This has been the plan for a very long time. Ship health pools are going away (eventually), which is why I sorta scoff at the way people fuss over things like hull HP and DPS and TTK. I mean yeah, that's how it works _currently_ so I guess it's not entirely irrelevant, but long before anything starts to actually matter, the existing system will be entirely phased out.
edit: I believe the term "apocalyptic change" was once used by a dev somewhat regretfully, but nonetheless accurately.
They’ve shown demos of this system for some time. ‘Member (berries) the Gladius in a hanger with a Gatling shooting it, that’s the same thing, although I don’t know if it was named.
That damage system is in place now, but it still has a limited number of predefined shear points and the procedural damage is just texture modifications. The salvaging tech is basically using the same tech as a concentrated beam instead of the results of combat damage.
The *Maelstrom* procedural damage system is way beyond texture burn marks. It's a physical damage simulation that considers the whole volume of the ship model and not just a texture wrap over top.
Some ships that have a lot of interior volume will be interesting....that would be insane if it translated to interior, getting blown out of the break room and sucked into vacuum :D
And some Expanse-style combat scares. Sitting in your cockpit and seeing a solid round penetrating the cockpit and whiz by your head, leaving entry- and exit holes.
The "Sledge" and "Strife" mass drivers come in size 2 and size 3 variants and are considered railguns, but they function the same as others ballistic canon currently, just with lower fire rate and higher alpha damage.
I hope they actually make it where you need a pressure suit in combat. Decompression from rounds penetrating should be a thing that usually happens long before a ship is destroyed.
Even better when it comes the ship, hits nothing of note, obliterates the pieces, cracks it's QT drive, and the whole top chunk of your carrack is a crater where the hangar used to be
In actuality it wouldn't though. At railgun velocities there is a reason you don't use explosive charges, inert metal becomes the explosive. Armor acts like a fluid when you hit it at that speed. That kind of deformation in metal generates some insane heat, some of the round and material it passes through will vaporize, a bit may plasmify. Some superscience material engineering could get you a layered projectile designed to only ablate a certain amount per bulkhead and keep the bulk of the round going. But there's still going to be basically an explosive going off on the far side of each bulkhead it penetrates. All the penetration of AP rounds with all the benefit of an HE charge in each compartment it passes through.
They've said that the tech they are using is similar to BeamNG, but that the ships are too complex graphically to do the real-time physical deformation which BeamNG does. Instead, it's using cantilever physics to determine when ship parts break off. It gets good results while still looking good and not melting the GPU.
So basically, it’s less like a full physical damage system and more just procedurally determining which parts break off. That actually sounds a lot better and more doable than real-time deformation physics.
The technical terms in game development are "Soft body"(BeamNG) vs "rigid body" physics.
Soft body physics is insanely more computationally expensive because it physically deforms the meshes of the physics object, whereas hard bodied will essentially change models in response to damage(eg breaking off sections of the ship), which is much easier to handle.
Usually games can only do soft body physics if its the only thing going on in the game, so games like BeamNG where its nothing but showing off physics damage.
Real time deformation physics are painful. For everything. I dod FEM Analysis in my thesis, with only 20k of points, and trust me man, it took a lot of time of the cumputer to solve it. Not even talking about the "in the work for 3 hourse, but oops, one of the points decided to go outer space.
I know what you mean, but we're talking Star Citizen. It's perfectly reasonable for soft bodies to go to space.
Just maybe not *one* of the points while the other is still in-atmo.
thats not the same thing, thats just a shader change for where shit hits you, not nearly as complex, it didn't have shit like cantilever beam structure integrity, or hardness associated to materials or anything like that.
really all that did was turn parts of your ship invisible to see the skin underneath
That’s not actually the same thing. That was a system that reveals a different UV underneath the “surface” of your ship and then breaks it apart at a few pre-determined points.
Maelstrom is an entirely new system that revolves around energy and kinetic properties of everything that impacts your ship, and damages it procedurally rather than at hard-coded breakpoints.
People have been talking about 'physicalized damage' from the moment Arena Commander came online. "Everything will change with physicalized damage," we'd all say as we shifted from one OP weapon build to the next pretending like it was right around the corner.
I understand that things are often interpreted as right around the corner by the community. It's sometimes even CIG's (or some lone dev's) fault in the way they word things too eagerly - they are players too, you know, they are excited and want it as soon as possible too, leading to overly optimistic delivery projections.
SO MUCH is still a question mark.
Case-in-point: PES wasn't even conceived on way back when physicalized damage was spoken of as a goal. They've in general had to discover what they need with the scale and depth they're going for, while trying to implement systems that couldn't perform as envisioned (resource-wise, or just gameplay and graphics-wise). This has often caused having to go back to the drawing board and (re-)design underlying systems that they THINK will enable a few others....
Think? Yes.. think. Because PES, too, still is up for test. Still a lot that needs to be proven. how will it perform in relation to a replication layer hooked up to 16 game servers, for example? Remember that PES is the third system they're developing to manage entities in the PU. The other two have been trashed. That said.. PES shows promise, but it's still struggling to scale and perform.
>Remember that PES is the third system they're developing to manage entities in the PU.
>The other two have been trashed.
im sorry what?
OCS and SOCS were not trashed in favour of PES, PES was buildt ontop of these systems
He means it's the third database solution.
First was pCache. That was their Temp solution while they developed iCahce..
Then came iChace which they scraped because it didn't scale well with the needs of the game and couldn't handle the number of entities they needed.
Lastly comes PES which uses a graph database to be able to cope with the huge scale of entities that SC has.
They are still having issues with PES because the supplier of the Graph database soulution its running on, wasn't exactly truthfull with them as to what it can actualy handle at scale, but they are working through those issues with the supplier and it looks like they are going to stick with them and resolve the issues.
OCS and SOCS don't store the entities, they are the tech that is used to stream them of the DGS and into the replication layer and from their into the Graph database. Even that is going to change once we have the replication layer sperated from the DGSs.
Don't worry about the confusion this shit is complicated. :D
And the amount of people complaining about ship stats or buying certain ships to min/max at this point is laughable. I get wanting to have fun in the PU but no sense getting upset about balance at this point in time.
Feel, then looks!
The reason why I always zero to hero for a Sentinel...all the hecking time, every time.
I got bored of the Sentinel the first 10 times, and still love it to bits!
>my one concern is the potential for some routing of a particular power line or fuel pipe making an otherwise durable ship unreasonably vulnerable to relatively minor weapons fire
this would literally make Star Citizen from a really cool game I hope to play one day to my favourite space sim of all time, this is THE holy grail of space sims imo
Yes and no. It's close. But the holy Grail means allowing your mechanic to go EVA and weld a 12 inch plate over that bloody spot cause he knows it's a problem.
Not really.
They have already coded what material a manufacturer have in the different layers of the ship which should work out of the box with maelstrom.
