Developers cover progress on Constellation/Merlin hard docking and general ship-to-ship docking, plus work on physicalised armour, armour penetration and SDF shields. They also discuss manufacturer-styled HUDs and MFDs, vehicle-in-ship spawning, the Hull-C's remaining dependencies, and the Redeemer's gunship rework.
TL;DRConstellation–Merlin hard docking is well underway, ship-to-station docking has a functional prototype before full production, and general ship-to-ship docking comes after as a less urgent nice-to-have.
Yep, I sure can. We sort of think of them in three different ways, although the two are sort of under the same umbrella of ship-to-ship docking. So with ship-to-ship docking, there's two aspects we're looking at. So there's the direct hard attachment, which the prime example is the Constellation and Merlin. And then there's ship-to-ship docking as a general, which is just any ship with a docking port connecting to another one. So first up we're doing the Connie and Merlin hard docking. That is well underway. We've got to the point where the vehicles are attached to each other and you can get in and out. And we're now at the point of just sort of dealing with all the quirks of having two vehicles physically joined together intentionally, which has thrown up some weird physics problems that we're just working through.
I'll come back to the bit of ship-to-ship docking. Ship-to-station docking is also well underway. We've got a fairly functional prototype at this point. We're just working out some of the last technical hurdles for that before we enter full production on that. So that's you taking your large ships and docking at any of the orbital stations or other places that have these large extended docking tubes that I think you saw on ISC. So that's the order of battle there, really. We're doing the Constellation Merlin docking first, then we're doing ship-to-station docking, and then at some point after that, we'll do the ship-to-ship, purely because there's less of a need for that right now. The Constellation Merlin thing solves some tech problems for ship-to-station docking. Ship-to-station docking is needed for ships that are coming. Ship-to-ship is a sort of nice-to-have that we will do, but it's not as important as those other two.
TL;DRDocking is not fully automatic: the pilot requests permission, flies about 99% of the approach using a docking UI to line up, and only the last few meters are automated to ensure exact orientation.
It's not completely automatic. So you communicate to the target ship and they accept your request to dock, because if there was no sort of permission system, you could have anybody just randomly trying to [dock]. But once that's all sorted out, you get a docking UI, which gives you an idea of how far off on each axis and roll you are. You line up all the symbols, you're in the right place, and then the very last few meters, it takes over and automatically guides you in. So you have to do sort of 99% of the flying into it, and it's the very last bit where we have to ensure that you are orientated a very specific way. Think about the Merlin: there is a baked animation sequence to get out of the ship. So if you are five centimeters off to the left, you could end up getting out through the Constellation out the other side. So we have to ensure you're in a very specific position. So that's why there's automatic there.
TL;DRPhysicalised armour, armour penetration and SDF shields are all in active production, with SDF core tech largely there and the remaining work on making shield visuals look good and perform at scale; progress is hard to gauge.
Yep, all those three things are in active production at the moment. They're not just for vehicles; especially the physicalised armour and penetration, that's also going to be applicable to actors and the FPS game. So again, we've got to a point where we're working on the initial parameters and tuning them in, making sure they're working as we expect before we start really putting all hands on it. Chris has been involved in it. A lot of the physics guys are doing the groundwork. The vehicle and the actor teams are working together to go, "Right, we need all these parameters, please make them," [and] the physics guys give us a build back and [we] go, "Sure, that sort of works. This bit doesn't work. We need some more tuning here." So we're definitely working on it right now. How far through that process we are, it's hard to say until we get something that works across the system.
SDF shields was the last thing there, I think. So in recent builds, all ships have SDFs generated for what will be their shield bubbles. The build process is now spitting them out for us. You will have seen the atmospheric re-entry effect in 3.10 uses that as the basis. So 3.10 was a sort of precursor for rolling it out on a slightly simpler problem to solve, which is atmospheric entry effects sort of reacting to whatever angle your ship is. Shields takes that to the next level. So core tech-wise, it's pretty much there. And it's really now working with the VFX team and the VFX engineering team to make the shields look good, because we can't use any of the existing shield effects work. We have to recreate that from scratch. And that brings up a lot of, not tech, but sort of visual gameplay [questions]: how do we make it look good at short range and far range without blinding players?
And then, of course, after you make it look good, then making it performative. Finding that balance between, you can make it look amazing if you only had one ship to blow up, but when it comes to giant melees of multiple ships, you need something that can scale and be performative.
Yeah, certainly the initial stuff we've seen of the SDF shields internally looks very promising in terms of just how it looks and how it behaves. Because one of the big things is when you lose a wing, the SDF adapts to losing that. You don't have this weird bubble floating out. So it's going to be a really nice change.
We have our internal milestones for this, so it would be foolish to work on the tech alongside converting all the ships to it, because there's just so many ships. So we want to get a very small set of ships working first with it all, get them all playing nicely against each other, understand the tools we have to balance this now, because it moves away completely from "weapon does 100 damage, ship has 1,000 health, 10 shots equals death." Whilst we have a lot of that all on paper, paper doesn't necessarily translate to fun gameplay once it's all implemented, so all the teams are working on the physicalised armour and the armour penetration. So penetration will be a thing, overpenetration will be a thing.
Yep, that's coming back. In fact, we're actively working [on it]. I keep saying actively working, but it's true. The Aegis ships, or specifically the Gladius for Squadron reasons, is going to be getting a completely fresh HUD overall. And then I think we've also worked on an RSI styling. So all the manufacturers will be getting thematically themed HUDs for their ships rather than it just being the same HUD. And that will apply to the MFDs as well. So the core functionality of the MFDs when they're reworked will be the same, but they'll just have a visual styling to make it feel like this is a Drake MFD versus an Aegis MFD.
