Why do so many ships come dirty or used? Will we be able to clean them later?
TL;DRShips get wear and dust to look lived-in and realistic, and the intention is that a wear slider will later change with use so players can clean ships, though some ships will never look fully pristine.
Sure. So I'll take that as two different parts. Part one, why do they come dirty? So we're not intentionally attempting to make dirty-looking ships, but adding wear to them and sort of dust gives all of our vehicles a sense of it being lived in and used. But that also lends to making it more of a realistic experience. So it helps us make the asset as a whole feel a little bit more real, and it gives it a little bit more volume as well, because you get a lot more variation across the materials on the surface. So it just looks better. It's better to do it that way. But the way we're setting up the materials are in such a way that we have a slider that we can pull from zero all the way up to one, and that'll change how much wear you're actually seeing on the material surface. So right now I can actually go into CryEngine and go ahead and slide that back and forth and see the wear become worse and then sort of recede a little bit. And the intention is that in the future, when you use a ship over time, that slider will be programmatically moved in engine in order to sort of simulate that you've been using this ship for a long time, and so it's getting dirtier and dirtier. And you should be able to go clean that up and then bring it all the way back down. That way you have a cleaner ship. Now, there are some vehicles where it just simply doesn't really make sense from a visual standpoint to ever give you a perfectly pristine version. One of those examples would be something like the Caterpillar or the Reclaimer. Even a brand new version of those ships, it just probably wouldn't look perfectly right if it was completely clean. So there'll be some level of wear and dirt on that, even at its most clean version. But then you'll have ships like the Razor or the M50, where it makes absolute perfect sense to have a perfectly pristine paint job. And so once we've got those mechanics hooked into the actual gameplay, the goal is to allow that slider to move back and forth programmatically, and to allow players to get a cleaner ship if they want, and then see it deteriorate over time.
Go to a car wash, as it were.
Yeah, exactly.