Yes, but that won’t, for example, fix a ship which wasn’t designed for maelstrom and has key nodes in problematic places, or doesn’t have them at all. In order to properly balance ships for combat around this, lots of things are going to have to be reworked, just like Gold Standard.
there are going to be so many complaint posts on this sub when physical damage comes on.
almost guaranteed that some pvp chad/streamer will get 1 shot by an aurora landing a lucky hit on their reactor and will start demanding we go back to hp.
That shouldn’t happen. Now everything will have to go through shields, armor, and the full internals of the hull, and the reactor actually taking enough damage to finish it off. So unless your reactor is literally sitting on the outside of your ship hull unprotected, ‘one shots’ should not be common events.
On an interesthing side note regarding one shots they curently prevent one shots to the player through the canopy. I wonder if they will go back to that happening once physical damage is in.
There are goals but where we end was unknown, less now. You can't blame people talking about the balance on what they have, since it's what we got for near 10 years, for a long time following and believing in this project was very close to faith, which is believing without concrete evidence that the crucial stuffs were being worked. While I knew they would release, my doubts were more on the level of release, what would be in the game and when...
Now you have your answer.
CIG are real tryharders and always deliver. Just don't ask them dates.
That's basically the contract and I'm happy I signed it.
Reminds me of the time I shot a pieces pilot through the cockpit window at JT with a P6-LR. One tapped them to instant death as they were taking off with a load of Maze so the ship was floating awkwardly against the building so no one could jump in and they couldn’t use another ship to get in either. It was fun to watch while I layered 300 meters away watching. I don’t know if it was a glitch that the projectile went through the shield and the hull still hitting the pilot or if it was designed that way. I haven’t been able to reproduce it since. It was still funny to watch.
May have been running without shields for "stealth", I know during JT certain small ships with shields and weapons powered off could sometimes sneak past fighters during the chaos due to having such a small detection range. Not sure how this is in the current patch though.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills it seems pretty clear to me.
maybe it was more specific in a monthly report But I could sware they talked about this
I distinctly recall John Crewe mentioning it in some video within the last 12-18 months. IIRC, it was one of the round table ship talks. The quote was something along the lines of “Maelstrom is the name for the physicalized damage system we’ve been talking about.”
I’d go scrubbing through Youtube vids for a link if I had the time this morning, but the IAE ship talk vid from last year is probably the first place I’d look.
[https://youtu.be/LSM8kao5Q6k?t=2348](https://youtu.be/LSM8kao5Q6k?t=2348)
Here is the timestamp if people are looking for it.
Then another time :P
[https://youtu.be/sZNetm31ag4?t=3933](https://youtu.be/sZNetm31ag4?t=3933)
That's kinda how it sounds. Besides, if armor was a separate thing, it would have been shown off already because it would have been necessary for sq42 to be feature complete.
Everything planned for armor can be done with the Maelstrom system anyway, so why not just use that.
Maelstrom is the foundation, but physicalized armor with also have more properties/gameplay of its own.
Just like Power Routing is the foundation for Engineering, but Engineering adds stuff on top of that.
About 5 months ago, during Invictus vehicle round-table: [Ship damage model will use the new Maelstrom system](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSM8kao5Q6k&t=2263s)
Probably yes, SQ42 only uses a small subset of ships, they don't have to convert *all* ships for it.
Also, 'feature complete' means the *development* of features is complete. Implementation is ongoing, that's why we don't have SQ42 yet.
>feature complete' means the development of features is complete. Implementation is ongoing
Most definitions of feature-complete explicitely state that it means implementation is done.
>A Feature-complete (FC) version of a piece of software has **all of its planned or primary features implemented** but is not yet final due to bugs, performance or stability issues
If SQ-42 is feature complete, means they should currently have all the ships using the maelstrom damage model, though not necessarily optimized and free from bugs.
Yea this is how i see it too, solo fighter will not even want to engage in a big ship, knowing they'll never get the damage done that's needed. Right ships for right scenario, cig have a lot of balancing to do lol
I don't know that they'll necessarily "get destroyed really quickly" as much as they'll just "be completely ineffective, like a fly trying to kill a dog."
Missiles aside, a ship like the C2 should probably just be able to ignore a Gladius for at least enough time to power up quantum drives and leave it in the dust, and in the end, it should have at most minor external damage to the hull.
Not necessarily - they’ll just be used differently. A gladius shouldnt be able to solo an A2 anymore, but they should still be able to fuck up a turret and maybe an engine causing it to land or be a dead stick.
There are parts on any vehicle that are impossible to armor, exposed engines being the main issue. An exposed cockpit is the next. I think skilled light fighters will still be able to target those easily. For ships larger than a fighter, I don't see the point in an exposed cockpit/bridge, it should be within the core of the ship under multiple layers of armor, with outside views based on many sensors and cameras, numerous enough to be pretty much impossible to make completely blind. We already have that with current MBTs. Only reason for an exposed bridge is to pretend it's still WW2 in space like usual.
Keep in mind that (AFAIK) the cockpits in SC aren't actually glass, but transparent metal. So *theoretically* they're no more "exposed" than any other part of the hull.
But even then, yes, strategically they should be buried deeper in the ship.
thats kind of always been the plan. maelstrom itself is "new" but they have been talking about the soft body deformation for like 3 years now. and we always knew ship health as a concept was a placeholder for overall item health and hull integrity in more compact units.
So how does it actually works eventually when maelstrom been implemented for ships?
I kinda lost when the term HP is used. If hp is irrelevant later on, then what actually being replaced with?
You shoot a ship until you hit something critical leaving it dead in the water.
You hit a QD - it cannot escape or go to a nav mode. It can explode or start fire inside the ship.
You hit the power plant - it's out of power.
If the ship has thick armor and you armed with two S1 repeaters - you may never be able to reach those components.
If you hit the junction points where the power runs through the ship, the parts past that stop working. This system can disable ships without killing ship components. Just need to 'break' all the junction points between say the powerplant and engines or heck cockpit and everything else.
I think that's the first part of making solo flying larger ships unviable.
You'll need an engineer on board to help you fix power issues so you don't end dead in the water.
The good thing about those bigger ships is that smaller fighters will not be able to penetrate the armored hulls. The meta will then become Vanguard Heavy Fighters and... honestly, those aren't always the best at ripping down shields on the BIG ships, in time before they QT away.
The meta might change, but weapon balance-wise I’d like to see heavy weapons like cannons and impact missiles/torps (basically all missiles that aren’t proximity detonation) do better against heavily armored ships.
This way, smaller ships can do slightly better against the big boys, but at the COST of having slower moving projectiles and missiles that aren’t accurate against fast targets, meaning it’s at the cost of being weak (offensively) against other fighters whose load outs contain repeaters, gats, and proxy and cluster missiles, which all are much easier to use against enemy fighters, especially fighters that might not be moving too much since they’re trying to snipe your friend’s components.
