We've heard about this signed distance field tech being used for shields for a while now, but it's not currently in game. What's been the delay, what's been the struggle?

Sort of twofold. There's the actual teams making use of these signed distance fields, like the vehicle feature team will be working on making the old shield system use the new shield system. We've got bits and pieces done, that's fine. Once we've done that, then the VFX team have to essentially go and re-author all the shield effects for all the ships, because at the moment you have the blue sort of splashy effect and you actually have hit effects coming off it. Because the old system uses something completely different to anything else in game, they need to make a new shield hit effect for SDFs. So they've got to do all that. But one of the biggest challenges is actually on the core engine side: this is a new file format that has to be baked into our existing assets. The resource compiler, when we're making the builds, has to automatically do this. But to do it, someone needs to mark up what of the ship it should be made from. So it's working out all these core pipelines: a tech artist has to go into the ship file and go, the ship is these parts. Because if we just let the compiler go, 'I'm going to do everything in the ship', it's going to be making SDFs for the buttons on the cockpit or the joysticks, which is just unnecessary time to compile and hard drive space for actually building these things. So we want to only use the exterior. So someone has to go mark those up. Then we had to make it so the builds actually picked up that data and generated it. And then there's a little bit of work still to come that's not blocking us at the moment from progressing, but a lot of our ships animate.

Right, the signed distance field has to adjust.

It has to dynamically adjust to those things, because in the old system it was just a part attached to the wing. So when the wing animated, it moved with it for free. Signed distance fields don't do that out of the box. And it's not just using signed distance fields for shields. We want to use it on other things as well. So that same signed distance field we'll use for atmospheric entry. So at the moment, when you come into an atmosphere, you get the glowy stuff on the front of your ship. If you went in backwards, you'd still get the front bit on the front of your ship, because it's just attached to your ship in that area. And we could do one for every single area of the ship to account for that, but that's just a huge amount of work. So the signed distance field will allow us to play that effect on the appropriate face when you're going in. Assuming you're going fast.