John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Number one is probably the metrics, if it's not for components. Because every ship has components, they are all going to be in a physicalized location inside. Obviously, we don't want to cheat things. If the ship physically can't fit everything it's supposed to have inside of it, something has to change on the ship. We've done a huge pass on the animations, which I think people have noticed in the recent patches, but they perhaps don't understand why things have changed, like the cockpit, or the little Terrapin fans with the cockpit seat height thing. That was fixed as part of a completely global change to every single animation in the ships. So previously they were just one canned animation for getting in. We've split that up into the individual chunks, and now design and animation can stitch them together in any different combination. So when we were designing ships before, we would say this ship uses the Gladius enter animation. So we had a template file and it had the ladder touch points. So that ship was built around that entire animation. So you had to get in a ladder of the exact same metrics as the Gladius, into stepping over a bit of the wing that is the same size as the Gladius, down into a cockpit that is the same size as the Gladius. That's all now split up. So you can have the sequence animations now. So you can mix and match, say, going up the Gladius ladder with getting into the Hornet. So it gives us a lot more flexibility. But that meant all the ships had to be vetted to fit things. We found examples. The Avenger and the Eclipse supposedly used the same animation. Turns out they did not in game. So when we fixed the animation, on the Eclipse you were walking inside the geometry as you went up the ladder. That's because someone had just done a sneaky little fudge to the animation, saved it as Avenger 02, job done. So we had to remodel bits of the Eclipse to get that fixed.

Ben Parr · Ship Pipeline Producer

As well as that, the more we make the ships, the better we get at it, and the more our art style gets better. So look at the 300 series, for example. They were one of the first ones to be made. I wasn't around then. But with the rework and the 600i, completely different style, so reworking it made it look way better than it does. So art styles evolve, and iteration.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yeah, and I think in 3.5, the M50, nobody will have noticed this because you just can't have seen it, but the M50 was actually carrying around the old damage model this entire time, where instead of having the UV2 damage, it had the four bespoke modelled damage states for every single part. Because you didn't have the UV2, you literally just swapped the left wing from 100% to 75%. So in the old days, we had to model a ship four times to do that, and then you'd swap between it. That's gone now. And that's probably the oldest ship in the game that hasn't had a touch. And that's on the roadmap soonish for an update pass.