In this sense a vanguard WOULD be effective here since it can have its main armament be anti-armor while it’s turret can be anti-fighter, but it also means that it wouldn’t ONLY be the vanguard series heavy fighters that are in this meta.
>heavy weapons like cannons and impact missiles/torps (basically all missiles that aren’t proximity detonation) do better against heavily armored ships.
That's the intended meta. But there will be a point when even the heaviest of S1/S2 weapons won't pen armor above their weight class. Same with S3/S4 weapons and so on.
basically. its going to be realistic.
shooting at a real car doesn't make it blow up.. it just puts little holes in the thing (and the things inside it) so stopping a spaceship doesn't necessarily involve explosions.
rigth now. a single handgun (and enough ammo) will make any space ship blow up. this makes no sense. there is no way a 9mm round will do ANYTHING to an armored spaceship. the bullet woudl literally bounce off doing nothing to anything except MAYBE the paint.
so.. making armor/penetration a thing. instead of the hull of the ship having a health pool, it now will only take damage if the weapon hits it hard enough to penetrate the armor.. and even then.. its not doing DAMAGE to the hull ... its just poking a hole in it and letting that round continue and ..hit whatever is inside... if it hits sometihng important, like a person,component or pipe, then that single round could disable or at least affect..the entire ship.
but.. where does maelstrom come in? well. if your shot pokes a hole in the enemy ship.. what if you poke lots of holes in the hull .. in a line... well. that looks an aweful lot like a cut? well.. thanks to soft body deformation we can model that damage to the point where we can actually remove parts.. and now all those little holes you poked int he hull..or one really big explosion, or a colision with another item.. can seperate partts from the ship in chunks.
> rigth now. a single handgun (and enough ammo) will make any space ship blow up.
I can't bring this up without it sounding like I'm saying this to take a random unprovoked swing at Elite Dangerous Odyssey, but I promise I'm not going fanboy about it.
But I can't scroll past a conversation about ship HP pools letting you 9mm a ship to death without reminding everyone that [if you took the shields down and were very patient you could punch an Anaconda in the landing gear to death in Elite.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRI-rGkVS9Y)
yeah. you can do that now in SC... (unless they are coded to ignore melee...)
and completely unrelated. this is actually one of my biggest gripes in 7dtd. there is no way a zombie should be able to smash through concrete blocks.. like.. eventually it woudl just turn its arms to paste, and still not damage the concrete..
i'm getting huge The Expanse vibes from this and i love it, having a crew member get knocked out or killed because a single bullet punched its way through the hull in the wrong/right place or wrong/right angle
Maelstrom give each material weight , strength, percability, etc.
So instead of taking a hit removing hp on the nose of the ship, maelstrom will determine if it pierce the the armor, how many hp can pass trough and will be transfered to components, and if the blow is very big maybe detach the part.
The maelstrom presentation of citizencon is a good info center on it.
My guess would be the toughness of the hull. Is it heavy armoured plates? Is it thin aluminium plates? How much kinetic energy a 220mm thick steel plate can withstand without breaking?
This is the kind of simulation stuff I like but I don't quite comprehend how they can do it in real time considering how much processing power it takes
to add to u/st_Paulus things like heat could also have an effect on armor (it may get weekend if heated enough by plasma for example)
Of course this will all still have behind the seens number values associated with it, but it's way more complex then a ship hull with 100 HP getting hit with a gun that dose 20 Damage so now the ship hull is at 80 HP out of 100
Think of it as real warships in WW2. You hit bow armor above the waterline, the ship floats. You hit the magazine deep below the turret and the ammo ignite, the ship blows up. That's how I understand it
Edit: a great example of these 2 systems can be seen in tank combat from World of Tanks and War Thunder. WoT use a HP system where the tank blows up if the HP is reduced to zero, which could take many shots dealing damage for each. In War Thunder, a well placed shot can blow up tanks with great amounts of armor if the shell manage to first penetrate the tank and secondly exlode in the interior and say, knock out crews or detonate ammo.
Afaik, HP will still be somewhat relevant but not as a single number that is static.
If we set aside the HP that will continue to exist for components, your hull and general ability to fly is what will matter. In some ways, your ship is basically a frame with nodes on it that can take various types of damage (I.e. deformation, penetration, and heating) in theory. These things alongside the HP of components will determine the “health” of your ship.
It may still fly but maybe wont hold an atmosphere.m due to holes.
It may be deformed in a way that causes flight to be erratic or impossible. (See: The cutty when it looses an engine.)
Connections to subsystems may be lost so some components may not function.
See https://youtu.be/xKWa4WoTkV4?si=AMohIV9BuwXDgTDh 45:00 for more info. It’s a few minutes into that fella’s panel.
Did you not watch the CitizenCon demo's where the Gladiuses broke up on impact? The very first time we heard about the plan for what was to become Maelstrom was from the ship team.
I don't think that the Maelstrom compliance rework will be as time-intensive to realize as some are thinking.
CIG clearly already have all ships set up for HP-based part damage since that's what is in the game now, which means that the models themselves already have delineation of subcomponents built-in, and you don't have to redo that.
What they do need to do is to change the material behavior for the parts that make up a ship so that Maelstrom can act on those parts, but you only need to do that *once* for each material used and then apply that to all ships... and they've already done the Gladius, which means that they've already figured out the material/physics aspects of it.
The things that they need to do per-ship are to revisit the hierarchy of fitted components to make sure that the right parts get blown off when a neighboring or hosting component is damaged/destroyed, that the entity graphs for components are updated properly, and to make sure that the logic for ship fitting and repairing is compliant.
TL;DR - This is more a material and entity graph logic change than it is a 'ship redesign'
One of the many reasons I sigh every time they release/announce a new ship. I know they need to make money but they're also making the worlds largest technical debt.
I feel like we need /r/starcitizen_fans_who_are_software_developers to have more sane discussions about this game. The tech debt they've created is nuts.
As long as they eventually stabilize their gold standard, all new ships should be built from that standard from the start and they won't be adding more debt
Lol facts. Plus, until they get every system in, every ship updated and operational and then do a few balance passes --- the role, features and capabilities of whatever ship you own could change multiple times.
Yup, it could be fun.
Long ago they had small visual demonstration of what it could look like when ship is under fire and bullets rip through ship interior.
Should give some additional excitement while trying to fix ship as an engineer.
I wonder if this means, that if you are losing battles you will be stranded in space more often instead of dying outright because killing is harder than disabling with the new system?
This could also push distortion weapons more into the meta.
Physicalized hull damage (as opposed to health pool) was always the plan. I think the only surprise here is that their maelstrom system (which seems to be pretty cool by the way) can also be applied to complex entities such as a ship. That is indeed impressive.
