Dear Stormworkers,
This week is announcement week, with last week being an update, and next week also bringing an update.
This week we discuss a new upgrade that we are planning to the vehicle management engine within Stormworks.
Currently in Stormworks, a single vehicle contains all the physical bodies related to that vehicle. This can include the main vehicle body, as well as any hinged parts such as custom doors or cranes, and any detached parts such as droppable bombs or lifeboats. Because these objects are all managed per-vehicle, this means that these parts load in and out together, even if they have become very spread out. They can become spread out if a part is dropped, or a solid rocket booster is fired off, or a lifeboat leaves its parent ship.
The issue with a vehicle being spread over a large area is that it is hard for the vehicle management engine to decide when that vehicle should be unloaded. This makes it difficult for the game to unload distant islands that the vehicle may be resting on, or unload these distant objects which can improve performance. With the explosions introduced in the Weapons DLC, a vehicle entirely encapsulated within an explosion can be completely destroyed and despawned. Sometimes you can see a missile hit a target before exploding then bouncing off the target or becoming stuck in it. These missiles should really be completely destroyed, but because they are considered a part of a larger vehicle, they are not.
So this is something we are reworking, deep within the game engine. We plan to split vehicles into sub-vehicles, and these sub-vehicles will be managed independently of each other. This will mean that each sub-vehicle will occupy only a small amount of space, which gives a huge advantage when managing them. Missiles and bombs will be destroyed when they hit their target. Distant vehicle parts will unload (unless they have a "keep alive block") which will help performance in some situations. This change will also be very useful for a future major update that we are working on.
The player experience should otherwise not be changed, and returning a vehicle to the edit grid will return the complete vehicle rather than just part of it.
While this is fundamentally a simple change to understand, vehicles connect to almost every system within the game so this change requires us to carefully and methodically upgrade lots of code in lots of places, and has been time consuming.
This upgrade should release later this year.
We look forward to your thoughts and feedback! We will return next week with a new minor update.
Much love <3,
The Stormworks Developers