What are legacy armors and why have we been working on them?

So legacy armors are pretty much older versions of the current armor that we have in the game. The armors that were made about three to four years ago did not respect any of the zones, and also the characters...

Or materials.

Pretty much everything about them wasn't set up. If you take a close look at those armors, they start to fall apart.

And also, wasn't the heavy almost as heavy as a Constellation in polycount at one point?

Yeah, they were not efficient. So really, those were put in not as a proper game-type asset, but as in, we're getting some art and we're giving it to the players for them to play around with, not like this is good for the game.

Because I remember when we tried our first FPS, for Star Marine, way, way back when, and there were a bunch of heavies in there, it wouldn't function.

Same thing with the old ships.

The polycount was just too crazy. If we remove just the visual aspect of it, just optimization-wise, a lot of our old armors were just a mess.

Also, they were draw-call heavy. Now we have the new layer shader that allows us to merge draw calls based on the material stack. They didn't have that at all; it was just draw calls everywhere.

And those were also made before Josh Herman, and also before I joined on as well. And I kind of mentioned in the ATV, a lot of the concept art was done by contract freelance concept artists. It was just all over the place. And so what we wanted to do was, since we have to optimize the old armors to the new, we were like, should we just use the old sculpts and do it again? And we're like, no, if we can make these assets look even better, why not give it that pass as well? And so we decided to update all the light, medium, heavy, marine, and outlaw.

The performance thing was what I really wanted to get to, so thank you so much, Gage, for hitting that. It's very analogous to the ship pipeline. I keep going back to the folks who have been following the project for a while. You've seen a tremendous evolution of our ships. The second iteration of the Freelancer series. Remember the Freelancer that had all the rivets? They're currently still in your hangars: the Freelancer MAX, the Freelancer MIS, and the Freelancer DUR, for instance. The Freelancer MAX has a resource footprint equal to the Idris.

A backstory on those. I might have said this before on RTV, I'm not sure. But some of those models, because they were really just there to get in for the player quickly, are literally the concept model.

Yeah, it's literally the concept model. They took the rivets from the concept model of the Freelancer, and instead of rebuilding it and baking it down, they just... no normals. So it's one of those things, this is game development. And game development is not just building a game, it is learning how to build a game. And when you're trying to build the biggest, baddest, most awesome game of all time, there's going to be a learning curve. That's what the development of our ship pipeline is, and it applies to the character pipeline as well, with the armors.