This is the most basic level of analysis, just showing me how the missions get assigned. I'm sure it'll expand with additional pieces as I find more weird behaviors I need additional tools to figure out.

This in-game debugging tool shows me all of the enemy units, and each round of prioritization and assignment so I can more easily see why specific units are getting tasked the way they are. I'd been meaning to do this for a while, but something else was always more important.

I talked a lot about how the AI works in the second half of devlog 36, but this is what its "thought process" actually looks like. It generates a bunch of missions for each unit, sorts them to find the most important one, and assigns it. It does this for multiple rounds until all units are tasked.

I've had fever dreams that were more coherent than this.

I'm so glad you finally have a steam page! I've been looking forward to being able to give this a try for months. Congrats!

The funny part is that the barrel needs to be squished to fit inside the mount space. I guess we'll see how this works for turrets with more significant barrel overhang, like the 450s...

The most annoying part was accounting for the fact that smaller components fit in larger sockets, so the UVs stored in the socket need to be scaled accordingly. Here you can see the gray box takes up more space than the turret base. That took a little bit of napkin math but it worked in the end.

Aside from the obvious increase in shader complexity, there's no additional overhead for this from applying damage to the hull normally: the sockets pull the armor damage mask texture directly from their corresponding hull segment and do a little UV coordinate remapping.

This technique isn't as simple as the engines, which are just mapped directly to their corresponding points on the hull in Blender. I have to determine the corners of the socket and it's rotation on the UV map and record those, then assign those values to the component material after it's installed.

I wasn't super thrilled with the original mount damage effects I did a little while back, which would just grunge up the mount's whole mesh based on damage below it. It was really just meant to keep the mount from appearing pristine after a reactor bloom, but I knew we could do better.

This really whips the llamas ass

It's not perfect, as it only projects the hits directly underneath the bell, but it allows us to texture all of the engine components on a full UV map while still knowing where to address damage in relation to the hull.

The engine bells are projected flat on the UV2 map, down onto the surface that contains them. This allows us to sample the same damage mask from the hull under each point on the bell, and doesn't require another hull segment with its own mask. This works for the small maneuvering thrusters too.

I appreciate the little red marks on the affected versions, but I open Unity Hub maybe once a week (or whenever my editor crashes) and update it even less. The email subject didn't include "critical", "security", or "vulnerability". The words it did use I commonly associate with FOMO marketing.