When optimizing, are you aiming for specific number of assets/triangles on screen at any given time? With backers keen in getting into some big space battles how do you determine what is possible and what ship count to set? Given that it is possible for citizens to pack a bunch of ships into a small area close to each other causing a huge amount of detail to be visible at close range, how do you manage this?asked by Daz

It's kind of large question. There's a lot of variables that come into it but really ... really every ship is a bit different. Every ship is its own puzzle you need to solve. And your general goal is to get them down to roughly the same level. So what I mean by that is at least just in terms of level of detail, when the model slowly disappears we'll focus on that. That's really important. That saves a lot of performance.When you are up close to someone, you see the ship: it has all of its internal stuff, all of its external stuff. All that full detail stuff, right? But when you are far away, you may not realise by you are not rendering all that stuff. Like things get culled: the interior might disappear, the model might degrade in quality a bit. Not noticeable. That's where it comes down to. Things like that are where we come in and we look at the statistics and we say "How is this performing? How many ships can we have in an area? How much detail can we get at various ranges?" And then we just optimise from there.I mean for a specific number? Really there's not specific number of assets or ... it's just like, you know, whatever people's computers can really handle based on what we use to work with.

Yeah. I mean the beauty of having this game run on a PC is that the more power you have, the more of the beautiful visuals you can have rendering at the same time.

Yes.

So part of it is hardware related, but obviously we're trying to optimise as much as possible to make the game run as smooth as possible for as many people as possible.

Yes. Exactly.