Search thousands of answers Star Citizen developers gave in official shows, streams and posts.

Yes. So the first good news is that the new flight model is fully complete, working in Squadron 42. There is no master modes. All the functionality you have at your fingertips is purely based on your engineering distribution. So if you want to have weapons powered at the same time as your quantum drive powered at the same time as radar, it's purely up to you. So you can manipulate your power pips to dictate how you want to fly. We also have the quantum boost functionality in quantum travel. So now there is no SCM and NAV. You just fly in the direction you want. Go where you want. You go max speed or not max speed. You can quantum boost at any moment. Quantum boost is, I have to say, incredible to use. You can use it in atmosphere. You can use it in space. It takes a short amount of time to charge up and go. When you are going, you're in this kind of quantum bubble light. You can actually steer and maneuver. You're obviously not going as fast as quantum travel at all, but it's giving you a much faster speed around and navigation. So if you're coming out of a landing zone and wanting to get up to an LEO station, you can trigger quantum boost and get there.

And it's freeform, right? You don't pick a destination?

No, it's freeform. So you can go into the black of space, quantum boost around a planet. And then obviously then we have quantum travel. So the new flight model, obviously it's been directed by Chris alongside myself. We're really happy with what's there in Squadron. We will be obviously then getting lots of feedback, which I think we've already had a few tests with players from Star Citizen. The work ahead of us is now transposing that flight model into Star Citizen with all of the necessary details and intricacies that Star Citizen brings, because obviously they're not a one-to-one gameplay experience. We know that.

Making sure it works in a networked environment as well. Make sure we don't introduce any new desyncs.

Yes, 100%. Things like bringing it over, making sure it works in a multiplayer environment, making sure it works in PvP, making sure it works in PvE, making sure it works for all careers: miners, bounty hunters, haulers. So we've spent a long time making sure that it is fun to use, it's intuitive to use, and ultimately has a lot of depth for the players who want to go in and manipulate how they want to set up their ship. They can do that. I think we're in a really good place. We'll still continue to get lots of feedback as we transpose into Star Citizen. But from a Squadron perspective, that flight model, which is what we want to become the foundation, is functionally complete.

The core ethos of what we call Mission 2.0 is essentially enabling our designers, or anyone in the company, to be able to create meaningful, scalable and robust content. So what do we mean by that? Let's talk about the intent first, as that pretty much solidifies the direction we want to take it to. So as Rich said in the 1.0 conversation, we're going to be having a main story, right? So the first part of that is our mission system will need to be able to create story scenarios, which influences NPCs or game world objects, animation, Track View events, dynamic events in the game world. So when we're telling story, that mission system can drive a lot of that. And currently, we don't have a lot of that functionality. The second major thing is we want to be able to do quest chains. So once you're progressing along that story, you want to be able to finish Story Mission 1, and then unlock Story Mission 2, etc. Again, functionality that we're missing currently right now.

And those quest chains retain or continue across logins.

We were going to get to that, but Rich, you're absolutely right. So jumping onto a little bit of the functionality outside of the intent, upgrading the capability of what we can do. Our first major one is obviously persistence between logins. Carl, you've picked up a mission. You log off for the night, the next day you still have that mission. You don't really care what had to happen on the back end for that mission to still be there in your contract manager the next day, but you want to log in the next day and see it there, ready to go, right? Also, other types of functionality we need is a deeper ability to specify mission sharing and rewards. So right now, as we've seen on a variety of our missions, participation or rewards being split equally are some issues that we wish we had a few more parameters on. So if you want to share a mission with someone and they want to receive some rewards, they have to do a certain amount of participation.

I think it's also really key to understand there that we want to encourage people to be able to play together. They shouldn't have to play together, but if they want to play together, we don't want to penalize them. So Mission 2.0 will give us the ability to allow players to come together without having to vie for individual rewards. They should be rewarded for playing together.

