Once they're physicalized, the items inside would shake apart, so are we going to do some cut-ins?

Yeah.

You have to watch out for loose components like this. I've told this story a few times, so I apologize if somebody's been watching me for nine years now and you've heard it before, but there was a time back in 2014, this was still in the Arena Commander days, people were flying a Hornet in Arena Commander and it would just randomly explode. Even in Free Flight, with nobody else shooting, in a completely open map with nothing to collide with, just randomly as it flew, it would explode. And all bug finding and fixing is based on reproduction, how often you can repro it. And they just couldn't repro it. It seemingly happened at random. Some people would fly their ship for an hour and a half and it would be fine. And some people would fly for 15 minutes and the ship would explode. And what it ultimately ended up being was that on the original flight suit, the white and red one where everybody was bald, there was a flashlight that dangled on the belt. The flashlight was physicalized. And depending on how you flew, how many G-forces you did, that flashlight would dink against the side of the Hornet for one point of damage, dink, one point of damage, dink, one point of damage, just rolling around inside the Hornet until eventually it exploded the Hornet. So that took forever to figure out. So whenever I see loose things in a box like that, that's what I always think about. You're going to need to find some way to secure those in the box.

Yeah, luckily I think with item ports we're safe with that kind of thing. This is why I'm developing this, because before that we could just physicalise everything in the box but it would be an absolute nightmare, you wouldn't be able to do anything. I think we had a problem fairly recently with something to do with the chessboard. When a ship was blown up, the chessboard inside the Mercury Star Runner... obviously now cargo kind of scatters, right? When the ship is, I think it's when it's soft-dead, all the cargo comes off the cargo grid and it kind of scatters. That includes the chess pieces on the chessboard. So whenever that chessboard was there, all the pieces of that chessboard would have to break off and it was causing some performance problems. We were trying to work out what it was.

It's always the tiniest little things. There was a version of the Freelancer, the second version of the Freelancer. Freelancer has been made three times, so remade twice. The first time it was remade, that version had 100, 200, I don't have the exact number, little rivets all around the exterior. And it was built by an outsourcer at the time because the company was so small and early. And the outsourcer took the rivet from the concept mesh and just Control-C, Control-V and put it into the in-game model. So the person did not make the rivet at a production scale. He took it from the concept. And concepts are terribly non-performant. And this individual screw had as many polys as the entire ship. So by the time the ship was done, the ship had a resource footprint bigger than the Idris. The Freelancer. And so then, during the old hangar module, people would have six, seven, eight, nine, ten of these things spawn in their hangar, and their hangars would just crash and be really, really slow. It was all because of a stupid little rivet.

We had something similar about a year ago. We have a cinder block in the game somewhere, I think it's an environment asset, and it was the highest poly mesh ever. A cinder block is a square, right? But I swear it was around 50, 60k. It was mental. And we put it in our backlog to basically work on it at some point, and I think it was Joe that did it, he went and fixed it. We crowned him as a hero that day for fixing the cinder block. But yeah, there's lots of stuff like that. You'd think it would be the big stuff, but more often than not it's the smaller bits and pieces.