Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Yes. So the first step of that is going in Good Doctor. Actually, it's a perfect setup for it because most of it's glass. So we're bringing back our 2D destructibility. So as I do, I will give you the full history of what destructibles really mean for the engine and for technology anyways. So yes, we want our environments to be interactive, right? Not just destructible, but you want to be able to pick up stuff and interact with the environment, basically. So we've got three different types of destructibles that we work with. And as we get our performance really in line, that's when we'll start dropping all those things in. Because basically, as we just talked about, we were talking about network delays and server performance and things like this. And when you're in that state, you don't want to be dropping a bunch more destructibles that need to be synchronized, and pieces of it and everything. The couple different types that we have, and already work within the game anyways: we have, I call it 2D destruction basically, so it's like if you have a piece of wood, you have glass, you have something like this that is pierceable and needs to leave holes, and then after you've left a couple holes, eventually it breaks off, right? So this is one of our 2D destructibles, so that's in place in a lot of spots around the verse anyways. But you'll see it really, really obviously within the Star Marine maps; Echo 11, I think, definitely has one. And then on top of that, Good Doctor is almost entirely glass. So you'll see a lot of 2D destructible with that. Now, 2D destructible is nice because it's not a massive network synchronization problem. We don't actually synchronize every single little piece of the glass. Instead, what we do is a state-driven thing where it's like, once that glass is destroyed, we know it's gone. Play the particle effect, but it's not important that this piece and this piece is perfectly synchronized across clients. The next one we have is a, we call it pre-broken, basically, destructible. And what it is, it's like if you had a building that was actually sectioned off so that we know exactly how it's going to fall apart. And we've already pre-authored all the pieces of it, and we just have some constraints that actually keep them together. So that's another destructible that we have. And then a further destructible is a little more complex one, and we call it a Boolean destructible. You would have a cutter object that can actually cut either a 3D shape or a 2D shape. It's kind of combining the two, where it's like the 2D destructible and the pre-broken one, but you create the pre-broken pieces at runtime. But that one's real expensive, so that one we want to avoid over the network or anything like that. But you'd definitely see something like that in Squadron, though. So, short answer, yeah, we want to put destructibles in.