I mean, you've talked a lot about the player impact on Mission 2.0, but for me, it's all about the way that our content creation teams are working to create those missions, right? Our mission tools suite at the moment is very granular and detailed. Mission designers are essentially programming in our mission description tooling. And so they have to worry about way too many error handling cases, initialization, streaming race conditions and things like that. They have to uniquely and very specifically find all of the elements in the world that they need to work with for their mission. And Mission 2.0 is sending things to be much more building-block oriented and make it more declarative. The mission designer will declare what conditions and what environment and what objects they need to be able to work with, and then the mission system provides them with that. They don't have to go and find them and serialize them and worry about their loading and initialization order and things like that. So yeah, it's a big tech...

For everybody at home, that means those missions will be more robust, have less bugs, easier to find out.

There's a question later on that discusses that, so we'll talk about that in a bit.

Well, it means basically if you're a designer, you can focus on designing the content and not...

The gnarly edge case stuff.

Also, some other improvements outside of the way we're building is the presentation of that information. So as we work towards 1.0 and we're scaling the type of mission content, we need to be cleaner in terms of how we're presenting those contracts to the player. The ability to search or the ability to filter, things like that, will be very valuable. Also, the way you accept those missions. Right now, you open up the contract manager, you pick a contract and you're good to go. On the story missions, they'll call you up, they'll enroll you into that mission.

There's also a couple of things there. We want to be able to tell people what tools they need to take on that mission, whether they need a multi-tool or whether they need a specific ship. Also rewards, outlining what rewards they'll get. So a lot of functionality, both from the back-end side for developers to be able to make more robust missions and more complicated missions, all the way to the front end, from the players experiencing that mission, both from a point of view of as soon as they pick up the contract versus playing through the mission and obviously then the rewards at the end. So yeah, there's a lot coming, I think, with Mission 2.0, which is going to be good.

So in a nutshell, Mission 2.0 is essentially an umbrella term we use that affects everything from where we're heading to the way we're building to almost how the engine works. So it's a big initiative.

So essentially engineering is something that we're always looking at and making adjustments to. I'd say the current balance isn't necessarily where we'd want it to be, which is why we're continuing to iterate on it.

The standpoint right now from an engineering perspective, I think, is to let everybody know that it's not where we want it to be. It's not the finished product. The intention with engineering, like we've always wanted it to be, is for it to extend the life of your ship. And with that comes the opportunity for players to engage in further activities to be able to do that. I think right now the balance of fire is probably a bit underwhelming with what we want it to be. The problem that we have trying to achieve the true full scope of engineering is that there are other features around it that need to come into play. But I think that we will definitely be balancing engineering over the next year to make sure that we are getting that tuning right on the base functionality. And like I said, when the new flight model comes in, engineering will be the way that you manipulate and utilize your ship, both from a single-seater all the way up to a capital-class ship. So there's definitely things for us to do there. But at least that's the current standard. But I know that you wanted to take us through some of the future.

We can elaborate on a bit more. So let's talk about soft death a little bit. So when you're fighting specifically AI ships, the soft death tuning is also, I wouldn't consider, where we want it to be. And what I mean by that is right now, there's a high likelihood that they would just explode. So we want AI ships that you're fighting to explode if a component goes critical. But then you also don't want a ship to be dead in the water and the mission still requiring you to take it out. So we'll be adding a few more callbacks on a mission point to be able to understand certain scenarios where it will consider that ship no longer part of the mission requirement, which I think will help. Another part of that is once the ship is soft-deathed, we want to be incentivizing more dynamic content. And what I mean by that is cargo manifests right now are also built through the mission. So obviously that's not very scalable. It requires every mission to be prescribed explicitly in terms of the manifests, whereas really we want that on ship archetypes. So basically when you come across an AI ship in the wilderness, that will have its cargo manifest, and that means we can create more dynamic scenarios. We're also going to be looking at the bug on the MFD screen. So when you scan that ship, you'll get more of a comprehensive and legible readout, again, to further give you the information you need about whether you want to...