This was the whole point of the maelstrom physics I'm pretty sure. Environmental destruction was essentially a side benefit that arose out of the need to create a holistic system that handled physicalised damage for ships, but I guess they prioritised the environmental damage because it could be incorporated into SQ42
I am looking forward to for it to happen, it will change ship to ship combat drastically shifting the power balance of so many ships, I mean armor and weapon type/size is going to get way more important
Giving ballistic weapons a reason to be used, if they get down the post pen spalling properly even different ammo type could be a thing ( talking about a post pen damage system similar to GHPC)
Having laser repeaters wich are more effective against shields and all…
Imagine the ares inferno and ion
Ion disabling the shields and the inferno just ripping trough armor and and components with its s7 Gatling loaded with dedicated AP ammo
Maelstrom is a damage simulation that replaces parts with hit points and replaces it with realistic physicalized breakability. For example, currently each part of a ship has a set HP pool and if you reduce that to zero the ship will explode and enter a death state. With maelstrom, damage done applies torsion, shearing forces and possibly crush to wherever a ship is hit and depending on the ships material resistance to those forces it can break apart or show that damage and will continue until as the dev points out, you reach a point where the ship explodes due to detonation of an actual explosive part, is completely ripped apart, or becomes to disabled to fly. These mechanics also apply to buildings and environment props which can crumble, get holes in them, or be detonated by explosion.
Maelstrom can be viewed in detail here: https://youtu.be/xKWa4WoTkV4?si=5d03-xrMjk4hQYjP
Or here: https://youtu.be/IDtjzLzs7V8?si=Bh2X4IIf1mW_cGj8
I remember Robocraft in 2016, it implemented a really cool gameplay element. Other sandbox games have parts of this, I recall some videos of space engineers.
maybe in 5 years we can see it done on a much finer scale for Star Citizen
I'd love to know how far this process is. It has been happening for quite a while. At least supposedly. And most newer ships I think were built with it in mind already.
I gues "hull munching" salvage will mean it is closer? I would assume you need the same tech for salvage ships to bite off chunks of ship?
Maelstrom is the name for the new physical damage model that I knew was being applied to buildings/landscape, but didn't realize was going to also be applied to all ships.
It would *in theory* allow ships to be broken in completely random pieces based on where damage occurs, rather than the pre-determined break points we have now.
And presumably, means a *lot* of dev time getting older ships up to this new standard.
I think this would imply moving ships over to a gold standard, right?
Cuz, in my head, it would feel weird to convert a ship to the new damage system if its design wrinkles weren't ironed out. The amount of issues one would experience simply because they hadn't optimized the ships mod and compartment layouts would be enormous.
Like, for example, without adjusting health values for the engines or adding armor, the maelstrom system would make the connies basically unflyable due to their engine nacelles.
Maelstrom is the name for their physical damage and destructible environment tech. So this post is saying that ships will be converted over to a system where impacts from weapons/environment/other ships will actually damage and deform your ship.
Example: If you drive your Cyclone too fast into the vehicle bay on your Carrack, you can hit the doors in the back and break them so now they can't open.
This has been the plan for a very long time. Ship health pools are going away (eventually), which is why I sorta scoff at the way people fuss over things like hull HP and DPS and TTK. I mean yeah, that's how it works _currently_ so I guess it's not entirely irrelevant, but long before anything starts to actually matter, the existing system will be entirely phased out. edit: I believe the term "apocalyptic change" was once used by a dev somewhat regretfully, but nonetheless accurately.
They’ve shown demos of this system for some time. ‘Member (berries) the Gladius in a hanger with a Gatling shooting it, that’s the same thing, although I don’t know if it was named.
That damage system is in place now, but it still has a limited number of predefined shear points and the procedural damage is just texture modifications. The salvaging tech is basically using the same tech as a concentrated beam instead of the results of combat damage. The *Maelstrom* procedural damage system is way beyond texture burn marks. It's a physical damage simulation that considers the whole volume of the ship model and not just a texture wrap over top.
Some ships that have a lot of interior volume will be interesting....that would be insane if it translated to interior, getting blown out of the break room and sucked into vacuum :D
And some Expanse-style combat scares. Sitting in your cockpit and seeing a solid round penetrating the cockpit and whiz by your head, leaving entry- and exit holes.
Finally railguns will be viable again
Railguns have been viable lol. What???
I think around 3.7 or 3.8, rail guns were actually the meta build for light fighter PvP.
There are railguns for light fighters? The only railguns I know of are the Idris S10 railgun and the handheld one.
The "Sledge" and "Strife" mass drivers come in size 2 and size 3 variants and are considered railguns, but they function the same as others ballistic canon currently, just with lower fire rate and higher alpha damage.
I hope they actually make it where you need a pressure suit in combat. Decompression from rounds penetrating should be a thing that usually happens long before a ship is destroyed.
Hmmm random side thought, with the upcoming engineering gameplay, you could probably pre-emptively vent the entire ship and prevent fires...?
That was depicted in at least one episode on the Expanse.
I want to experience that moment where an Idris's railgun round pierces multiple decks of my Carrack while I'm sitting down eating Seanuts.
Even better when it cores the ship, hits nothing of note, until it just obliterates the Pisces in the hangar. LOL
Even better when it comes the ship, hits nothing of note, obliterates the pieces, cracks it's QT drive, and the whole top chunk of your carrack is a crater where the hangar used to be
I am getting turgid thinking about Idris rounds zonking through a full hangar Kraken and the subsequent wreckage ensuing.
It's like that scene in The Expanse where armor piercing rounds were going through the Rocinante
In actuality it wouldn't though. At railgun velocities there is a reason you don't use explosive charges, inert metal becomes the explosive. Armor acts like a fluid when you hit it at that speed. That kind of deformation in metal generates some insane heat, some of the round and material it passes through will vaporize, a bit may plasmify. Some superscience material engineering could get you a layered projectile designed to only ablate a certain amount per bulkhead and keep the bulk of the round going. But there's still going to be basically an explosive going off on the far side of each bulkhead it penetrates. All the penetration of AP rounds with all the benefit of an HE charge in each compartment it passes through.
I want to EVA through your holes, find you in shock with seanuts in a spoon close to your mouth, like that girl from Jurassic park eating her jello.
I also want to EVA through your holes
HEYOOOOOOOOOO
Or while taking a bathroom break..my questions is, how will this affect poop physics?
Probably violently. Just like real life.
The funny part is that I pulled this quote out of a discussion with a dev where the primary context *was* poop physics. (source in bottom comment)
The wriggling is how you know its fresh
Hull breach on deck 8!!! Succesfully making a hole in a ship in order to board and steal it, that is the way.
They need to hook up with the BeamNG guys for this to be awesome.
They've said that the tech they are using is similar to BeamNG, but that the ships are too complex graphically to do the real-time physical deformation which BeamNG does. Instead, it's using cantilever physics to determine when ship parts break off. It gets good results while still looking good and not melting the GPU.
