ST- John Crewe has answered the ever growing question of when more ships will get LAMP, or night vision, in the game.
Spectrum link: Here
JCrewe CIG
Hi all,
I wanted to provide a bit of context around why LAMP hasn’t yet appeared across more ships. Due to the way vehicles are built in Star Citizen, canopies typically consist of two panes of glass: an interior-facing pane and an exterior-facing pane. As you may have noticed, LAMP operates on the interior pane only, which means the effect is visible to players inside the cockpit looking outward. When ships are authored, there are two slightly different workflows for how the canopy and interior glass are set up depending on the ship:
Animated canopies – If the canopy needs to animate, the interior glass pane must be attached to the canopy itself, which is part of the vehicle’s exterior asset.
Static canopies – If the canopy does not animate, the interior glass pane can instead be placed within the interior “object container,” meaning it is functionally separate from the exterior asset.
When LAMP was initially planned, the intention was to roll it out to the ten most-used single-seat ships. With support from the game code and graphics teams, we were able to automate much of the setup for ships that fall into the first category. As a result, those ships were relatively straightforward to support. Ships in the second category are more complex. Because the interior glass is not linked to the exterior canopy, LAMP cannot currently be applied using the same approach. We have raised work with the relevant teams to support this case, but the timing will depend on their broader priorities and scheduling. The positive news is that a potential path forward has been identified. We already have other systems that link similar assets, such as the canopy rain and snow effects, which will hopefully provide a framework to extend LAMP more broadly.
We did also explore an interim approach that would involve separating the interior glass pane and reattaching it to the exterior asset. However, applying this change across the remaining ships would require a significant amount of art and design time as well as the potential for introducing further issues such as undesired wear on interior glass panes. For that reason, a code-based solution is likely to be the cleaner and more sustainable approach in the long term.
We're looking forward to getting the rest of our ship lineup up to date with LAMP functionality and will keep you in the loop as we progress
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