How is it going with that whole armor thing?
TL;DRPhysically based damage and armor is in production, with ship mass to be worked out from the model and its materials rather than hand-entered values, leading later to penetration and material-strength armor.
So I'm going to assume that's talking about physically based damage and armor. So that is in production at the moment. It's something that Chris is actually... He's got a local version of the code where at the moment we define mass by a value in the XML, but how it's going to be is it's going to be defined off the actual vehicle's model and materials. So if we make a ship out of a plastic material, it will work out the volume and the mass of it from that, based on the materials that are applied. So it will behave like a plastic ship, versus someone like me putting 10 million tons in the XML. So that's the groundwork for it. So the ships will be physically, weighted is the wrong term, but they will be appropriately massed, appropriately designed and set up with all the materials. So if it looks like metal, it's going to weigh like that. If it looks like carbon fiber, it will be lighter and have the same tensile strength.
So it's not just a measurement of the volume, which is kind of what we're doing now.
It's the volume plus the material. And then the ships aren't just one material. So there's sort of various aspects of it. You might have a ship whose body is made of a really dense metal, but its wings are made of paper. Those will behave differently. So when you shoot bits off, it will not all just behave like, oh, this is 10% of the ship that's fallen off, so take 10% of the mass off. It will work out like that. And then that drives into the next step, which is penetration, drives into armor, moving away from just removing hit points to sort of adjusting the strength of the material. It all starts happening now.
So you need the system where it does the dynamic mass.
The start of the system is we need to work out what the ship is programmatically, because marking it all up is how we do it now, and that's not sustainable or usable for the desired end system. At the moment we go: left wing has 500 hit points, right wing has 500 hit points, left end wing has 100 hit points. We're going to move to: it's the left wing, it's made of this material.