How hard is it to implement the new damage tech into old ships like the Hornet/Super Hornet?asked by Superflytwo

This is a question I added for you. The new damage tech. This is obviously a big item because it was.. Much like the ship's evolution damage has evolved as well right? Our expectations for it, our ability to do it, our tech behind it has all evolved.

Yeah and I think we can take a step back and that is why upgrade the damage tech right? Again it's a balance of time, functionality and quality. Your basic project management steps that actually define that triangle. So one thing that we found very early with the damage stuff it was very labour intensive and the results were very expensive in game.So that was a big challenge and we have amazing graphics programmers like Allie and Oaken and other people that just can create tech that is more shader driven, that limits the amount of manual labour that Artists need to do. So they can concentrate on making them look good while the system drives them and we have consistent frame rates because it is so code driven by the people that are controlling the frame rates and that are requesting what the frame rates are for us to deliver quality wise.So the damage tech required us to: write a new shader that allowed you to, as we've probably all seen, penetrate the ship so you kind of exposing the inside which I've learned are called: gubbins.

Gubbins. The gubbins.

The gubbins is exposing the inside. Instead of building a ridiculous amount of debris pieces that come off we worked concept right on working an inner frame rate. Framework of the ship so when it exposes it, you can see what the inside of the ship looks like before it penetrates all the way through into the actual interior.Which is kind of neat and it allows us to build kits that are these frames. So as we build new ships and we put this gubbins inside the other ships, we have a gubbins library that we can pull from. So we don't build a custom frame for every ship, we build these pieces and then we re-use them constantly. So the previous system required every aspect of the ship to be custom damage modelled. Now it's shader driven so it renders through the mesh and then we have geo inside of it that's reusable constantly. That's fantastic.

It's great. So it's incredible hard! No I mean it's hard to implement it but it's so very technical. You've got some very talented people you're working with.

Then we have new effects and everything else!