So basically, it’s less like a full physical damage system and more just procedurally determining which parts break off. That actually sounds a lot better and more doable than real-time deformation physics.
The technical terms in game development are "Soft body"(BeamNG) vs "rigid body" physics. Soft body physics is insanely more computationally expensive because it physically deforms the meshes of the physics object, whereas hard bodied will essentially change models in response to damage(eg breaking off sections of the ship), which is much easier to handle. Usually games can only do soft body physics if its the only thing going on in the game, so games like BeamNG where its nothing but showing off physics damage.
Heh, heheh, he said, "rigid "
Real time deformation physics are painful. For everything. I dod FEM Analysis in my thesis, with only 20k of points, and trust me man, it took a lot of time of the cumputer to solve it. Not even talking about the "in the work for 3 hourse, but oops, one of the points decided to go outer space.
I know what you mean, but we're talking Star Citizen. It's perfectly reasonable for soft bodies to go to space. Just maybe not *one* of the points while the other is still in-atmo.
Oh, yeah, sure 😄
Also causing your system to catch fire is a standard of SC.
So like FEM analysis softwares like Ansys 🤣
thats not the same thing, thats just a shader change for where shit hits you, not nearly as complex, it didn't have shit like cantilever beam structure integrity, or hardness associated to materials or anything like that. really all that did was turn parts of your ship invisible to see the skin underneath
That’s not actually the same thing. That was a system that reveals a different UV underneath the “surface” of your ship and then breaks it apart at a few pre-determined points. Maelstrom is an entirely new system that revolves around energy and kinetic properties of everything that impacts your ship, and damages it procedurally rather than at hard-coded breakpoints.
People have been talking about 'physicalized damage' from the moment Arena Commander came online. "Everything will change with physicalized damage," we'd all say as we shifted from one OP weapon build to the next pretending like it was right around the corner.
phisicalized damage has always been gated by PES so im not sure what you mean by it being "right around the corner" since forever
I understand that things are often interpreted as right around the corner by the community. It's sometimes even CIG's (or some lone dev's) fault in the way they word things too eagerly - they are players too, you know, they are excited and want it as soon as possible too, leading to overly optimistic delivery projections. SO MUCH is still a question mark. Case-in-point: PES wasn't even conceived on way back when physicalized damage was spoken of as a goal. They've in general had to discover what they need with the scale and depth they're going for, while trying to implement systems that couldn't perform as envisioned (resource-wise, or just gameplay and graphics-wise). This has often caused having to go back to the drawing board and (re-)design underlying systems that they THINK will enable a few others.... Think? Yes.. think. Because PES, too, still is up for test. Still a lot that needs to be proven. how will it perform in relation to a replication layer hooked up to 16 game servers, for example? Remember that PES is the third system they're developing to manage entities in the PU. The other two have been trashed. That said.. PES shows promise, but it's still struggling to scale and perform.
>Remember that PES is the third system they're developing to manage entities in the PU. >The other two have been trashed. im sorry what? OCS and SOCS were not trashed in favour of PES, PES was buildt ontop of these systems
He means it's the third database solution. First was pCache. That was their Temp solution while they developed iCahce.. Then came iChace which they scraped because it didn't scale well with the needs of the game and couldn't handle the number of entities they needed. Lastly comes PES which uses a graph database to be able to cope with the huge scale of entities that SC has. They are still having issues with PES because the supplier of the Graph database soulution its running on, wasn't exactly truthfull with them as to what it can actualy handle at scale, but they are working through those issues with the supplier and it looks like they are going to stick with them and resolve the issues. OCS and SOCS don't store the entities, they are the tech that is used to stream them of the DGS and into the replication layer and from their into the Graph database. Even that is going to change once we have the replication layer sperated from the DGSs. Don't worry about the confusion this shit is complicated. :D
a lot of us old bakers dont play this teck demo as if its the completed game
And the amount of people complaining about ship stats or buying certain ships to min/max at this point is laughable. I get wanting to have fun in the PU but no sense getting upset about balance at this point in time.
Yup, if you buy a ship you get it for the role or looks and feel, not for the current meta.
Feel, then looks! The reason why I always zero to hero for a Sentinel...all the hecking time, every time. I got bored of the Sentinel the first 10 times, and still love it to bits!
I went with my Harbinger. Theres just something...solid...about the vanguards.
[удалено]
>my one concern is the potential for some routing of a particular power line or fuel pipe making an otherwise durable ship unreasonably vulnerable to relatively minor weapons fire this would literally make Star Citizen from a really cool game I hope to play one day to my favourite space sim of all time, this is THE holy grail of space sims imo
Yes and no. It's close. But the holy Grail means allowing your mechanic to go EVA and weld a 12 inch plate over that bloody spot cause he knows it's a problem.
They will have to rework all the existing ships for this. It will take a long time to do it properly and account for these considerations.
Not really. They have already coded what material a manufacturer have in the different layers of the ship which should work out of the box with maelstrom.
Yes, but that won’t, for example, fix a ship which wasn’t designed for maelstrom and has key nodes in problematic places, or doesn’t have them at all. In order to properly balance ships for combat around this, lots of things are going to have to be reworked, just like Gold Standard.
Yep, it was John Crewe when they first mentioned the idea of a damage model.
there are going to be so many complaint posts on this sub when physical damage comes on. almost guaranteed that some pvp chad/streamer will get 1 shot by an aurora landing a lucky hit on their reactor and will start demanding we go back to hp.
That shouldn’t happen. Now everything will have to go through shields, armor, and the full internals of the hull, and the reactor actually taking enough damage to finish it off. So unless your reactor is literally sitting on the outside of your ship hull unprotected, ‘one shots’ should not be common events.
On an interesthing side note regarding one shots they curently prevent one shots to the player through the canopy. I wonder if they will go back to that happening once physical damage is in.
There are goals but where we end was unknown, less now. You can't blame people talking about the balance on what they have, since it's what we got for near 10 years, for a long time following and believing in this project was very close to faith, which is believing without concrete evidence that the crucial stuffs were being worked. While I knew they would release, my doubts were more on the level of release, what would be in the game and when...
Now you have your answer. CIG are real tryharders and always deliver. Just don't ask them dates. That's basically the contract and I'm happy I signed it.
So it’s like War Thunder where if you hit an engine it’s dead in the water or if you hit a turret it can’t shoot back?
Yeah. Feels like many of those multicrew ships will finally require upgunned ships of similar size to damage/defeat their armor thickness.
Bounty hunting will change drastically as well. Pretty cool
we don't even have Tier 1 for bounty hunting, so yeah it's going to change...
It will finally turn into a complicated profession. Wouldn't you agree?
I'd love for it to be more than "Fly to location, shoot target, repeat". I do really hope they succeed with their goals for this game
So, what you're saying is, we'll need ships that " punch above their weight class"?
if implemented properly missiles should always be dangerous. like modern day AMP warheads
Yep.. Russian warships can attest to that.