You want to be able to go into combat, fight an AI ship, and some of the ships might be worn and heavily worn, poor components, and then they blow up. But some ships should also, like you said, soft death, and then you should be able to use that as part of the reward for that mission and be able to go and salvage it, take its components. Does it have cargo on board? And obviously radar should be able to give you some of that information and be able to play the game. That's where we want it to be. We're not there yet, but I think that's still a good vision for us to work towards. The development needs to be faster. We need to get more iterations into the players' hands. I think nobody's happy with the pace of development that we want to push towards on these iterative features, and it's definitely something that we're going to be moving towards. And that's coming back to Mission 2.0. The reason why we're investing time into Mission 2.0 is to help make the development faster, so that we can focus the engineers not on helping the designers to fix mission bugs, but come and help us iterate on engineering. We're well aware that we want to be improving on that front, and it's something that we will do.

Well, this is going to be a very easy question to answer. AI blades are still planned for 1.0. We 100% want to be able to have somebody fly a large ship and be able to utilize AI blades for some of its functionality. That's always been the plan. I think I've been on record saying that in the past. There's no change. The 1.0 vision is the same as we always have. I think everybody, the development and the community, would hopefully wish to have it as soon as possible, and we want that too. But yes, AI blades is still something we're 100% committed to, and we will be delivering that for 1.0.

Ah, so storage and ships. So this is one of the ones where we talked about having it split into three sub-features. We have Starwear, suit lockers, and then there's...

FPS Armor 2.0.

Yeah, exactly. So it's FPS Armor 2.0. So we are working on all three of those things. We want them to come as a cohesive unit. So if I touch on FPS Armor 2.0, in a nutshell, that is the armor roles that I've talked about in the past. We still want to do that. We still want to have heavy armors be G resistance.

And for the system that brings all of this together, we actually did the pre-production of that earlier this year. I just didn't quite get to starting the work.

Yeah, so all of that work is all these little things. It's not this one Goliath feature. It's all these little things for Armor 2.0. So we are slowly chipping away and knocking each one of those down. And then obviously, how does that tie into suit lockers and Starwear? Well, Starwear is the ability to customize your character so that you're not having to wear just a single undersuit and then armor on top, and you're very limited. I've actually played a full version with Starwear. That's almost finished. I've had sunglasses under my helmet. I've been wearing boots on top of my... It was great. But how does suit lockers tie into that? Suit lockers is the way that you save that loadout. So then you can go into your ship and you can be like, this is my radiation package, this is my FPS package, this is my flight suit package. And that should just be a single interaction. You're going in, single interaction, you're now... I've got a different loadout than the loadout that I was in. That should be removing friction so that you can quickly switch between play styles. And obviously, we're working on all three of those. And the big thing with suit lockers, which everyone will obviously want to know, is that insurance, tier three insurance, which includes decorations, would also include weapon racks and suit lockers. So if you are setting up all of your ship and you're filling all of the lockers or the weapon racks or the food goop for your kitchen or your medical goop for your imprint or your medical bay, all of that will be covered under the decorations insurance. So you'll be able to pull it back and decorate your hub or your ship as you see fit, which... what was that guy's name?

So we saw an outstanding video internally. It was incredible. We watched it last week. So that was by John Claude Van Wick.

It was a great video, right? I mean, he had an Idris in the upper hangar. He set up all of the weapon displays and you could go in. That's what we want to see. We want people to be able to customize their ships. We want people to have a home away from home. That is the design. We are absolutely going to deliver that. We are working on those features and it will come.

Maelstrom, okay. So similar to the flight model, Maelstrom is technically complete within Squadron 42. All of the combat, all of the ships, all of our props in the environment are set up with Maelstrom. They all break apart. I mean, the Maelstrom on the ships is fantastic. The challenge ahead of us now is then transposing that into Star Citizen. Obviously Star Citizen is a lot broader, has a lot more, 200-plus ships in Star Citizen, a lot more scope. So obviously it will be the same system, but it will need to be network compliant. It will need to make sure that it's working in all the conditions that we need it from a gameplay perspective and a balance perspective. That will replace the current armor system wholesale. Damage is fully enabled with Maelstrom, so it takes the weight of the bullet, the projectile speed, the type of the bullet, whether it's an energy or ballistic. It calculates the kinetic force on impact. That is all working. All of the physics has been calculated. So that is fully complete in Squadron. Now it's about bringing it over to Star Citizen. And as Squadron moves towards its release, more and more resources, more and more gameplay features will come over. Similar to how we did a big push in 3.23, we brought those features over, we'll be bringing over another tranche of features, which is Flight Model and Maelstrom.

