How do you build a ship in this game? I am curious with all this detail are the ships a one shot thing on the production end or when talking this level of professional work are they built in parts and stuck together and then its the CryEngine that turns them into a singular mesh?asked by Filan Fyretracker

So, that's obviously a very complicated question, but we can give a very simple explanation I think of how we do it. We use a 3D program and the first thing we do is we block it out, we get it over to Design, they approve it (obviously this is after it's been concepted) and then we block it out further and make sure that everything's functional and everything's working and it's still meeting all of the design specifications that have been made by our Designers, by Ben, by Chris Roberts, and then we continue the process, get it flyable, get some thrusters on it, make sure that it actually flies okay, and then we, and this is just the blocked body of the ship, and we have the interior and all that stuff, so then we get to the more fine detail, and at that point you export out your ship as a whole, but it doesn't include the weapons and the components, those get dynamically spawned in the engine. So while somebody's building the ship, somebody else 's building components, somebody else's building the weapons, and then through XML and scripts it calls the correct weapon and the correct thing at the right time, then we have this entire back end database that knows what the ship is, what needs to go on it, so it knows how to call the script, and then it knows obviously the users and what the users own and what they have, and that stuff gets dynamically, i'ts like magic. Actually, I don't know how it works. I have no idea how it works.

Lot of time. Lot of time. Space magic.

It's space magic, yeah.

And then from a design perspective, I mean, it's really really hard because each ship is based upon a concept. Sometimes it's just the hull of a ship that gets approved, so you have to figure out all of the spacial volumes inside, and not all of it always works all the time, what areas of the ship are modular, like, where can we re-use assets in ships, but have it true to form.

And that's something we've really been concentrating on, making sure we have our manufacturers and we're kind of starting to do a great job of getting styles for manufacturers, and then reusing stuff. If you have a weapon rack that's made by Aegis for example, why can't it be reused in this Aegis ship and this Aegis ship, so the idea is we're really starting to nail down the direction of the art, and really starting to get this modular system rolling, so obviously ships take a long time the first time you do it, the second time you do it they get faster, and faster, and faster, and the more kits we make out of these ships, and the more pieces we can piece together, and the more modular framework that we already have built allows us to build these ships much faster and speed up development time, which obviously is always a great thing for us and for you guys.

Cause these ships, they really are a remarkable undertaking. If you even knew how long they actually take from the beginning to the end, because we focus on every minute bit, and also every animation with every button you touch, getting into the ship, how the ship flies, the HUD, we have designers who design everything. Zane upstairs is doing just what you see when you're flying it, to the point of everything else , there's so much that goes into it, and how long the concept, getting the concept approved by everybody, being like this is what we want, moving that forward, to this areaFS: I don't know how we ever get a ship done. We've got like, 21 of them.

And some are being redone. Which is a good thing. Because the ships we built early on, as we've grown we've been like, oh wait here's a better way to do this. So when we realize that we can give a better product, that's when we go back, revisitFS: A better product, and we want to make sure everything's compatible. So while we were working hard at first, eventually you have to start working smart, and that's when we started figuring out that there is a lot more modular ways to do it. And also we figured out how to utilize the engine better so we can optimize the ships better, so when a ship loads up it doesn't take six seconds, it takes a couple milliseconds, so we want to make sure that every ship that's going into the game has the same level of efficiency, and the same level of quality. So I think there's a couple ships, the Gladius, the Retaliator, the Merlin, they've hit those bars now, and that is our bar, and the techniques and the ways that we're doing it, so now we're going back and trying to make sure all the other ships are up to par with those. And that way, if we do have things modular, we can be swapping everything out, right?

Totally.

Cause we really want this flexible universe.

I like what you said, work smarter, not harder.

But some people know what it's like to build a ship. For those that remember the next great starship, we had tons of teams build ships for us, and when I talked to them when they came and were on the show, they were like, it 'aint easy. No, no it's not.

And then they come and build a ship here, and it's still equally as difficult, even with the support of a team.