Has there been a particular time when you have had to make a decision to not implement the most 'realistic' version of a part due to technical/design limitations and if yes, why?asked by Farasalt
TL;DRElwin describes how the Merlin's openable compartments were removed at the last minute because they caused too many draw calls, with a maybe-someday hope of bringing them back.
Interesting, so I spent a lot of time working on the Merlin and I made that thing so that you'd be able to open up every single compartment to access, every single component, but for technical reasons I had to rip all that stuff out at the last minute and cap the holes to get the ship to run because it was pulling way too many draw calls.So that's one example of many that we've had in the game, but the process of developing a game often tends to be trying to go as far as you can with a specific type of idea and developing it as far as you can and realizing, "Oh man, this isn't going to work, so how do we solve this problem with less resources?". So that's just kind of a theme for game development in general and that's what happened with the Merlin. It made me sad because it looked really awesome when you pushed the play button and everything popped open.
I saw it, it was so cool.
Yeah it was very cool. Maybe we can get that back into the game at some point in the future, but at the moment that was one example of what we had to tear out.