Let's talk about POMs real quick.
TL;DRPOM is a flat texture applied like a decal that fakes 3D detail, saving time and performance, and it lets reworked ships avoid heavy modeled geometry like the old Freelancer rivets.
Okay, yeah, so it's very simple. It's a very simple concept. It basically functions exactly like a decal. You apply it to the surface of the geometry, and it'll make it look like you have geometry on there, because it's sort of displacing the texture and making it look like it's cut out. So you can see this nut here. It sort of looks like it's cut out of the surface. And as I move around it, let me slow down the camera, as I move around it, you get a sense of it being actually 3D, sort of cut into the surface. That's all fake. That's just a flat texture. It's a card, essentially. It's no different than this decal right here of text.
And you've seen POMs in action on things like the Starfarer. Anything that's got grating where you can see underneath the grating and you see all the wires and the cabling. That stuff's not really there.
So it's very cool because it allows us to add tons of detail without actually building that detail. So one, it saves us time. Two, it's also a lot easier for the computer to run, because you're not running all this extra geometry. So I jumped on to help out polishing the decals, so I worked on reworking that and rebalancing it. These sort of cut-out things. But the other thing that I did work on was this piping. So there's this under detail that has a lot of pipes and wiring and all that stuff. I jumped on to sort of help out on that. So from this view, you might not be able to tell, but none of this is real. That's a flat texture. And it's reacting to the light properly because we've done some work to sort of fake it a bit. But yeah, all of that detail in there, that's flat, completely flat.
And that's one of the big improvements of our vehicle pipeline over the last couple of years. One of the many reasons we have to rework ships. We've often told the story of the old Freelancer line, which had all those rivets. Instead of using POM for the rivets, they actually modeled the rivet, and then copied the rivet, and copied the rivet, to the point where the Freelancer had a larger resource footprint than the Idris.
Yeah, that made no sense. And to be fair, that was the original, original one. And so the new one, way better. Way, way, way better. And it uses all these same techniques, right? We were able to update the Mustang using a lot of these techniques, which we didn't really have when we originally started working on it.