With all the tools CIG has developed, is building and creating ships faster now than it used to be?
TL;DRBuilding ships is definitely faster now thanks to live tuning tools and shader-based damage, though ships have also grown more complicated, so there is more to do.
It is definitely a lot faster. I know back when we did the flight presentation at CitizenCon 2948, I think it was, we showed off all the new flight tools, and we continue to improve them. There's new tools for the aerodynamics and all sorts of stuff. And I know there's various other new tools for the other aspects of ships, but I think John mentioned the other day that our ships have also gotten more complicated. So there's more to do, but the tools are definitely years ahead.
It's definitely quicker. Using the tuning example, when I first started, it was pretty much you open the XML and you look at these sets of numbers and you just type some of the numbers in there and play it and go, no, that doesn't feel quite right.
You would have to stop the game, though.
Yeah, stop the game, type it in the XML document, restart the editor, go. And then over time, it got live update and then coming out of Excel. And then now we have all the cool tools that Dave's written and Rich uses day in, day out that do it live and give you all sorts of information. And then on the art side as well, obviously the old way we used to do damage, you would essentially model the ship four times. And as each one went down to 75, 50, 25, 0%, you would swap that part out. Now we have the UV2 shaders. We just model the ship pristine. We model some gubbins inside and let shaders do all the magic in between.