What determinations are made when deciding where to draw the line on ship destructibility, taking into account balancing the visual spectacle against system performance?
TL;DRShip destructibility depends mainly on how interiors will eventually be split (multiple physics grids per ship are planned), plus choosing detachable pieces like intakes and wings that add gameplay without overloading performance.
Well, the biggest consideration is how the interiors will eventually be split. We can't just split at any point or create holes in the hull. We have to think about eventually when we split the ship, we're not going to disappear the interior, which is kind of a cheat right now to get around the physics issues that we currently have. What we want to do is, like a big capital ship, you break it in half: if this half has the gravity generator in power, it should still have gravity, where this half will lose gravity. But right now it's all one big physics grid for a ship. So Chris Rain is going to be working on multiple physics grids per ship.
Yeah, and then you obviously think about performance-wise, but you also think, that's probably going to blow off. You look at a piece and it structurally doesn't look like it's going to take a huge pounding. At some point, that piece is going to tear off. So we try and pick and choose pieces that'll add to gameplay too. Like, that's the first thing, intakes, right? When I'm breaking things off for, say, Matt Sherman. So we'll break off intakes, break off wings, we'll see how that affects how it plays, and then I'll be like, well, what's left? Is there anything cool? There's only a few pieces breaking off; anything aesthetically appealing, easily detachable, that's not going to overload everyone's computers. So that's kind of my process.
One of the features I'm asking for is, especially on the big capital ships where you're going to have multiple layers of rooms and they may not line up perfectly on a bulkhead, we want to have the ability to swap the interior for, say, a split room version. So imagine the Titanic breaking apart and you see a bit of a room with some mess coming out and people falling out and screams and smoke and fire and all this stuff. So that's kind of where I'd like to head. I'd like to see that in the atmosphere and watch people falling out and let the gravity take them.