Maelstrom's going to be one of the earliest ones that we look to bring over, right? Because it's quite a chunky piece of tech, and it's going to need some integration with our network model.

I've seen it. I've played it. It is a very different experience based on the armor system currently. So that's exciting.

I won't go on too long about Maelstrom, but the biggest thing is just the feedback that you get when you're shooting a ship. It breaks up much more granularly. You get that feedback that you're actually making progress, that you're removing bits off it. You see bits of wing come off. You see bits of the ailerons come off. You get to see the visual progress.

It's that tangible feedback right from your cockpit, right? And that is game-changing.

Good ideas, great minds think alike. So the expectation with medical is that when you die, you will have multiple options for you to be able to choose from. So you should be able to have your main hospital location, depending on where you want to imprint. You should be able to in the future also have a location for your base. You should be able to have a ship location. So there's like three permanent locations that you'll be able to imprint. And on death, you will be able to choose which one you want to go to, if you've got a specific ship, if you've got a specific base or a specific location.

Or if you've been camped, you can go back to what you want.

You can choose. Then you should also have access to some transient locations. So for example, if you're in one of our large mission operations where you want to be, say, in a line of mine, or you want to be able to respawn at a location, you'll be able to log that imprint, and that will be a temporary imprint that you'll be able to switch back and forth, and vice versa. You'll be able to also have a temporary imprint on somebody else's ship. So you should have these options available to you, and you can choose which location you respawn. And obviously once we've done the Death of a Spaceman in terms of the DNA integrity that ties into your respawn mechanic, that will obviously have wider ramifications depending on where you actually respawn and the tier of the bed and the facilities. But that's what we want. That's been the decision. We've had that design and vision for a long time, and we still want to do that, and we will be bringing that to you in a future update.

It's a good question. I had the same question when I joined the company a few months ago.

Well, why don't you take this one, Carl?

Yeah, I think there's two parts to this question, or two parts to the answer to this question. The first part, and I think the most pertinent part, is what Benoit, our CTO, mentioned, which is a huge scale of volume of content and a huge level of combinatorial complexity of that content with different gameplay systems and features, paired with a lack of validation testing. He talked a lot about our lack of a robust suite of being able to test, validate, pre-submit the work that somebody's doing, working fine for the content and the feature that they're working on, but is not going to regress something that was made seven years ago or what have you, right? Or even seven weeks ago. But that's the thing, right? So once something is released, it goes into the pot of this huge volume of content that we have. And just the scale and combinatorial complexity of all of that integrating together means that we run a pretty high risk of a change not being compatible with something that was released a while ago or fairly recently.

So what are we doing to stop it?

So essentially what we need to do is leverage more automated testing and more tooling around, whether it's gameplay feature development or especially our content development tools, to basically be able to sweep through a suite of all of our content and do some basic regression testing on all of those systems.

The next bit, I'm assuming you're going to talk about the declarative model.

Yeah. The other thing is obviously this person was directly referencing missions. Missions specifically have an additional challenge, which is the complexity of the tooling that we have around our current Mission 1.0, let's say, means that the resulting mission flows and the logic setups and all the things that we just talked about, like finding all the entities, collecting them all together, dealing with streaming race conditions, having to put things into the mission logic to deal with things like server crash recovery and things like that, it results in a very brittle system.

I mean, a good example of this going wrong in some respects is Race for Stanton. What was interesting about that was, for some reason, the way that the mission system interacted with the back-end systems, it funneled everybody to this prologue mission or setup mission to one location. And nobody wanted that. It didn't happen in our own testing because we didn't have enough concurrency. And then when it goes live and the live environment is slightly different, it then funneled everyone, and it's like day one, oh. What? And it makes it poor for the player. It makes it a poor experience for us, because people have spent a long time trying to make the content and get it out live. So that's something that, none of these issues do we want. We want to be adding new content to the game, and every patch should make the game better than previously. And that's something that we're very well aware of and we want to improve on. And we have taken steps, like you said, in terms of refactoring some of these large systems, but we've also taken steps into highlighting these individual areas within the game or development in terms of buckets. So we've talked about the first hour for a new player. We've talked about quantum. We've talked about freight elevators, hangars, and taking those and really doubling down on making sure that they are robust within a short time frame. So yes, I think that is a great question. We're very well aware of the status of the game. Our community is very vocal and we are thankful for that. We want to say that we are taking that on board, and absolutely we will be improving on that going forward.

