How do you envision breaching to work? Will we be able to blow a hole in the armour to board, turret breaching? (Also touches on Ship and Room atmosphere system)?

Well, to hark back to the physical damage question, that's really what breaching should be. It's a matter of the surface that's on that given door taking the damage that it needs to take. So there's no specific door breaching per se, because that's how it's set up right now, right? Right now, a door is in there, you can do some damage to it. Sometimes, I think in some cases they'll open slightly, they'll animate to open or they'll switch to a damage model. Yeah, they'll unlock, switch to a damage model. It's all very specific and bespoke. What we want to do is make sure that that's actually part of the overall physical damage and it just has to be. You can definitely argue, wouldn't you then armor the doors of your ship pretty heavily if that would be breached? But then again, it brings gameplay up if you want to punch holes elsewhere. That makes a lot of sense. But again, it really relies a little bit on that physical damage. But breaching as it is right now, I don't know that the design necessarily would change dramatically. It's just the way you get there would be different.

The problem with locks is that they're made to be opened.

I just want to mention that the one other system that we rely on is we need to finalize our room and atmosphere system, because part of the result of the breaching is that you're actually rending a hole in the side of the ship. We want atmosphere to vent out, and conversely, we want to be able to have airlocks that can seal off and then you want to re-pressurize the evacuated area. There's just some underlying systems that we need to do some work on first.

And to expand on this as well, fundamentally, the thing that makes all of this work is kind of the room system. This is something Chad McKinney worked on a long time ago where you have two volumes and they could hold atmosphere, and he uses the ideal gas pressure laws to indicate how and why certain gases transfer. So if you have two rooms and you add a connection, they'll transfer gas. So what a breach essentially is, is you connecting the inside room to the outside room and it just suddenly ventilates out. So if you know the connections, you could create a force. If you know when a door opens, you could establish a connection. When you know a turret is blown off, you could establish a connection to the outside. Right now our ships have immutable rooms, which basically don't allow the transfer to go through. We have worked on a life support system which allows us to turn that off, and when powered on, it would increase the oxygen and the gases in the room so that you could breathe. And if you were to turn it off, if you stayed in that room for a long time, it would all turn to carbon dioxide and you'd probably die. That's not fun unless you have systems in place that inform the player what's going on. A lot of times I see these things, you have worked on the system, what's the next step? That is the next step. How do we hook this up in a way that's player facing so you know what's going on? That's basically the next step. Then suffocation is fun.

And then we want this too. Nothing would be more fun than blowing up the top turret of a Cutlass, right? And then, sorry for the guy that happened to be in it at the time, but if it vents the atmosphere out from the hole that results from blowing it away, we want to have a door system that will shut that off so that you don't compromise the rest of the hull when you're in the Cutlass. But we need that atmosphere system to be functional in a way that we can implement this gameplay in there first.

Yeah, for the actual process of breaching the door, we've updated the doors to be able to derive their lock state from other items. I had a deadbolt item that I made as an example. But anything that would be specifically in charge of keeping this door shut mechanically, it would be able to get that information from there instead, which would allow us to make specific breach points within a door, that maybe this part needs to be the thing that takes damage. Or if the whole thing takes damage, does the entire thing come off? That affects what will happen when you lose atmosphere. And then also having it so that you have the ability to, like you were saying, counteract the loss of pressure, being able to inject the room with atmosphere again. We have this compressor, which has been a way of taking the airlock behaviors that we had and taking it from being this hyper-bespoke setup that we had, where this room is just an airlock because we've made a room that is an airlock and wherever you place it is an airlock, to here's how you make a room into an airlock: you give it a compressor, which takes the atmosphere that's in the room and puts it into its tank and takes what was in its tank and puts it into the room. So if there was atmosphere in the room and nothing in the tank, it swaps to be atmosphere in the tank and nothing in the room; you are now depressurized to go outside the ship. If outside the ship was a toxic environment, when the doors open, it will flood full of the toxic environment, and the breathable environment in the canister will switch with the non-breathable environment in the room, and now you're back to a breathable environment to safely enter your ship. So that is the go-between from the life support system that we made, which very, very slowly regenerates and filters the atmosphere in the entire ship, to being able to intentionally use the systems to give yourself an edge or find yourself at a disadvantage because someone else has filled your airlock with toxic gas. Why'd they do that?

That was a fun thing when I remember you were experimenting with it. It's like, wait, we can't just pump oxygen into the room. We have to take out the bad gas and then replace it with the good gas. And then we started debating, all right, if you have that canister that takes the good gas and then changes the atmosphere, what happens if someone swaps it on the ship for fun? Like, hey, Sean, can I come aboard your ship? Swap his air tanks with toxic gas. All right, I'll see you later. And then Sean goes flying away. He passes out. I steal his ship. Standard pirate run.