As Chris talked about on last week's RTV, the Hull C was having retraction problems due to the animated physics grid. Do you know anything about what we're doing with that?
TL;DRThe Hull C retraction fix is on hold because staff moved to other work, with no solution yet; the static physics grid is a fundamental engine limit, though none of the problems is insurmountable.
It's currently on hold while those people have been moved over to do other work. So I don't know that we actually have an answer for that at the moment.
No, we haven't come up with a solution yet. But it's not because there isn't one. It's because we're not working on it. That's kind of it. And a lot of this is sitting in Frankfurt on the physics engineers for the physics system itself, because there's a couple different issues with the whole thing. But one of them is, yes, animated physics, the thing needs to change. And again, this goes into those what you see is what you get kind of functionality stuff. The system that we currently use, which is being re-engineered anyways, is a pretty static system. So you make it, that's it, that's what the physical grid is, and it ain't changing. Regardless of how that ship breaks up or whatever, we can turn it on and off, but we can't move it around. It's kind of a fundamental thing within the engine and within Lumberyard that there's a concept of areas versus entities, and an area is not an entity, and thus you can't do the same stuff with an area volume that you could do with an entity, just from the code side. Everybody knows that. Physics grid is one example of an area; another example would be a vis area, these things that we battle with, vis areas and portals. So this is what calls out certain regions or areas. And the difficulty that comes sometimes with those is, yeah, those don't animate either. So anytime we want to really change that ship around, even in destruction, it absolutely comes up. And then some other problems with the Hull C: I think somebody had done just a quick setup with, it was like 50 Hornets or something attached to it. And I don't think this is what you're going to be able to do by any stretch. But just to give you an idea of the performance implications that that brings, the fact that a ship can be strapped with that much stuff is a performance concern on the GPU, not so much on the CPU, but GPU, and that's where we get worried about it. So there'll be some things we need to solve there, but none of them are insurmountable, as nothing is. It's just a matter of time and money.