Isn't it fun when the community highlights something that we internally have had a lot of conversations about?

So essentially, yeah, that's a great question. It's a very pertinent question right now. So ultimately, we completely agree on this. We've been talking about it a lot with Rich internally. The ability to unload your hard-earned loot throughout the mission is something that we're looking into, whether that is item banks along the way at the various medical facilities throughout. Does that tie into my local inventory in Orison? I remember we were speaking with Jens about that. So the nuance about how that would work, we're still looking into, but it's something we'll be looking to add.

I was just going to say, because we have to basically reconcile that with the fact that Siege of Orison is instanced content, right? That's using new technology.

So you'd be communicating from your inventory in an instance to your inventory in your, if your home location was Orison.

Looting is also, just in general, we want looting to be less friction. So we want people, if they go in and spend their time working on a specific operation or specific series of missions, we want people to be able to be rewarded, and it's not great when you do all the effort and then you don't get the reward. So yes, we definitely will be looking into that. And in some respects... I don't think we had a crafting question, did we?

Not yet.

Okay, so a tidbit for crafting. We're going off piste. Yes, for crafting and refinery, this also comes with respecting people's time. We want to make sure that if you are searching and you spend a period of time finding ore of a specific quality, you should, at the end of that period of time, feel like you've made progress to what you want to do. And I know at the moment it's a bit too random. And we want people to be able to take some of those ores and then put them together and then obviously refine them to higher quality ores. So that is something that we will be touching on. And I think it all ties into this same overarching message when it comes to the time that you put in the game. You should be rewarded for that time, whether that is through credits, whether that's through reputation, whether that's through gaining access to a new ship, or whether that's for crafting materials. We want you to be utilizing your time and being rewarded. You've moved forwards during that play session. I don't want to be in a situation, and I've used this example many times before, I used to do end-game raiding when WoW first came out. And I used to do the roll call for all the mages. And I would have people be like, I can't afford to come on the raid because I can't afford the repair costs for my gear. And that sucked. So I don't want that. I know Chris doesn't want that. So we're not going to make it like that. So we want to make sure that if you put in the time, you should be rewarded for that. And that is part of that bigger vision.

Yeah, I think that's part of what we talked about, whether it's item banks. I think we will introduce a mechanism, especially if you're in an instance environment, for you to gain access to your equipment and your loot, especially when we move away from automatically respawning in your equipment and we go back to insurance and those things. You should be able to go back and get your gear. And we want to put in a mechanism that allows you to do that in an instance environment, because there's no reason for us to take it away from you, especially when you're in an environment that is either solo or just you and your friends. So yes, we will be resolving that.

So that's a great question. So absolutely, that's part of our plans. The ability to log out and log back in in place is something that you've talked about before, Rich. Chris has talked about it. It's definitely in the plan. How that works if we're in a party and how that works if we're in a ship? Well, I think...

An easier way to describe it, because I think there's lots of different permutations that you could be in: okay, what happens if I'm on a different shard or I'm on a different server, or I'm in space or I'm not in space and my ship's docked. Ultimately, the intention that we want to get across is if you log off in whatever scenario that you're in and then you log back on, we want to do everything possible to try and put you back in that same position.

You want to try and go as far as you can.

Well, for now we're taking the old shuttle that always has been here, and we're going to go to the transition platform, as at least we've been calling it, where we can call ourselves an instance and get involved, get in the mix. So that's step number one. That's what this mission is going to teach us right now, how to do it. And then after that, anyone who wants to play, they can just rock up to these elevators and get themselves an instance.

And I hope the players aren't expecting a reward for this mission. There is no reward. It says zero.

