We have heard a lot of talk about the optimization of lights on the ship. Does making lighting more efficient free up room to add other cool visuals to ships?
TL;DRThe team says they already add every visual they can until performance suffers, so better optimization mainly means more ships at full detail in big battles; staggered startup lights and X-ray sub-component targeting are mentioned as plans.
Like, what other cool visuals?
We already do everything cool we can think of, and then we rein ourselves back until it runs well.
I mean, there's PFX, there's lighting.
I think almost the idea of optimizing enough where we could have another cool ship in the same scene at that same level of fidelity and detailing. Getting us to the point where we can do these bigger battles, where, hey, if we can get to the cap ship versus cap ship without having to pare down the detailing to keep both of them existing in that same screen space at the same time, if you're a fighter flying between that same fight...
For lighting specifically, I mentioned we were going to have these more interesting startup animations, so the back lights will come on and then it'll kind of raise up on the front and the cockpit lights will come on. So it'll be kind of this orchestrated way instead of everything just kind of coming on like Windows. It's a more staggered thing. But one of the cool things, and I don't know what made me think of this, it's totally not related, is we're going to look into sub-component targeting, and I'm hoping you will get this kind of X-ray view where you'll see the interior component. It's still being designed, but we're planning for something along those lines so you can pick apart.
Even if we didn't have it, that would be a benefit to people who know the ships. You could take it upon yourself to learn the interior layout of as many ships as possible, so you know where the components are physically on that Constellation or on that Javelin, so your own personal knowledge can benefit you through how well you can disable a ship.
Doing that legwork should definitely yield you an advantage, because if you put the time into it, there should definitely be a reward for those kinds of things.
And we've talked about different scanners, and we'll probably upgrade scanners, and the best scanner in the world will be able to look really into the ship and pick it apart, and you'll find the resources that you can harvest. But the basic scanner is just going to be 'ship', can't see anything.