Grasping the Concept

At the concept stage, these ships are at their trickiest to calculate, as they are generally very high poly meshes without the benefits of physics sub-meshes. This requires a small amount of work to simplify and cap hole to allow us to accurately generate a volume for the ship.

Capping Holes is the process of fully enclosing our collision proxy meshes and open faces that can cause issues in the engine. In essence we make them “watertight” while marking up specific faces that will allow entities to move through them unimpeded. Whilst this is usually done in the production stage we had to move ahead with this at a simple level for many of our concept ships to achieve standardized mass calculations for all ships.

My Density Has Brought Me to You

Once we had the volume of the ship as if it was solid block of material, we then subtracted the volume blocked out by the design team for the interior play space, cockpit and internal local grid mesh. This new volume (solid minus interior) was assigned an appropriate density value with a few modifiers:

Construction Methodology

Origin ships use more advanced lightweight materials that retain strength rather than the traditional stalwarts like Aegis and Anvil with heavier metals. The materials in play are an essential component in accurately accessing the correct mass of a vehicle, ship, or space station.

Species Construction

Xi’an ships are renowned for their materials and are significantly lighter than human counterparts, with their collaboration with MISC allowing some crossover. Design will work with the Lore Team to determine not only the aesthetics in play for a specific species like Banu or Vanduul, but they types of resources at their disposal and technological advantage of their culture in determining the materials used in construction.

Design Role

Ships that are naturally heavily armored or require more rigid internal support generate a denser value. It is vitally important not only to consider the source and history inherent in each ship, but it’s intended purpose within both the lore of the Star Citizen universe, and the design of our game.

It’s What’s Inside That Counts

Once the mass for the external “chassis” of the ship was generated, we used the internal volume again to generate a weight for the interior. This simulated all the interior panelling, doors, wiring etc as the design blockout volumes and local grids are slightly larger than the interior playable space (as they encompass the walls/floor meshes) and we felt this was a better reflection on the overall mass.

Only What You Take with You

Finally, we looked at the ship’s proposed or current default loadout, and added the specifics for each of these components (which also got a rework pass) to the final mass generated from the above steps.

What does this mean? All of our ships and characters now behave much better as the values used throughout the game are much more in sync. One example we uncovered during this rework was that on a variety of ships the physics meshes were uncapped, which during detachment and having the mass assigned to them was causing the engine to incorrectly calculate the mass of the detached part and thus it would behave poorly. With all the parts now capped or in the process of being capped, ship destruction and part detachment is much more reliable and believable, with less instances of huge ship debris parts spinning off at excessive speed. In addition to better behavior it also meant a lot of systemic features can be better accounted for such as carried items and cargo. Previously, with ships being so wildly disparate in weight, the simple act of adding a heavier weapon could significantly alter one ship unintentionally.