Are damage shaders something that can be implemented for larger ships like Idrises? Is it the same process? Do they scale?
TL;DRDamage shaders can scale to capital ships, with the same mesh-dissolve approach but far deeper underlying detail and lighting, driven mostly by shaders and lighting, which Nathan Dearsley calls challenging because players can stop and EVA.
It's really a case of, when you go up in scale, the construction techniques slightly change for everything. Even the base, without even talking about shaders, the base modeling and everything has to be different because you have to render it all in memory, right? But when it comes to shaders, it's really a case of authoring these shaders and being clever with things like detail maps. We have the facility to bake info into a second UV channel, so we can use that as a mask to bleed through. So every ship, when you hit it at the moment, you get all this beautiful, we call it gubbins. This beautiful mechanical detail starts coming through. With the capital ships, it's very much that, but like times 10 because it's the scale, right? So you will still dissolve meshes away, which we're doing at the moment, but what's underneath that with the capital ship is just generally far deeper. It's got far more lighting information in it. And again, you can look at so many successful IPs that have done this stuff in cinema. The Star Destroyer has got what we call the sandwich design approach, of a cavity down the side. And for me, if you took that top skin off, you took that bottom skin off, it's going to be all that. It's like R2-D2, C-3PO, he's got all that stuff exposed. So it's like that, but on a magnitude of scale, and you need to think about that. Not for the flying of the ships, that's easy to do, because you're flying past things relatively fast, but what if someone gets out? And that's the really difficult thing about this project: at any time anyone can stop their ship, EVA out and study. So that's challenging. That's a word for it. But it's more shader-based. It's more shader-driven. And lighting and effects are key. It can't be understated, the importance of lighting and creating a system. You can take the most beautiful asset in the world and put it in a bad lighting rig and it'll look bad. You can take the most subpar asset in the world, put it on a beautiful lighting rig and it'll look okay. It's like people can make hairdryers look decent in catalogs. I want to buy one, right? And when you get it, it's like, oh, it doesn't quite look like the pictures did. It's that kind of approach. Light is everything.