What updates can you give us on physicalized damage, physicalized components, or any other interior sources of damage?

It's tough to give hard updates. I can tell you where it's at, because physical damage is a big undertaking. It's not just about ships. This is about everything in the game. And generally, the top-level intent that Chris has had for this system is broad. And the reason I say that is every material in the game should be a real material, has tensile strength and all the things you would expect of a real material. So it's not a very gamified implementation where there's just some penetration value or whatnot. He wants to go through and have every one of those materials, whether it's a box, whether it's a character, whether it's a ship, whether it's a space station, all be respected. That's mass, everything that comes with it. You can imagine how many teams that affects. And then on top of that, because the way our surface types work with physics and where they're actually stored is very art-centric. So our physics type and what the impact of that given surface will do is defined actually by an artist when they do the physical proxy. So it's also stored in the material. So anything that we do within here is not only going to affect all the gameplay balance of the ships. Again, it's not just health anymore or not just parts, but it's actual density and thickness and those kind of things that will affect. But it's also going to affect the art setup itself, because all of that stuff comes into play, because obviously we don't want to have, well, maybe that's a bad example, but let's say aluminum on a ship. We don't want to have that aluminum act differently or read differently on a box, on a character, and do something different. So anyways, long story short, affects a lot of teams. I think everybody understands that. Where things are currently at is on the core gameplay pillar, Rich Tyrer and the physics guys have been doing a ton of work just going back and forth with narrative, because again, we have some real materials, like a titanium or whatever, but we also have things that are created from in-game lore that are lore materials, let's say. It's a real material that exists, just not in the real world, so we have to come up with all those values, and they have to coincide with the reality of a value. It's even just getting the details of all of that. Then beyond that, it's talking about what's the kinetic reaction of it, the radiant reaction. I've got a list here. Thermal, electrical, chemical, cold, heat, rarity. There's so many layers of it. So really right now, it's a big Excel sheet of here's all the surfaces that we're going to need. Here's all the reactions that those surfaces do. Where can we get that onto the content teams? And then once we do get that on the content teams, it's going to have to go to all the different experience teams. So vehicle experience team will have to tweak everything, because imagine what's going to happen with the ships. We have some balance in on the ships. We know that ship A will beat ship B in most cases because health is here, damage output is higher. Once it goes to a physically based setup, that changes the ballgame, because now all of a sudden the art of that ship informs what the armor is, how strong it is. And this to balance is just going to take some doing, I can imagine. In terms of if that's coming soon, I don't want to say anything in terms of timing, but it is an ongoing discussion and constant design that is being done and a lot of back and forth with Chris. And again, Rich Tyrer is really driving hard on it on the physics and the core gameplay side. So I expect more to be talked about in the future, but just do appreciate the complexity of the task, and it would be less complex if we didn't have any assets, but again, here we are a couple years running, so we've got a lot of assets already in place that need to be updated and converted to such a system.

On the implementation side as well, we've talked about the physically based damage over the years because we've done explorations and experimentations of what would it take to set this up to get the kinds of behaviors that we want in a closed system. And those have been informative, but like Sean says, we can't move forward until we find the version of that that addresses all those considerations at the same time. So a lot of that has been explorations to determine what it was we needed to be able to hit, what it was we needed to be able to accomplish, and then with that information starting to chart out the full scope of what this entails, which carries into all the stuff that Sean just said.

Another change might be that this also affects mass and also center of mass. Our flight model will have to get updated to accommodate the more realistic physics that will get informed by the art that's generated by the artists.

There's even some more fun with it. Our vehicles are one of the most destructible and interesting ways of blowing up an entity. You could break off wings, you could break off panels, you could break ships into different pieces, and all that is kind of customized into this XML packet. And if we want to be able to utilize the same breakable technology across entities across the board, we can't just use what vehicles are doing. And so there's been other discussions and even pipeline tools of changes where we could change the asset itself to define how and why things could break based off material properties. So it's no longer we have an asset of a ship with XML. You have the asset and it behaves correctly. So there's a lot of cool things coming along with this tech.

Yeah, just there's tons. Because I don't know, we made it sound pretty negative because it's work, right? And we're just going over, oh my God, it's all this work. But the stuff that it gives us is pretty incredible. Because now all of a sudden, it's not a gamified physical damage thing. It is a force damage. It's a kinetic damage. And they all have different reactions and all have different byproducts of them, whether it's an effect that is different or whatever. But it also just really embeds the materials and the art into the actual gameplay of the world, because we don't just color it because it looks cool. We make it aluminum because it needs to be aluminum in that part of the ship. And what I hope is that it informs the design even further as we make new stuff. It just would make sense.

Like the cascading damage effects that can be reinforced or negated by whatever particular circumstances are happening. Yeah, it makes it a much more reactive and specific behavior.

And procedural. Chris always talks about it, but he'd prefer, right now we have a very specific thing. If you damage a part at whatever it is, 75 to 100%, then you have a chance of detaching it. And then we have to apply a proper impulse. We do it very specifically. So it's like, oh, okay, we know that ship has gone to 90% of wing damage, so the wing has to punt off. Where Chris would like this to be much more, there's a technology called BMNG or something, way more physically based, where it's like there's a constraint. There's a constraint and after so much of an impact, let's say you hit it with a size nine railgun, it doesn't destroy the wing, but that's going to rip it off, because it just physically makes sense that that would happen. Anyways, stuff like that absolutely comes out of it.

Hopefully we can find a solution to prevent players being able to exit seats into other ships too at the same time. That'd be nice to get rid of that.