[New build - EXPERIMENTAL] 21w12a: Physics engine overhaul
Some big progress have been made on the physics engine overhaul with the migration of the brick narrow-phase logic to the new framework.
It moves from a grid-based system to a Bounding Volume Hierarchy one.
Improvements:
Changes ahead:
Unlike many voxel building game Starship-evo uses bricks that can be rescaled and placed in various increment.
It only uses a voxel logic to allow a few features like voxel paint, smart border and HP armor computation and up until this update the brick physics narrow-phase.
Having an hybrid solution has many drawbacks like memory usage and code complexity.
Following the latest technological breakthrough it has been decided with the community (discussion) to move away from the voxel logic.
Here are the impact for this and the following builds:
The upside for this switch are:
This was quite a heavy refactor so bugs are to be expected! Thanks for reporting any regressions.
Bugfixes:

Thanks for playing!
It moves from a grid-based system to a Bounding Volume Hierarchy one.
Improvements:
- Significantly less memory usage, especially for large build. On a normal game RAM saving are between 300MB and 400MB.
- Entity / Entity collision check is now fully using the new Data oriented logic and multi-threaded, which means that FPS will stay steady during collision heavy situations.
- Children entity collision check is also using the new framework but have yet to be multi-threaded. Some large FPS improvements have been made.
Changes ahead:
Unlike many voxel building game Starship-evo uses bricks that can be rescaled and placed in various increment.
It only uses a voxel logic to allow a few features like voxel paint, smart border and HP armor computation and up until this update the brick physics narrow-phase.
Having an hybrid solution has many drawbacks like memory usage and code complexity.
Following the latest technological breakthrough it has been decided with the community (discussion) to move away from the voxel logic.
Here are the impact for this and the following builds:
- Voxel paint removal: hull will be painted entirely like smaller bricks. To be done. All ship will be migrated to the new sytem.
- HP armor and damage will have a new system (hp per brick). To be done, for now HP have been deactivated.
- "Smart border" for hull removal. The border look have been significantly toned down to account for that.
The upside for this switch are:
- Massive memory gain: the memory requirement of a voxel-less logic only depends on the number of bricks. It means that super large build will be possible
- Large brick will be added to the game later on.
- Faster shader (so higher FPS most of the time)
- Massive reduction in code complexity, allowing faster developments down the road.
This was quite a heavy refactor so bugs are to be expected! Thanks for reporting any regressions.
Bugfixes:
- #3673 Opening the spaceship computer slows fps on large ship after close.

Thanks for playing!