What is your favorite type of ship to work on, and why?
TL;DRFavorites differ: one likes small to mid-sized ships for their gameplay flexibility, one likes big ships like the Caterpillar, and one cares mostly about how much of a ship can be blown off.
For me, kind of the smaller to mid-sized craft, because it's enough to build out where they can have a bunch of different gameplay potential to it. We can explore some different options with it in sort of the infinite timeline of things, where we can build it to be this thing now first but then potentially go to other options later, but without being such a behemoth ship where it's like, okay, I'll make this ship this year, for just the amount of work and detailing that goes into anything.
For me, it seems I get most satisfaction out of the bigger ships like the Caterpillar. When you drop down those doors and the vista is just out there and you're standing there in gravity looking at this amazing view, and then we get to blow them up too. So I have a lot of fun with the bigger ships. I'm looking forward to working on the capital ships, and we're working really hard on, I won't go into detail on it, but the gravity, inside gravity and putting little ships in bigger ships and all this stuff. And we're going to be delivering some cool stuff for 3.0.
The zone system is one of the most impressive achievements for me personally with Star Citizen. The ability to put a ship inside another ship and be able to transition seamlessly, I imagine that makes for quite a number of challenges.
Yeah, our engineers working on that, like Chris Rain specifically, he's just done an amazing job with the zone systems and local grids.
Patrick, what's your favorite type of ship to work on?
Size and type doesn't matter as much as how many pieces I get to blow off of it. Honestly, that's pretty much it. When I look at a ship, the first thing I think of is this is going to be so fun to tear apart. I'm looking for all sorts of little flaps and winglets and panels. Does this animate? Oh, can I rip that off too? Where are the areas that are going to show cool damage as a player? What are you going to see? What's the damage going to look like when it's landed and you want to repair it? What's it going to look like in space? Which is the coolest ship that just looks awesome when it's blowing up and parts are exploding and there's fire going off. I know that's really vague and totally not specific.
We have to balance the amount of debris that can fall off a ship with the optimization. Each separate mesh costs a certain amount of draw calls, so we have to kind of keep it in check.
And a draw call is the CPU calling to the graphics processor.
Yeah, it's the number of passes on a certain mesh. And say you have 10 draw calls on a hull and you start to break it in half, now you have 20 draw calls. You break it off again, you have 30 draw calls. It's not exactly that way, but you can kind of think of it like that.