So yeah, what we are now is the transit platform. This is new compared to the original Siege. We can already kind of see that some stuff has been going on and that Crusader is actually in distress. And then from here, we'll take an elevator and we will go into the instance. It's a new technology that we deployed that allows people to have a more curated experience within the universe, where you go in with your own group of four for this Siege of Orison experience, and then other players can't really obstruct your player experience, so we are able to provide the players with a lot more of a directed experience.

We changed it. Originally, this was like a no man's land that was kind of safe. You join in with Crusader and you'd be safe. And then, I don't know, we just want to kind of throw you into it straight away. You're here to take this back.

Yeah, and I think initially we were also thinking, oh, we want to throw people directly in it. We want to have enemies directly as you get out of the shuttle. And then we actually noticed that we were getting overwhelmed a little bit, because there was no time to kind of position and plan. So we dialed it back a little bit, and it gave you a little bit of room to kind of plan ahead and have that opportunity to jump into the different lanes, as we call it, the different approaches.

It's just visibility of the AI.

Ninetales have nice fluorescent kind of purple armor as well, so they kind of do stand out, but if you were here trying to fight against a different faction, it's going to be so difficult to really lock onto them.

There definitely was a theme, sort of mixed between gameplay mechanic themes and also telling the story, I suppose, of the Ninetales attack on these platforms. Luke would probably be the best to talk about how he tackled that side of it art-wise.

Yeah, so the theme that we discussed with the creative director Ian, that we really wanted to bring home on this first island, is really this Normandy beach landing experience. You come out of the shoreline. You're there, explosions are happening. The fight is immediately intense. You're trying to push up. We're fighting uphill. We had the mortar section that we just went through. So it's really like, we're here, it's not a stealth approach. You're getting tossed into it straight away. And I think that really defines this first couple of areas. And then we'll see what the next area has entailed for us.

When you're designing encounters and missions, you always want to try for nice, what we call, peaks and troughs, where there's points of high intensity that then chill out. Because if it was constant high intensity, it gives you a different feeling and experience compared to ones where it's like, okay, now we can breathe, we can gather up, we can sort ourselves out.

Well, there are bosses throughout this mission, but there are also some Elites that you'll find. And these Elites will drop a keycard, as we're about to be taught by this first interaction with this objective: when you loot them, you'll get a keycard. That keycard will open a nearby weapons cache.

So it was actually... I've seen a lot of discussion about it online, and I know everybody has their own opinions about it. I think there's drawbacks and benefits to doing it. Simply put, when we decided to remake Siege of Orison, within an instance, we wanted to see whether we could create a curated experience for four players. A linear mission flow that utilised not having any outside influence inside a mission, really for the first time, in Siege. We wanted to see if we could craft that in particular, and see whether we could pull it off: what we have, what we don't have, what we'd like in the future to perhaps make things like this, or things with a bigger party size.

And like I say, we could have made a bigger platform and increased the party size, tried to curate it for that many people. But we settled on four. We wanted to start with a group of four for this. I know it's not very similar to the old Siege.

I mean, the old Siege was completely unbalanced. We had no way of limiting it. So when we had built it originally, it was designed for 30 people. And then they found an issue where... Originally, we used to have two DGSs running on one server, and we found when we did Siege that they were fighting for resources. So instead, we were like, well, let's just have one DGS per Amazon server. So we did that. And then we were like, we can up the player count then. And then obviously that's when Siege came out, and we'd upped the player count to like 100 people. So it was instantly unbalanced on release. So it's nice to finally see it in a balanced form.

Well, honestly, I expect everybody else is way better at the game than us lot. So I would imagine they can probably tackle it two and two. It depends, but it's up to them, really. How difficult they're finding it so far.

And that still happens, clearly. You can still... we let you do this for your mates. You choose. It was completely different when there were people stood outside the shuttle on Solanki Island just grenading each other. I went to a Bar Citizen in France and I met one of them. He was like, "Yeah, I'm one of the guys who stands outside the shuttle and grenade launches everyone."

No, so it is going to be endless respawning, at least with this initial release. We're working on the system, obviously it's the first time trying it, but basically, as you complete each major step, kind of after you get past the objective, every time you go through a med room, completing that next objective, so in this case reach the rooftop, that's going to set our checkpoint to this med room.