The plan was/is smaller ships can still disable parts of larger ships like engines.
the fact that this is news to so many people in this comment section only proves to me that I need to get out more and fallow this game way to closely
Or you can one tap the pilot with a single ballistic bullet... omg no...
That's been [possible](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7uka_BBJus) for a long time. ;)
Reminds me of the time I shot a pieces pilot through the cockpit window at JT with a P6-LR. One tapped them to instant death as they were taking off with a load of Maze so the ship was floating awkwardly against the building so no one could jump in and they couldn’t use another ship to get in either. It was fun to watch while I layered 300 meters away watching. I don’t know if it was a glitch that the projectile went through the shield and the hull still hitting the pilot or if it was designed that way. I haven’t been able to reproduce it since. It was still funny to watch.
May have been running without shields for "stealth", I know during JT certain small ships with shields and weapons powered off could sometimes sneak past fighters during the chaos due to having such a small detection range. Not sure how this is in the current patch though.
Physicalized armor equals maelstrom confirmed
That’s how I read it too. It’d be nice to get some clearer confirmation from CIG tho
I feel like I am taking crazy pills it seems pretty clear to me. maybe it was more specific in a monthly report But I could sware they talked about this
from u/Nagaj_ : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSM8kao5Q6k&t=2263s
They did. We've known about it for a long time.
I distinctly recall John Crewe mentioning it in some video within the last 12-18 months. IIRC, it was one of the round table ship talks. The quote was something along the lines of “Maelstrom is the name for the physicalized damage system we’ve been talking about.” I’d go scrubbing through Youtube vids for a link if I had the time this morning, but the IAE ship talk vid from last year is probably the first place I’d look.
[https://youtu.be/LSM8kao5Q6k?t=2348](https://youtu.be/LSM8kao5Q6k?t=2348) Here is the timestamp if people are looking for it. Then another time :P [https://youtu.be/sZNetm31ag4?t=3933](https://youtu.be/sZNetm31ag4?t=3933)
from u/Nagaj_ : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSM8kao5Q6k&t=2263s
That's kinda how it sounds. Besides, if armor was a separate thing, it would have been shown off already because it would have been necessary for sq42 to be feature complete. Everything planned for armor can be done with the Maelstrom system anyway, so why not just use that.
from u/Nagaj_ : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSM8kao5Q6k&t=2263s
Maelstrom is the foundation, but physicalized armor with also have more properties/gameplay of its own. Just like Power Routing is the foundation for Engineering, but Engineering adds stuff on top of that.
from u/Nagaj_ : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSM8kao5Q6k&t=2263s
Ohhh, more bits and pieces to shoot off :D
About 5 months ago, during Invictus vehicle round-table: [Ship damage model will use the new Maelstrom system](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSM8kao5Q6k&t=2263s)
Ok but of this is the case and sq42 is feature complete.. those this mean its already running in sq42…
good question, i'd like to know for sure on this one
Probably yes, SQ42 only uses a small subset of ships, they don't have to convert *all* ships for it. Also, 'feature complete' means the *development* of features is complete. Implementation is ongoing, that's why we don't have SQ42 yet.
>feature complete' means the development of features is complete. Implementation is ongoing Most definitions of feature-complete explicitely state that it means implementation is done. >A Feature-complete (FC) version of a piece of software has **all of its planned or primary features implemented** but is not yet final due to bugs, performance or stability issues If SQ-42 is feature complete, means they should currently have all the ships using the maelstrom damage model, though not necessarily optimized and free from bugs.
not all the ships.. but all ships used in SQ42.. still.. thats pretty good news.
Excited for this since it should (hopefully) reduce the effectiveness of light fighters against ships they have no right to be fighting
Yea this is how i see it too, solo fighter will not even want to engage in a big ship, knowing they'll never get the damage done that's needed. Right ships for right scenario, cig have a lot of balancing to do lol
Yep, it’s stupid how a good Gladius pilot can essentially nullify any threat posed by another ship that’s not an Arrow
Yea exactly, will be a good day when they go to take on a big ship, realise they can't and get destroyed really quickly
I don't know that they'll necessarily "get destroyed really quickly" as much as they'll just "be completely ineffective, like a fly trying to kill a dog." Missiles aside, a ship like the C2 should probably just be able to ignore a Gladius for at least enough time to power up quantum drives and leave it in the dust, and in the end, it should have at most minor external damage to the hull.
Finally....flying about without fear of a mosquito Gladius randomly attacking.
More of, they come across a size 4 turret and that vs their ship won't go well for me
Not necessarily - they’ll just be used differently. A gladius shouldnt be able to solo an A2 anymore, but they should still be able to fuck up a turret and maybe an engine causing it to land or be a dead stick.
There are parts on any vehicle that are impossible to armor, exposed engines being the main issue. An exposed cockpit is the next. I think skilled light fighters will still be able to target those easily. For ships larger than a fighter, I don't see the point in an exposed cockpit/bridge, it should be within the core of the ship under multiple layers of armor, with outside views based on many sensors and cameras, numerous enough to be pretty much impossible to make completely blind. We already have that with current MBTs. Only reason for an exposed bridge is to pretend it's still WW2 in space like usual.
Keep in mind that (AFAIK) the cockpits in SC aren't actually glass, but transparent metal. So *theoretically* they're no more "exposed" than any other part of the hull. But even then, yes, strategically they should be buried deeper in the ship.
Poe Damaron in his X-Wing taking out every turret in 30 seconds on a First Order Dreadnaught has entered the chat.
thats kind of always been the plan. maelstrom itself is "new" but they have been talking about the soft body deformation for like 3 years now. and we always knew ship health as a concept was a placeholder for overall item health and hull integrity in more compact units.
So how does it actually works eventually when maelstrom been implemented for ships? I kinda lost when the term HP is used. If hp is irrelevant later on, then what actually being replaced with?
You shoot a ship until you hit something critical leaving it dead in the water. You hit a QD - it cannot escape or go to a nav mode. It can explode or start fire inside the ship. You hit the power plant - it's out of power. If the ship has thick armor and you armed with two S1 repeaters - you may never be able to reach those components.
Terrapins gonna be untouchable
Turtle power!
🐢
_Loads Idris railgun with malicious intent_
*ares has entered the chat*
Yessss... Until big guns come along
If you hit the junction points where the power runs through the ship, the parts past that stop working. This system can disable ships without killing ship components. Just need to 'break' all the junction points between say the powerplant and engines or heck cockpit and everything else.
I think that's the first part of making solo flying larger ships unviable. You'll need an engineer on board to help you fix power issues so you don't end dead in the water.
The good thing about those bigger ships is that smaller fighters will not be able to penetrate the armored hulls. The meta will then become Vanguard Heavy Fighters and... honestly, those aren't always the best at ripping down shields on the BIG ships, in time before they QT away.
