What is the current status of physicalized armor and damage and components?
TL;DRPhysicalized damage is still being worked on, with armor following from it, while physical components are independent and are being put into older ships, a slow burn for many months with resource network work possibly shown late in the third quarter.
So they always get lumped together in one thing, but they are somewhat independent systems. So physicalized damage, that is still being worked on. Physics guys are still working on it. They've got a few more test cases, found a few more issues. They are looking at some smaller scale problems to solve. Rather than going full hamster on a spaceship, they're trying to solve a lot of these questions on smaller environmental assets, because if you can solve it on that, it's much easier to then scale it up for a spaceship. So they're still working on that. The VFX team are quite heavily involved in doing a lot of tests, like simulations for the whole breakability side of it, rather than just nice clean breaks, but having a bit of crumpling. I know I said VFX, people think, oh, it's just particles. It's not. They do a lot more than just particle work, like mesh simulation; that knowledge is within that team. So deformation and twisting and bending of assets, that's with those guys. Physicalized armor is like a byproduct of the damage systems that will come with that. Physical components is sort of independent to that, because we can do physicalized components without the physical damage side. So we are looking in the very near future to start going through some of our ships and putting those components in the right places. If you look at our newer ships, say multi-crew ones with interiors, Carrack and Starlifter, you will have seen all the hatches, and when you open them up, the components are actually there. So for new ships that's built in. We're looking at going back to the older ships and updating those, which is obviously a lot of work. So it's a balancing act between updating the older ones and delivering newer ones. But we are putting more of a focus onto going back to those older ships and updating them, because we do need those ships to have the items in the right place, to have the resource network, which is the thing we've shown in the past with all the nodes and the links. And I'm sure we'll see more of that in the coming months on ISC as that progresses. But yeah, that side is in progress. That's going to be a slow burn for many, many months. And you might see in coming patches ship interiors changing a little, but not see any gameplay side of that. That's all the prep work for that.
It's worth noting, not to bury the lede there, that dependencies are at the core of all of these things. We're here with the vehicle content and feature team, the design team and stuff, but that question is mostly work for other gameplay teams, other design teams, other effects teams, and stuff that then needs to get integrated into the vehicles. And you are right. We will see more of the resource management stuff in quarter three of this year, probably towards the end of quarter three, maybe even the beginning of quarter four.