John Crewe · Director of Vehicles

Yep, all those three things are in active production at the moment. They're not just for vehicles; especially the physicalised armour and penetration, that's also going to be applicable to actors and the FPS game. So again, we've got to a point where we're working on the initial parameters and tuning them in, making sure they're working as we expect before we start really putting all hands on it. Chris has been involved in it. A lot of the physics guys are doing the groundwork. The vehicle and the actor teams are working together to go, "Right, we need all these parameters, please make them," [and] the physics guys give us a build back and [we] go, "Sure, that sort of works. This bit doesn't work. We need some more tuning here." So we're definitely working on it right now. How far through that process we are, it's hard to say until we get something that works across the system.

John Crewe · Director of Vehicles

SDF shields was the last thing there, I think. So in recent builds, all ships have SDFs generated for what will be their shield bubbles. The build process is now spitting them out for us. You will have seen the atmospheric re-entry effect in 3.10 uses that as the basis. So 3.10 was a sort of precursor for rolling it out on a slightly simpler problem to solve, which is atmospheric entry effects sort of reacting to whatever angle your ship is. Shields takes that to the next level. So core tech-wise, it's pretty much there. And it's really now working with the VFX team and the VFX engineering team to make the shields look good, because we can't use any of the existing shield effects work. We have to recreate that from scratch. And that brings up a lot of, not tech, but sort of visual gameplay [questions]: how do we make it look good at short range and far range without blinding players?

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And then, of course, after you make it look good, then making it performative. Finding that balance between, you can make it look amazing if you only had one ship to blow up, but when it comes to giant melees of multiple ships, you need something that can scale and be performative.

John Crewe · Director of Vehicles

Yeah, certainly the initial stuff we've seen of the SDF shields internally looks very promising in terms of just how it looks and how it behaves. Because one of the big things is when you lose a wing, the SDF adapts to losing that. You don't have this weird bubble floating out. So it's going to be a really nice change.