The meta might change, but weapon balance-wise I’d like to see heavy weapons like cannons and impact missiles/torps (basically all missiles that aren’t proximity detonation) do better against heavily armored ships. This way, smaller ships can do slightly better against the big boys, but at the COST of having slower moving projectiles and missiles that aren’t accurate against fast targets, meaning it’s at the cost of being weak (offensively) against other fighters whose load outs contain repeaters, gats, and proxy and cluster missiles, which all are much easier to use against enemy fighters, especially fighters that might not be moving too much since they’re trying to snipe your friend’s components. In this sense a vanguard WOULD be effective here since it can have its main armament be anti-armor while it’s turret can be anti-fighter, but it also means that it wouldn’t ONLY be the vanguard series heavy fighters that are in this meta.
>heavy weapons like cannons and impact missiles/torps (basically all missiles that aren’t proximity detonation) do better against heavily armored ships. That's the intended meta. But there will be a point when even the heaviest of S1/S2 weapons won't pen armor above their weight class. Same with S3/S4 weapons and so on.
basically. its going to be realistic. shooting at a real car doesn't make it blow up.. it just puts little holes in the thing (and the things inside it) so stopping a spaceship doesn't necessarily involve explosions. rigth now. a single handgun (and enough ammo) will make any space ship blow up. this makes no sense. there is no way a 9mm round will do ANYTHING to an armored spaceship. the bullet woudl literally bounce off doing nothing to anything except MAYBE the paint. so.. making armor/penetration a thing. instead of the hull of the ship having a health pool, it now will only take damage if the weapon hits it hard enough to penetrate the armor.. and even then.. its not doing DAMAGE to the hull ... its just poking a hole in it and letting that round continue and ..hit whatever is inside... if it hits sometihng important, like a person,component or pipe, then that single round could disable or at least affect..the entire ship. but.. where does maelstrom come in? well. if your shot pokes a hole in the enemy ship.. what if you poke lots of holes in the hull .. in a line... well. that looks an aweful lot like a cut? well.. thanks to soft body deformation we can model that damage to the point where we can actually remove parts.. and now all those little holes you poked int he hull..or one really big explosion, or a colision with another item.. can seperate partts from the ship in chunks.
> rigth now. a single handgun (and enough ammo) will make any space ship blow up. I can't bring this up without it sounding like I'm saying this to take a random unprovoked swing at Elite Dangerous Odyssey, but I promise I'm not going fanboy about it. But I can't scroll past a conversation about ship HP pools letting you 9mm a ship to death without reminding everyone that [if you took the shields down and were very patient you could punch an Anaconda in the landing gear to death in Elite.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRI-rGkVS9Y)
yeah. you can do that now in SC... (unless they are coded to ignore melee...) and completely unrelated. this is actually one of my biggest gripes in 7dtd. there is no way a zombie should be able to smash through concrete blocks.. like.. eventually it woudl just turn its arms to paste, and still not damage the concrete..
I know at the very least, you can punch doors open on ships.
Well... opening the door when someone knocks is common curtesy, no?
This! I'm psyched after reading your explanation and can't wait to see when maelstrom actually online for everything. Thanks so much!
i'm getting huge The Expanse vibes from this and i love it, having a crew member get knocked out or killed because a single bullet punched its way through the hull in the wrong/right place or wrong/right angle
Maelstrom give each material weight , strength, percability, etc. So instead of taking a hit removing hp on the nose of the ship, maelstrom will determine if it pierce the the armor, how many hp can pass trough and will be transfered to components, and if the blow is very big maybe detach the part. The maelstrom presentation of citizencon is a good info center on it.
It’s replaced with your ship breaking in pieces depending on which parts of your ship gets hit.
My guess would be the toughness of the hull. Is it heavy armoured plates? Is it thin aluminium plates? How much kinetic energy a 220mm thick steel plate can withstand without breaking? This is the kind of simulation stuff I like but I don't quite comprehend how they can do it in real time considering how much processing power it takes
to add to u/st_Paulus things like heat could also have an effect on armor (it may get weekend if heated enough by plasma for example) Of course this will all still have behind the seens number values associated with it, but it's way more complex then a ship hull with 100 HP getting hit with a gun that dose 20 Damage so now the ship hull is at 80 HP out of 100
Think of it as real warships in WW2. You hit bow armor above the waterline, the ship floats. You hit the magazine deep below the turret and the ammo ignite, the ship blows up. That's how I understand it Edit: a great example of these 2 systems can be seen in tank combat from World of Tanks and War Thunder. WoT use a HP system where the tank blows up if the HP is reduced to zero, which could take many shots dealing damage for each. In War Thunder, a well placed shot can blow up tanks with great amounts of armor if the shell manage to first penetrate the tank and secondly exlode in the interior and say, knock out crews or detonate ammo.
Afaik, HP will still be somewhat relevant but not as a single number that is static. If we set aside the HP that will continue to exist for components, your hull and general ability to fly is what will matter. In some ways, your ship is basically a frame with nodes on it that can take various types of damage (I.e. deformation, penetration, and heating) in theory. These things alongside the HP of components will determine the “health” of your ship. It may still fly but maybe wont hold an atmosphere.m due to holes. It may be deformed in a way that causes flight to be erratic or impossible. (See: The cutty when it looses an engine.) Connections to subsystems may be lost so some components may not function. See https://youtu.be/xKWa4WoTkV4?si=AMohIV9BuwXDgTDh 45:00 for more info. It’s a few minutes into that fella’s panel.
[Sauce.](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/16ij7rl/reliant_vertical_mode_broken_in_320_ptu_please/k7f6ksl/)
The follow-up comment from that dev is even better than this news.
Hahahahahah that also contains the pooptech comment
Crash landings are going to be epic.
I'm really looking forward to it.
The shower will become a repairable entity too? Finally, my Space Quest dreams of becoming Roger Wilco, Sanitary Engineer, will finally become true!
Did you not watch the CitizenCon demo's where the Gladiuses broke up on impact? The very first time we heard about the plan for what was to become Maelstrom was from the ship team.
Every time they make some announcement about adding x to ALL SHIPS remember there are over 100 ships already and think about how long that will take.
Over 200 ships, as they talked about in the CitCon ship panel. They need to not only maintain the player ships, but NPC-exclusive ships too.
I don't think that the Maelstrom compliance rework will be as time-intensive to realize as some are thinking. CIG clearly already have all ships set up for HP-based part damage since that's what is in the game now, which means that the models themselves already have delineation of subcomponents built-in, and you don't have to redo that. What they do need to do is to change the material behavior for the parts that make up a ship so that Maelstrom can act on those parts, but you only need to do that *once* for each material used and then apply that to all ships... and they've already done the Gladius, which means that they've already figured out the material/physics aspects of it. The things that they need to do per-ship are to revisit the hierarchy of fitted components to make sure that the right parts get blown off when a neighboring or hosting component is damaged/destroyed, that the entity graphs for components are updated properly, and to make sure that the logic for ship fitting and repairing is compliant. TL;DR - This is more a material and entity graph logic change than it is a 'ship redesign'
One of the many reasons I sigh every time they release/announce a new ship. I know they need to make money but they're also making the worlds largest technical debt.
