigation missions, time in the verse, and the economy designer's background.
Yes, I did. We wanted a lot of fidelity, a lot of movie-like breakup for these ships, lots of little pieces. Initially, when you shoot at the ship, you're going to have a lot of pieces flying around.
TL;DRThe Hornet currently has ten damage parts that can be shot off, with the engine housing as the critical spot, and Dogfight is planned to award points for crippling parts before the kill.
Right now there's currently 10 different parts, so we have the cockpit, we have the two intakes left and right, the two main wings left and right, and then the rear wings as well, as well as the tail, the engine housing, and then the main body. So with that, the engine housing is where your main reactor is going to be along with your main thruster. So that's going to be the critical location. If you want to just outright destroy that ship, aim for the engines. That'll do a big, massive, catastrophic explosion, failure for the body structure, and then this whole thing will just break apart into its own pieces and then you'll see the cockpit drifting away and then the wings drifting away as well. And if you're careful with that, the wings on the extremity, you might be able to actually salvage those individual items that haven't been actually hit by any damage or any explosion yet. So you might be able to go in and recover that stuff within the Persistent Universe.
So inside of the engine here, inside of Sandbox, I'm going to jump in. We set up a level here right now with the Hornet just in its destruction states. So we can actually just demo off how we're actually going to be shooting this thing and blowing off all these different pieces. So with just the weapon mount that we have currently set up, I've got this level where we can actually just rotate the Hornet to shoot it wherever we want and actually see all the different particle effects that are actually coming off of this thing, both on the tail and on all the individual wings here. So with that we can actually see all these individual destruction pieces going from the 25% damage states to 50% to 75% from here.
And how this is all actually glued together was all of Chris Smith's pieces that he actually modeled out within Max, and we had all of them separated out into their own sub parts. I can actually show you here with this quick damage parts below. With each one of these we had a setup where we had the cockpit be its own piece, the left and right intake being their own pieces, left and right wings, the rear wings and also the tail as well as the main body. So the actual main body is the one that's actually causing ship death. And from there, that actually constitutes an actual ship destruction. But each one of these parts is actually going to house all of your different items. So we can actually start damaging off all the different intakes. So we can actually blow off any of your hydrogen scoops that you're actually going to be having or your in-atmosphere setups. Same thing with your wings. You have the destruction on your wings. You can see there on the left wing that I just blew off. You just lost your left gun, which is no longer functional and that's all damaged and gone away. You could even lose, you can see here underneath the actual wings, I have my landing gear. If I actually lose those wings, I might have to go in for a crash landing now in order to survive the actual landing, since my left wing with my landing gear is all gone. So I can actually get to the point where all of these parts are completely destroyed but my ship is still intact. So we've actually gone way beyond a lot of other games in terms of their destruction fidelity of how many different states this thing is actually going to be broken up into. And then when we actually destroy the main body here, you can actually see Casey's volumetric explosion that he's actually shown you guys already. So from there, that just shows off how your Hornet is totally going to be blown up and able to be completely destroyed inside of the game, and we want to take that same fidelity to the rest of the ships throughout the game.
But for now, what we're doing with the point stuff for Dogfight, we're actually setting up some of the game modes so that when you're damaging the ship, you're actually getting point values for that, blowing up different parts of the ship before you're actually destroying the ship itself. So then that way it's an incentive to actually see and cripple the ship before you actually kill the pilot, right? So then that'll be an additional point value on top of that.
So you mean I get points for making them bleed?
Yes, exactly. Slow death. So you cut them up first, right?
That's kind of a two-part question. Because in Dogfighting V1, it's not going to. You're in a simulator. Your ship will be fine. We're not going to damage your ships in the making of this dogfighting. But then in the Persistent Universe, it will eventually. Your damage will stay. And over time, it will get dirtier and more damaged, until you fix it.
Yeah, Forrest showed some of the PBR, how it's going to rust or go through over time. And as you said, it's a simulator. It's a dogfighting module. Don't forget, you guys are helping us test this thing so that we can find out and balance and tune this thing as we go. So it wouldn't do us any good if everybody's ship was blowing up left and right. We weren't able to get any data out of that.
At some point in the future is a good answer to that. We've definitely talked about that being an essential thing as far as people being able to watch other people play. I think that's crucial. But not in V1. The one thing we will have in V1 is when you eject from your ship, you'll be able to hang out in space and watch the battle around you for a while.
Let's think about real life for a moment, because we're all about realism. So if you're a bounty hunter and you drag somebody in, you don't get to keep their car. So in this case, no, you don't get to keep their ship. It's still an act of piracy to steal someone's ship. So if you want to be a pirate and a bounty hunter, great. Kill them and take their ship.
Technically, it is maybe a little bit large compared to the small ships to be a Corvette, but it's still a Corvette. Basically, just the relative scales of the larger ships have just increased to go with them. It all works out perfectly in the scale chart.
Yeah, and it's looking sweet. At some point, we'll be able to show you guys how it's looking, and man, I think you're going to like it.
I think I'm going to go take care of that fire. Maybe tomorrow. So yeah, the animations are going to be undergoing constant tweaking. So don't expect that everything in there is going to stay the way it is right now. We're not sure if we're going to do separate contextual faster animations for shift and dash out of the seat sort of thing. But they'll be tweaked to be faster in some cases, I'm sure.
That's a lot of recorded voice there, wouldn't it? You'd have customized voices.
Kind of like thinking of the GPS system or something.
Exactly. And you can pick from a handful on the GPS systems. And we'll probably do the same thing. We'll have more than one eventually. But right now, Bitching Betty is just going to be a single voice. That's the military term.
Oh, for the part, like, if somebody's on your six. You're taking damage.
I'm not sure that the ship would tell you that particularly.
So initially, for the Persistent Universe, we planned at least to do some form of investigation to find people that you're hunting down for bounties. The more advanced content like that, it's on our roadmap for the long term, but probably won't have that level of mission detail at launch.
TL;DRPlanets will have day and night cycles and time compression is likely but its rate is undecided pending playtesting, while a standard clock is kept alongside each system's local time.
So time, that's a whole can of worms because there's a lot of different pieces to this. Now, from a standpoint of time passing on planets, yes, there are going to be night and day cycles on them. From the point of view of time compression, we're not sure exactly what that number is yet. I think that's going to take a lot of playing around to see what feels comfortable. We're pretty certain there will be compressed time in the game, but we're not sure exactly where that's going to sit.
That's one of those things that the people out there that are playing the game, the citizens, are going to help us with. They'll be able to give us feedback as to how long it takes to get from one system to the other. We'll be adjusting as we go.
The other piece of that one then is the standard Earth time, which is something we do in our fiction. Dave Haddock has, we've talked about time a lot, and we do keep a standardized clock so that if you're setting something up on your calendar, it will be at the same time, no matter where you start it. But each system also has its own local time as well.
They're averaging about 50 pages now. We hit a high-water mark this last issue with the Idris. We had 80-some-odd pages. But we're not going to do that every time. I can't handle 80 pages.
I have been involved in game design. I was working with Steve Jackson Games and some others, but primarily with Steve Jackson Games on the GURPS role-playing system. And so I was involved in developing that. Steve was the one who designed that. I'm not trying to say I designed that thing at all. And similarly, Car Wars. Steve designed Car Wars, but for a while I was what they call system guru and responsible for making sure the systems worked.
Now, you're helping us with the economy, which is a really, really big part of our game. And your background, you're a mathematician.
Sure, yes. I've got a degree in mathematics. And I can't say I know analysis real well, but in terms of what we need to do in the game, I can handle that.