Are there different types of fires, like red, blue or yellow flames, raging or small? How far along are you on fire tech?
TL;DRThere are different fire types tied to the technology level and manufacturer, varying in color, smoke, light and sparks, and future hazard-zone work may link fire behavior to oxygen in rooms, though not setting the world ablaze.
Well, I guess there's a couple of ways we could answer that. Do you want to talk about the stylistic side of it?
Yeah. The first part of the question is what types of fire we have. We actually do have our internal style guide. We know that we should have classic fire, which is orange or red, and you get smoke and such, but we obviously also have other technologies, such as Xi'an, Vanduul or whatever. And these, as a race, as a technology that comes from a different kind of source, use different materials. And as in real life, different materials produce different colors and flames. For example, your hob in the kitchen will give you a certain flame color, and if you burn a torch, it's going to give you orange stuff. So we do have different varieties of fire, and it's not only about the color, but also about the amount of smoke, how quickly the smoke dissipates, how thick it is, how much light we emit, what textures we use, what it looks like, how many sparks we have, if any, stuff like that.
Yeah, we loosely tie that in with what we describe as the efficiency of the thing that's burning. A low-tech ship would be the oily, classic, smoky fire, as Michal just described. And then if there was a high-tech equivalent, well, it's kind of sci-fi. I think I'd describe it as sci-fi blue, classic. Far less smoke, in fact no smoke, much more lens flare style. So when we start to tackle a specific thing, like a specific ship, we know that the manufacturer, per our internal style guide, is a certain tech type, and that helps us define what those visuals look like. And even if that's not something that's totally obvious to people playing the game, I think it gives us a consistent visual language throughout the game, and it gives us our initial cues about what this thing is going to look like. I think another part of that question is quite interesting, because we're going to be working on hazard zones in the future, and we're going to be looking at the behavior of fire in the game as well. So with the room system itself, if there's oxygen, then it should burn more. The fire itself could contribute to removing oxygen from that room, propagating fire. I'm not saying that we'll be able to just set fire to the world, because that would be a stretch too far. But we've got a lot of plans in terms of the functionality of the fire as well.