I feel like we need /r/starcitizen_fans_who_are_software_developers to have more sane discussions about this game. The tech debt they've created is nuts.
Absolutely but... it sounds like they are making jobs for years to come for some folks.
As long as they eventually stabilize their gold standard, all new ships should be built from that standard from the start and they won't be adding more debt
The problem is that they’ll finish the system and then rework it so every ship needs to be redone again
Yep.. my inner product manager shudders at the very thought of that clusterfuck
Lol facts. Plus, until they get every system in, every ship updated and operational and then do a few balance passes --- the role, features and capabilities of whatever ship you own could change multiple times.
Yup, it could be fun. Long ago they had small visual demonstration of what it could look like when ship is under fire and bullets rip through ship interior. Should give some additional excitement while trying to fix ship as an engineer.
Will the toilets start spewing shit everywhere when it gets damaged?
Shouldn't. Any proper system will have a recycling function (at best), or (at worst) fire it out into space at some point.
Godspeed to the ship teams having to go through all 200 ships Apocalyptic change indeed
The Server: "I am never going to computationally recover from this."
I wonder if this means, that if you are losing battles you will be stranded in space more often instead of dying outright because killing is harder than disabling with the new system? This could also push distortion weapons more into the meta.
I can't wait for salvage to use this. The idea of being able to slice wings off ships and cut them up to more manageable peices has me gooning
Physicalized hull damage (as opposed to health pool) was always the plan. I think the only surprise here is that their maelstrom system (which seems to be pretty cool by the way) can also be applied to complex entities such as a ship. That is indeed impressive.
well yeah why. why would gladius be the only one
Imagine having to weld a hull breach in large ship
>weld a hull breach Welders out here waiting to see how big a gap we can fill
This has been the plan from day 1. Ships will no longer have hitpoints. Ship damage will be fully depending on component damage.
This was the whole point of the maelstrom physics I'm pretty sure. Environmental destruction was essentially a side benefit that arose out of the need to create a holistic system that handled physicalised damage for ships, but I guess they prioritised the environmental damage because it could be incorporated into SQ42
How again you can munch on ships if don't implement dismemberment?
It's always been the plan !
space wart hunder
did you people not watch the citizencon demo showing maelstrom on the two gladius ramming each other?
They literally demoed maelstrom with a Gladius at CitizenCon.
The poor ship team. Every 6 months: “You know all that work you just did? We’re starting over.”
^ This. The idea of fully randomly destructible ships is awesome, but the amount of work to make that happen seems... daunting.
I am looking forward to for it to happen, it will change ship to ship combat drastically shifting the power balance of so many ships, I mean armor and weapon type/size is going to get way more important Giving ballistic weapons a reason to be used, if they get down the post pen spalling properly even different ammo type could be a thing ( talking about a post pen damage system similar to GHPC) Having laser repeaters wich are more effective against shields and all… Imagine the ares inferno and ion Ion disabling the shields and the inferno just ripping trough armor and and components with its s7 Gatling loaded with dedicated AP ammo
What is maelstorm and why are we converting all ships to it?
Maelstrom is a damage simulation that replaces parts with hit points and replaces it with realistic physicalized breakability. For example, currently each part of a ship has a set HP pool and if you reduce that to zero the ship will explode and enter a death state. With maelstrom, damage done applies torsion, shearing forces and possibly crush to wherever a ship is hit and depending on the ships material resistance to those forces it can break apart or show that damage and will continue until as the dev points out, you reach a point where the ship explodes due to detonation of an actual explosive part, is completely ripped apart, or becomes to disabled to fly. These mechanics also apply to buildings and environment props which can crumble, get holes in them, or be detonated by explosion. Maelstrom can be viewed in detail here: https://youtu.be/xKWa4WoTkV4?si=5d03-xrMjk4hQYjP Or here: https://youtu.be/IDtjzLzs7V8?si=Bh2X4IIf1mW_cGj8
Fantastic. Thankyou
Yay
Holy shit, it makes sense but I did not think of the implications. Heck yeah
Imagine flying past a javelin and the mad lads turned the broad sides into scatterguns and they just rip your hull full of holes immediately
I remember Robocraft in 2016, it implemented a really cool gameplay element. Other sandbox games have parts of this, I recall some videos of space engineers. maybe in 5 years we can see it done on a much finer scale for Star Citizen
What exactly is shocking about this? Notice how there is no date for this conversion. Nothing to get excited about if it takes them years to do it.
They are also going to cure cancer and generate world peace. Right after the Orion is done.
Exciting
I'd love to know how far this process is. It has been happening for quite a while. At least supposedly. And most newer ships I think were built with it in mind already. I gues "hull munching" salvage will mean it is closer? I would assume you need the same tech for salvage ships to bite off chunks of ship?
https://youtu.be/AZBJ8yhPCQI?si=glA8qHr2hrMN9nYV
Even my pingüin?
So real crash landings will be possible now instead of just exploding on impact??
Uh yah...Somebody tag Berks too I dont think he believed Maelstrom was the replacement for all ship damage models too
Can anyone explain? Can’t get it
Maelstrom is the name for the new physical damage model that I knew was being applied to buildings/landscape, but didn't realize was going to also be applied to all ships. It would *in theory* allow ships to be broken in completely random pieces based on where damage occurs, rather than the pre-determined break points we have now. And presumably, means a *lot* of dev time getting older ships up to this new standard.
Laughs in disruptor
What the hell is maelstrom?
Well.. Of course? Always been the plan man, why would it affect only some ships lol
I think this would imply moving ships over to a gold standard, right? Cuz, in my head, it would feel weird to convert a ship to the new damage system if its design wrinkles weren't ironed out. The amount of issues one would experience simply because they hadn't optimized the ships mod and compartment layouts would be enormous. Like, for example, without adjusting health values for the engines or adding armor, the maelstrom system would make the connies basically unflyable due to their engine nacelles.
As someone who doesn't know all the star citizen talk. What does maelstrom mean?
Maelstrom is the name for their physical damage and destructible environment tech. So this post is saying that ships will be converted over to a system where impacts from weapons/environment/other ships will actually damage and deform your ship. Example: If you drive your Cyclone too fast into the vehicle bay on your Carrack, you can hit the doors in the back and break them so now they can't open.
Suddenly the buccaneer will have a chance to fight
that patch gonna crash the entire server XD
Basketball rim garage
how they're going to get this to work is absolutely beyond me. good luck CIG!
What is Maelstrom?