Is there any chance ships manoeuvring VFX will increase in size or intensity in the future? (touches on development pipeline)
TL;DRManeuvering thruster effects are limited by the thruster size on each ship design, but work is under way to make the effects match the physical wind volumes the thrusters generate, which should add punch near the ground.
I just want to make sure I'm not the only person talking, by the way. I've got a habit of just saying things first. I appreciate that a lot of the maneuvering thrusters have got that potential for looking a bit like a candle flame compared to the main thrusters. Sometimes it's just the scale of the actual thruster item itself. If the ship has a really small nozzle, then it's probably going to look even worse if I give it this ridiculously oversized, like five times longer than the ship, effect. You know what I mean? It's not always going to work. So we're definitely at the mercy of the ship design in that sense. But there's definitely things, I guess, relating to that. We're doing some work at the moment on thruster wind volumes, and what that is specifically is we want to make sure that the effects match the physical volume that these thrusters generate. Because I think it came in, did it come in in 3.12 when we got the thruster volumes? Teo, can you remember?
Where you're being affected by the force.
Yeah, so we just need to make sure that our effects properly match the physical force itself. So we're doing some work on that. Leo, I guess you've got some knowledge on that system, if it's worth us talking about that a bit.
I mean, yeah, I feel like there are different things that we could do. For example, add a separate strength value or have some kind of dynamic behavior based on if you're in the atmosphere. We already do something similar for shock diamonds on the main thrusters. So potentially, we could use that data we do have anyway to do something special with the smaller thrusters if necessary. The ground effects, as you mentioned, with the per-thruster wind volume stuff, I think they will help quite a bit as well to give more punch to the thrusters, especially if you're close to the ground.
Yeah, because that's the thing, it's not necessarily that we want to have a really hot, emissive, long thrust effect that you can clearly see hitting the floor. If you're sort of high up, and then there's enough force coming from a smaller thruster that it's displacing all that snow or that sand or whatever the surface is, I think that will help as well for sure. And that's definitely in the works.