So just so players are aware, in case they don't know, do you have to set the medical bed at all?

Nope.

So it's an automatic thing, which is really cool.

Yeah, so what we're trying to do right now is that, at a high level, Crusader got invaded by the Ninetales, and they started to place some of these friend-or-foe machines, which basically means that the Ninetales now disrupt what is considered friend and foe in the airspace around it. So our goal is to disable the friend-or-foe inverters so that the Crusader forces can come in and help us clear the threat.

Yeah, these IFFs were the same things as in the old Siege.

We just discovered an issue where we need to decide what we load in, and based on that we take the proximity of the size of the location, and the location size is determined by everything that's in the location. What we discovered is that I had that ship fly by, and no one checked what happened at the end of the path it flies. And then we discovered that after it's done, it just keeps flying, it just goes in a straight line and just flies out, so the bounds of the location just...

Massively expands.

Yeah, along with this, we did a nice visual refresh of the Ninetales, which includes adding these Oni masks, and there are different versions of them, there are different levels, they're really cool. Ian absolutely loves them, our creative director. We put a lot of effort into them with the rest of the character team to make them look real nice.

If there is an optimal route, I've not worked it out. I'll let Mr. Kraken make a guide for it, and then I'll know.

Yeah, and that's what we try to think about as well, from an environment and especially from a level design perspective: okay, where are the covers? Are they very close to each other? And then based on that, you kind of get a play space that works very well for shotguns or SMGs, close-range weapons.

Plenty of variety of engagement, I guess, right?

Yeah, so just to make sure that we cater to the different play styles that players have.

But also, it's added challenge, right? If you're always doing shotgun stuff, you just bring a shotgun and do that, but you have to kind of have a bit of variety within the team, make sure you're covering all bases.

Yeah. That's why we create these protected pockets where the AI is really hunkered down, and now it's like, ah, there's a big open area in front of it.

Yeah, and actually, if there's an opportunity to do it, I think the level design team that has worked on this mandate has been so exceptional. We had a lot of work. The AI inside of this instance is actually all hand placed, which is something we don't do anywhere else in the game. We spawn all our AI through spawn closets. Instancing allows us to hand place AI and assign them defend areas, give them all of their settings, hand placed in editor, which is super helpful for development going forward. But once we tried to start doing it, there were a number of problems that arose. They had a lot up against them, and they got it done in record time. They really did an amazing job with this. So shout out to Manuel, John, Marcus. They did an amazing job.

Yeah. We built this together with the team in Germany, and they really smacked it. Level design, the environment, my environment guys in Germany were super proud of how it all came together.

Yeah, this is the opportunity we've had, which we don't get that many of, to use some of the vehicles. We went back and forth about what vehicles to use, actually. We could have used tanks if we wanted. We experimented with the idea once upon a time. But ultimately, we decided to go with the IKTI. That was just an awesome opportunity to use them, jump around. I think it's turned out really, really nice. It's nice to see it inside of a mission.

And maybe tanks in the future. It's not like you can never use those.

Never know.

Yeah. We were debating the time for this, but I think if anybody can complete the entire event... the mission, this entire mission... and send all POVs. I need every player's POVs, no exploits, no cheats. If you can complete the whole event in 45 minutes, if you're the first people to do it, we will commemorate you in the game. So you'll be called the Sweet 45. The Sweet 45 Gang. So once we're live, get yourself a group.

And then are we going to show people, or will people go find what you're talking about?

We'll put it in, they have to find it themselves.

Yes. We've skipped the idea, originally in Siege, where you had to fly your own ships up here and try to push your way to the barge. And instead now we let you take the shuttle and get straight back into the action, and there's no chance of anyone being left behind because all the ships have been taken and all this sort of stuff.

What you can do as well is if you come here to the Cutlass on the left, then we can actually see a little bit of the narrative world building that we've done as well: the Ninetales have used this Crusader barge to just Trojan horse their way into Crusader. And we can see that they've used all these containers and that a lot of the stuff came out of it. And that's also why this final boss battle happens at this barge, because this is that stronghold that they flew into. So now we are sieging the fortress.

