Where is physicalised damage?

It's being worked on by the physics team at the moment. I saw a cool little video the last few weeks. So they are prototyping all the different aspects of it. So they've got little soft body deformation tests on vehicles, which is equal parts looking really cool and terrifying to me from the content side. And this week, in fact, we were looking at replacing the hit point-based part detachments with material-based and tensile strength detachments. So rather than you just depleting the parts of the wing down to zero health and they fall off, you hitting it and the tensile strength of the joint is reduced to the point that it would break off naturally. So it's being worked on. There's a lot of things there, and we're at the point where we've got all these prototypes, it's merging them together, and then looking at that versus our current pipeline and going, right, what's the best way to merge these two things together? Because obviously we build ships in a certain way at the moment, and not all of that is going to be 100% usable out of the box with physical damage.

It's a big change, but it's absolutely central to so much of what Star Citizen wants to be. So it'll happen.

There's some of it actually in the engine already, but just disabled. So there's a CVar that we can flip that correctly generates the mass based off the material applied to the ship. A lot of physical-based damage is going to be based off the material types and surface types attached to the ships. So at the moment, design just goes, this ship weighs 87 tons. And the physics engine goes, I'm going to work out the volume of each part. Here's the overall volume. This overall volume weighs 87 tons. I'm going to split it equally between it. But it has no knowledge of what the part is. If you have a ship with what looks like a carbon fiber wing versus a solid iron wing, the engine at the moment goes, they weigh the same. Unless a designer goes in and specifically says, this one only weighs 100 kilograms, this one weighs a tonne, which obviously we don't want to do per part on every single ship in the game. That's not fun for a designer. So the new system looks at the material type. So when Art are making the ship, they go, this wing is made of metal. But yeah, there is a CVar in the game that we can flip, and then the ships look at the volume of the parts, the material type, and then work out the correct mass. I will actually say that the two ships we tried it on, there was actually very little change in the mass because they were correctly set up.