New Physics Engine: Damage and Wrecks

Since 0.9.14, combat changed not in a list of balance numbers but in what sits underneath it. This is the second of three posts catching the story up to 0.11.5 — and it's about how ships now break, scatter, and take hits.

Damage used to be a number that ticks down. Now a hit physically carves a piece out of the ship's hull: the outline really changes, a hole or a chewed-off edge is left where the shot landed, and with every new hit the ship's silhouette grows more ragged. Health doesn't "drain away" — the ship literally loses parts of itself.

This isn't cosmetic paint over ordinary hit points — it's how damage works underneath: we don't track "how much is left" but "what exactly is left of the ship." So two equally battered ships can be damaged in completely different ways — it all depends on where the hits landed.

A torn-off piece of hull doesn't vanish or turn into an abstract effect — it becomes a real wreck in the world: it flies off with the momentum of the ship it broke from, spins, and collides with everything else. And whatever was mounted on that part goes with it: lose the nose, and you lose what was attached to it.

A destroyed ship doesn't just disappear either — it breaks apart into wrecks that stay in the fight as physical bodies. After a heated exchange the battlefield isn't empty but a tangle of torn hulls, with the shooting still going on among them.

Fast projectiles are an old headache in any action game: between two frames a bullet can slip past a thin target, and the hit is simply lost. We fixed that: a hit is now checked along the bullet's whole path, not just at frame points, so high-speed weapons stop shooting straight through the target. Ricochets got more honest too — a projectile bounces off the shield at the correct angle, not along its stale flight direction.

All of this — carved hulls, flying wrecks, dozens of bodies in contact — only holds together if there's solid physics underneath. Under the hood we swapped the game's physics foundation for a native engine instead of the previous Java implementation. You don't see this as a line in a changelog but as headroom for scale: a fight of a few ships and a handful of wrecks turns into a large brawl, and the game keeps running smoothly through it.

So it doesn't stay just words, we filmed a simple comparison: the same large scene, a frame counter in the corner — before the engine swap and after. The difference is obvious at once, and while the new physics wasn't the only thing we worked on for smoothness, it's what contributed the most to that gain.

This is part two. In the final post of the 0.11.5 series we'll cover how ship control itself and its behavior over the network became smoother — so that everything described here feels as good as it looks.