John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

That can be many things. Lots of different bugs working together against each other. Occasionally it is purely an asset issue. The way we build the assets, you have a physics proxy, and there's two ways you can assign that physics proxy to a mesh. You can combine it into one mesh, and then that is a pretty solid, watertight way of ensuring collisions don't work. The problem is you then have a physics proxy that is combined with that mesh. So if you want to actually get to the bit you see, you have to detach it first to do your work, then reattach it. So it's a bit of a workflow pain. The other way you can do it, you can have it as a child mesh. Most of the time that works exactly the same way, but every now and then it just doesn't behave the same way. But it is a nicer way to work. So quite often you'll find when artists or designers go and do fixes to ships, they'll detach those meshes, make them child meshes, and then just forget to put them back and combine it as the solid solution.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

As for the part where why is it sometimes it works one patch and it doesn't the next patch: integrations. Every patch is, okay, here's everything that was before, and now we're adding all these new things in. And the vast majority of bugs come from untested, unanticipated interactions between systems. Lots of times, if you ever watched Bug Smashers, which was a program we broadcast for a number of years, you'd see just the strangest, seemingly non-related systems. A ship uses this system to keep things in there, but this thing also interacts with this system, and they don't interact with each other, but they interact with the same underlying system that causes the problem in the other ship. It's always a challenge, and one of the reasons we have our PTU to help us identify those.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Throw in live game networking stuff as well. If you're on a particularly poor connection, or the server is having a moment, there's the difference on your client between putting the box down where the root of it is at the very bottom, flush with the proxy of the ship, and the server might think you're a centimeter off, or I don't know how accurate they do it. The server thinks you put it inside that proxy on the bottom of the ship. It now has to go, do I put it above? Do I put it beneath?