Yeah, so this barge was actually my pride and joy of the old Siege. This was the thing that I got to make, the old warehouse. If there's any old-school players in the chat, they'll remember it.

The OG barge you made with the fire on it as well.

Oh, yeah. We made a version of it that had fire in the final area of that thing, but VFX said it was too costly at the time, so sadly, we never got to put out the en fuego version. But we did decide to change the layout of the barge quite considerably, and I think it is significantly, significantly better than what we had before. It's now a sort of maze to find your way over to where you'll find the final boss. And then that final boss room is a completely different thing to what it once was. It's a whole designed boss fight, so hopefully everybody enjoys that, but we'll wait till we get to that bit.

The Transport System is ready for roll-out in other locations and soon for vehicles too. In 4.9 we’re expanding the utilization of Transport to Area 18.

The team working on Transport is busy finalizing the integration of the system for Instancing in 4.10.

The intention was for it to appear connected. There are plans to have a refueling hose deploy when the panel is opened, connecting through the landing gear. We aim to fix it in a future update.

Well, it started with an attempt at a bug fix a month ago. So with this 4.8 release and the way we've been doing patches this year, we have two streams when we work off from the working set. We have a base stream that we use for the base release, so 4.8.0. And we have a hotfix stream where we bring all the continuous changes along. So there was an attempt at bug fixing something on the Idris that was actually creating some performance issue somewhere else that was checked into that stream and nobody saw it and it went through. So we've been on the hotfix stream now for 4.8.1, now going to 4.8.2. In 4.8.2, we went back to the base stream, which are supposed to be at parity at this point, except additional content because we've added additional content in the patch. That change was included. And so what's supposed to be a routine update became a massive, wide-sprawling issue because basically the Idris was no longer compatible with its persisted copy. And so what that would do is players have in their ASOP terminal a version of the Idris that's from 4.8.1. This change, which was not supposed to be in the stream at all, gets in there. And so now the game server is expecting another shape for this. The game server has a series of checks and balances for this, but he's the last banker in the chain. And so for him, if the schema is incompatible, he's like, there's data corruption risk, I'm out.

Who's he in this analogy?

Well, he's the game server, basically. So the game server is trying to spawn the Idris, wherever it is, right? So that's called the async spawn chain. And so as he's trying to resolve the object containers for this and to materialize the ship in game, he comes around an incompatibility. And then there's a hard check for this. Because if we let those through, if we disarm this check, for example, then the game server might corrupt ships or might be twisting data and then we would go wider than that. And so the game server would crash.

And so every time an Idris would be attempted to spawn, that server in that region would crash and then restart and then try to load the Idris again and then crash again. And so as players were unstowing more Idrises in more shards, more servers got affected, until you reach a point where now the ops team is in the background and they're lighting all the fires, calling the Rohan. And so we're looking at this and basically we start cordoning off shards, because at the beginning we're not sure what the issue is. And what happens in this case is the more shards are getting offline, the less capacity we have for players that are either entering the game or shard hopping. We have a lot of people shard hopping. And so what happens is they hit the dreaded 60012 error, which means, hey, there's no capacity in your zone. There is capacity, but we've had to restrict it in the meantime. And so we took a hard decision later in the night to prevent players from spawning the Idris temporarily, just to stop breaking other shards. We brought more shards online to keep people playing. And then we basically went through and manually rectified. That's what we call percussive maintenance. When you see that in the status, it means we went in and we did a drastic measure to basically fix the Idrises that were either spawned in shards or still left in inventories, to make sure that they had the proper schema. And so now we know that all the Idrises are fine. We've lifted that temporary stoppage for that ship. And so now we're back. That's what happened.

This is cabaret trays being spawned by some subcomponent in the Idris cargo room.

And it's not even anything specific. In this case, it's the Idris, but it's not because it's a capital ship or anything.

No, it could have been any ship in that case. So normally, there's a check-in discipline that we apply, especially this year, because we have a different publishing model this year. And so ships that have been distributed already in a given major-minor patch cannot be modified. Now, for some reason, this check-in passed all the validation checks and ended up in the build.