Yeah, pretty much it. It looks exactly the same as it did, but it is, in fact, all new. And now we have the ability to, say, style it by just applying one style sheet, much like web CSS. You can change the theme with a very simple change, which you can't do with Flash. You just have to remake the entire asset. And then you've got two things to update every time you want to add or change something.
TL;DRVehicle-in-ship spawning is only semi-active and not in active development, since it is waiting on other dependencies (iCache) to be more complete before it is picked up.
It's sort of semi-active. We did some internal tests. We got it working. It's important to differentiate some of those things from Connie and Merlin docking. That's almost like an entirely different thing. Anything that is always going to be in a repeatable position every time you spawn the ship or customize the ship, like the Merlin and the Connie, will work. Things where you can change it out between multiple ships, we're looking at this. Ultimately, it still creates item ports that ships are attached to, but it does them dynamically. And for various technical reasons, we're waiting for iCache to be more complete on certain other areas, and then we'll pick that up. Because if we try and shoehorn it in now, it'll just be throwaway code that iCache does out of the box for it.
TL;DRThe Hull-C is closer because the needed multiple physics grids now exist, but several dependencies remain, including scalable rooms, separate state-machine triggers and a cargo system that doesn't rely on 1 SCU boxes.
We are. Like you say, the ship-to-station docking required animatable and multiple physics grids, which is what the Hull-C requires. So we now have those. So that's one thing ticked off the list of Hull-C dependencies. We still have a few more that we need to solve before we can release the ship, but we are able to actually progress internally now a bit more with it. So we need the ability for rooms to scale, like physics areas, because now you can have gravity in that central spine, but there'll be no air. So it's sort of equally as problematic for release. And that will also help all the level designers and the vehicle designers, because we want to unify the way all the rooms and shapes are made in the engine. At the moment, they're all sort of individual shapes. So a designer has to go in and mark up a room for the air. An audio designer has to go in and mark up a room for the audio volume. Art have to go in and mark up a room for VisAreas and portals to stop light coming in. So we want to put them all into one single feature that can support scaling. And then bam, that's the Hull-C part solved. The two other bits needed are a way to nicely trigger state machines on vehicles. So we sort of fudge it together at the moment by tying state changes into the landing gear deployments. We need to split that out. That's scheduled for one of the vehicle teams. And then the last one is really the cargo system. It obviously carries thousands of units of cargo, and we only supply cargo in 1 SCU boxes at the moment, and that system needs to support not doing that. It needs to go, "Right, you've bought 4,000 units of Laranite and here's 100 big boxes of it," because [otherwise] it will just cripple server performance. We've seen what happens when people go wild with Picos. This would be a whole lot worse than that.
And it's one of those things where the upcoming cargo decks in 3.11 (well, not the functionality that's in 3.11, but the cargo decks themselves) are a platform for additional features, and those will tie into being able to offload things like the Hull-C and maybe even load them up to begin with.
Yeah, they're the perfectly designed places for that, because you don't want to take your Hull-C... well, you can't land with the cargo out, so there's very little point taking it down to the surface to land, but you will need to drop these off at orbital stations.
TL;DRThe Redeemer has been moved into a full gunship role with a largely reworked exterior in Aegis style, accessible manned turrets, a roomier interior and rotating wings for VTOL, while staying recognisably the Redeemer.
Yeah, so we talked about this a while back, about moving it into sort of a full gunship role, and that has happened. We had a little holo viewer of it at the Fleet Week, Invictus Launch Week event. So if you were eagle-eyed, you will have spotted the Redeemer was there in the holo viewer, and it wasn't quite looking the same as it does in the hangars, or as it does in the original concept. So we have done some work on it, and I can maybe share a few pictures of it before this gets redacted. So yeah, a gunship needs lots of guns. I can't quite remember off the top of my head the sizings of these, but the exterior of the Redeemer has pretty much been entirely reworked, but keeping it in the same style as it was. We were on the fence about, do we just move it to a different manufacturer? Because it looks so different to Aegis. But in the end, we decided to keep it Aegis. We'll keep the nutcracker wings, but we'll just do a little massaging of all the shapes here to bring it more into the Aegis style. So the nose has changed, the turret design has changed, the tail has changed. It's not quite as rounded as it was. There's some harsher Aegis lines in there. Still got the wheels on the bottom. We toyed around with skids, but we'll keep it to the original concept. You can see here there's a lot more Aegis. Trying to do my best Paul Jones impersonation. I think the tail slightly changed as well. So it has a manned turret on the top, manned turret on the bottom that are entirely accessible from within the ship. You don't need to go on a little ghost train ride out into outer space to get to the turrets anymore. Still has the ramp on the back.
No, no, it's still the Redeemer that people... you would still look at this and go, "This is the Redeemer." It's not a complete re-imagining of it. We tried to keep it faithful to the original concept, but just bring it up to modern standards. I don't have any of the interiors here to show, but that's had much more of an upgrade from what was there. The drop seats are gone. They've been replaced with space to sort of walk around the ship. If people have got into the one in the hangar still, they'll know it's quite compact to move around in there. So we've enlarged it, got access to components, got access to all the turrets. You can freely move around without it being cavernous. But yeah, you can see there's a lot of turrets. There's two at the front. One of those is pilot controlled. There's the manned one behind it. There's a manned one on top. There's the one on the tail as well. So yeah, this is really designed for hovering around. These nutcrackers will rotate for VTOL, so you can really go full AC-130 style and engage in ground combat.
This isn't being actively worked on by the vehicle team right now. This is the pre-production concept for us. Just like any other ship, for ones that have been previously available and are going to go back into production, we treat them as a new ship. We take them through the entire concept pipeline to just vet that everything is there that needs to be there before artists put pen to paper. Okay, that's enough of your surprise treats.