Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Yeah, absolutely, and that's it. There's things that are pipeline internal and then there's things that are game wide, and the Hull C is one of those things that juggles both, or careers straight through both. They're always the tricky ones as well. Sometimes we're ahead of those gameplay teams, sometimes we're behind.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We always get the damned if we do, damned if we don't. The ship could be ready, and in the past, we would have just released it without the gameplay. But now we try and not do that. But then it's the case of, well, hey, this ship's disappeared off the roadmap now. It must be done. So it's coming in the next patch. And it's like, gameplay's not ready.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Yeah, and things like the Hull C, it's [Hull?] on steroids, basically, because that rear section, you can walk around it, which you can do on the [Hull?], and that causes a whole lot of pain. Lifts in moving... anyway.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Giant, one physical screen that separates and becomes two physical screens.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Three. I have quite high expectations for that, and so that unfortunately requires some additional work from the different teams to get that looking right and feeling right. Okay, and then, talking of salvage, that's one of those things that is somebody else's baby and feature and has a massive impact on all of our ships. So the team, Henry's been spearheading some of this stuff, have been working exceptionally hard looking at all of our current ships that are in game. All of their damage and underlying damage meshes were created for a damage feature that was worked on many years ago, and now we're like, well, that works for salvage, but some of it works great, some of it didn't. And so we're going through, and for me, I love supporting new features. For us to take all of the damage meshes and the UV2s on ships and everything and do them to a gold standard is years of work. And I don't want to be the person that's holding back a feature that can be really good fun for the sake of me being like, you can kind of see through that bit, kind of see through this bit. So we're going in, getting all the ships ready, getting all the UV2s updated. We're improving damage as we can as we go through.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I was talking to Lars the other day and Lars was telling me how much work he did on the Cutter, specifically the damage maps.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

And that's what I mean by impacts our pipelines. It's tech debt basically. And I mean, that's the natural part of being in a project that's creating new features, right? The ships we made several years ago, they're not necessarily going to be fully compatible with these new features we drop. So that is tech debt, and that's sort of a part of development, right? And basically we just had to triage the ships.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That happens with everything. It's just not every game happens to be running a live environment right in the middle of this development.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

Usually you have to pay off the tech debt before a game comes out.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

And there's good kinds of tech debt and then there's kinds of tech debt that you can avoid, right? But things like salvage, we want the damage to look good anyway, so it's a pass that, you know.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, the salvage work that necessitated all this was built off the damage system, which we introduced with the Gladius, I don't know, 2015, 2016. And that system hasn't really changed since then. And it looked good for damage, like when you're shooting another ship with a spaceship 100 meters away and you see the burn and the glow and everything come on. And when we looked at salvage, it was like, yeah, we've got a system, it works. But then when you pressed your face up against it, scraping it with a thing, it was like, no, actually, this technically works, but it's not to the standard we want.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

I think as well, over the years, you call it rot or just changes and stuff, damage maybe hasn't been scrutinized as much because it hasn't needed to. And then when a feature like salvage is coming up, we sort of need to take stock of where everything is now and review it again and be like, these ones probably want a bit of love, right? And then there's some that you're like, oh, that'll work. It's not all going to be perfect for tier zero salvage with hull scraping, but it will work as a feature.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Ship damage, you mean the visual damage. I keep having to correct this.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

The visual damage will all mostly work. And the shader's had a bit of love, and we've created some new textures for it as well, so there's a little bit of visual polish that will benefit damage as well. Less tinfoily damage.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

On the plates. Dan's done a great job on the team. We've got issues that were ship-specific, which means we have to touch every ship, and then we've got improvements we can make that are ship-wide, and the new shaders and the texture improvements and stuff that we've done affect all ships in one go. There are going to be cases where you salvage a ship and you might see a bit poking through. It's still fun. We did our best. We've done some work on resource management. And we're in prototyping phases, getting stuff in and working. But we're not at the point yet where that's actively rolled out across ships and we haven't done a big pass and stuff. We're early days with that stuff.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Design's done their pass on it.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Yes, sorry. On the art side.