When can we have physical ship components?
TL;DRThis quarter's work lets real items replace the placeholder brushes inside ships; next comes connecting them to ship control, after which swappable physical components, targeting and damage can be pursued, with no date given.
We already have some, don't we?
Yeah, we have some. I presume that is aimed towards the internal items. So there was work done this quarter by the US Vehicle Feature Team allowing us to spawn item ports inside object containers. So use the Retaliator, for example: if you walk around that, you can see items in the ship. They're simply brushes. They're not the actual items. So what that team's done this quarter, they've allowed that to be replaced with the actual items. What needs to be done next is actually hook them up to the ship control. At the moment, the ship can't see what they are. So if we swapped them over now, the ship wouldn't work, because it'd go, I've got no power plant, I've got no cooler. So that's going to be worked on next. And then when that is done, we can go through the ships and put the physical items in the right places. And then we can look at subcomponent targeting of all those items, penetration to hit those items and damage them.
I think that's probably what the question is referring to. When will we reach the day that I've got three spare coolers in the cargo hold and I can go and rip out the damaged cooler, throw it away, grab one from my cargo hold and put it back into the ship?
Once that's on item ports, that should be easy to do.
The tricky thing was we could sort of fake it now. But what we'd have to do from the design and art setup side is guess in Max where the hardpoint for the ship item is relative to the interior and sort of line it up. And then it has weird problems. Those items would be lit as though they're part of the exterior. They would light them as though they're on the outside of the ship. So you'd have these either glowing or pitch-black items in the ship. And because they're on the ship, which you're in, but you're inside the object container, which is a different zone, all sorts of weird stuff happens. So they need to be items inside the object container, attached to the ship, and the ship talking to them for it to work.