Chad McKinney

When you get it, I don't think so, but... I'll say this, we plan on, and as I've said before about bed logging, we're definitely gonna work more on bed logging and we're gonna work more on logging in and out. And one of the things in particular that we're gonna work on is logging in and out of hangars specifically. We wanna support that. That's something that we've already been working on to some extent on the technical side, but there's still more work to go there. I don't wanna say that when you get this particular thing, a certain feature is gonna be supported in the next release though. So as far as that goes, I don't plan on that being a supportive thing by then, but logging in and out of hangars and bed logging is gonna be developed further is what I'll say.

[...] You're telling us that at some point, not saying the next release, but at some point you will be able to log in and out from your hangars?

Yes, 100%. That's definitely a thing that we're gonna support.

Isn't that? I'm not sure I understand because like you pay a fee to auto load now.

Yeah, I was gonna say, that's a weird question. I thought that was, that's pretty much the thing. We'll skip ahead.

CM I mean, I can give a, maybe I can answer a question that they didn't ask. Which is, is auto loading always going to work the way that it does now? Sure. We're gonna build on that. Right now, auto loading is built into the commodity trading experience in part because that was the quickest way that we could do it. I think we'll always want to have that because it's convenient in order to just make those decisions when you're doing trading. However, there are times when it would be convenient to auto load things that aren't necessarily part of a transaction or after a transaction.

Like mission cargo can't be auto loaded.

Mission cargo, but also items in general that you have. Maybe you want to load those into the ship. And so a full auto loading experience is a feature that we're currently looking at as far as making it to where you can just have whole sets of stuff. If you just don't want to touch the freight elevator, you just don't like it, that's fine. We're looking at having an experience for you to where you can say like, okay, I want this arrangement of stuff. And as long as it fits into the cargo grids on the ship, then it'll move them around. And now that we've made it to where the cargo grids support so many different items, that means that there's a lot more opportunity to make that work. Of course, there'll be a small fee associated with it, but it will, I think, support, it's kind of a bigger solution to, instead of just like solving it specifically for mission items, it's something that you can do more generally. And then also, we talked about small vehicles, ground vehicles, getting those into your ship. Well, that would be a solution, right? If you didn't want to drive it out yourself.

Now, not just spawning a ground vehicle in the cargo, but spawning a ground vehicle in a cargo crate. That can then-

Well, I'm saying like you could have the ship stowed and then request to have the vehicle loaded into, like the ground vehicle loaded into your vehicle.

So starting with the easy questions. My name is Chad McKinney. I'm a senior lead gameplay engineer currently in the Los Angeles studio, mainly focused on Star Citizen. So I'm part of the core gameplay group. I have a kind of sub team in that group called CGP7, but we mainly focus on what I would say are the features that make Star Citizen unique. So the big MMO style gameplay features. Cargo is certainly one of the big ones, one of the big careers, right? So our team is really focused on those features. And certainly over the last several years, that's been a really big focus for us. So any of the big cargo stuff that you've seen coming out over that time, physicalized cargo, Hull C, all this stuff has been my team's main focus. But we've worked on a lot of other stuff throughout the years.

But yeah, so what happened with cargo? Well, the first thing is, hey, I don't know that there's anyone that's more personally invested in seeing this through than I am. So it was disappointing to come to the conclusion that we did need to pull it from 3.23 or push it into a point patch. But it was the right call. And there's a lot of factors that went into that. Just to kind of get into it, the first thing is that it's a really, really big... I don't even think you can call it a single feature set. It's like a whole change of the way that the game works from top to bottom in many different aspects. So whenever we started concerted development on this last year, we come up with a certain schedule. And at the end of the day, if you look at where we're heading, while it is disappointing to see it slip, we're really close, actually. It's kind of like throwing a dart at a target a mile away. We are a bit off. We missed the target, but we're not so far off. It's not going to be six months from now or anything like this. It's a bit disappointing that it missed the release, but we are really close.

The first thing is it's big and it's hard to estimate and quite pin down all the unknowns and everything and make sure that your dates are exact by the time the actual date comes up. So we're a little bit off on that part. But there's also just been a lot of things that have happened during that time. Some of the stuff towards the end that have really informed that decision making are the fact that there's still some feature work that needs to be finished out. There's some iteration that we're still doing on certain aspects, or that we did on certain aspects of the design once we got things up and going. In particular, the freight elevator kiosk UI and the item bank UI. Once we played with them a bit, we realized we needed to update them and change them to make them a better experience. And then on top of that, in particular, the hangar instancing, ASOP and transit kind of flow graph there about going from all these different stages of gameplay had some stability problems. And it's the kind of thing that I really felt strongly that we can't go live with that being not really stable, because if we do and it ends up being a problem, the game essentially becomes unplayable for the players. So it's not like if we went out with salvage and maybe there's some issue with salvage, or if we're going out with mining or the rocks sometimes crash your client. That is really unfortunate. That affects a small subset of people. This is the kind of thing where the game could literally just be unplayable.

You can no longer summon your spaceships. You can no longer load your spaceships. It's a pretty heavy thing.

So in comparison, ever since 3.18, we've been a lot more cognizant of what kind of risk we want to take on whenever we're going into the release. So whenever we were coming up on 3.23, we were really aware of how big this was and also really aware of the current state of 3.23 without all of that feature work. And because 3.23 was already needing some more time to be focused on to stabilize and improve performance, we didn't want to just rush this in and then take something we already spent a certain amount of time hardening on 3.23 and then just destabilize it all again and probably just reset our whole release pipeline there, but also then taking on all the new risk for the cargo work. But we are in a child stream of the release stream. So that means that we're ready to go. Anytime we want to, we can just pull the trigger and release it. We're right there. So it's not like it's stuck away in some development stream that's still in a bunker somewhere. We're really close. It's going through certain steps of the release phase already. It's just, we weren't ready. We didn't want to integrate it because of the risk and already the state of 3.23 itself. But on top of that, to be completely honest, this feature has been around, like I said, for quite some time. And there's been a lot of things that have happened just kind of outside the feature that have also contributed to it. So as people are probably aware, there's been some team restructuring, personnel changes, changes to our vision and direction that have, in particular, I think, impacted the team supporting on this feature set. So it's made it a challenge at times to stay focused on it and not be affected by all that, people changing, bringing people on board and getting them up to speed about the whole project and everything. So it's been a whole journey, but we're really close. It is disappointing to put in this much effort that we've put into it and then miss it. But I felt like it was the right call.

We don't want that to happen again. Is this me sitting here saying that it's never going to happen again? No, I'm not going to sit here and say something will never happen. But everybody here is working very hard to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And decisions like this one are one of the things that have to be done in order to ensure that from time to time. So it is still 3.23.x. Whether that's 3.23.1 or 3.23.2, it's too early to say. Whether that's before Invictus, at Invictus, slightly after Invictus, it's too early to say. But yeah, like Chad said, it's all there. It's all still in the branch. It's basically when everything else is stabilized and secure and in a place that we're happy with, then it's like, okay, now let's introduce this new thing here and see how that affects things and fix those things. Because, Chad made another great point, this is literally your ability to summon and access your spaceship. It's a fundamental change to the way everything moves in the Persistent Universe. So it is not a small feature, but 3.23 has a whole bunch of other features. We're currently 13, 14 episodes into this season. It's normally 10 episodes. We've got a bunch more coming. It's a huge, huge patch even without this. So we'll get all that stuff in, stabilize all that stuff, and then turn our attention back to this.

Yeah, so the first thing I'll say is with everything, this is the first release of this. So what we come out with now isn't necessarily our final vision or where we leave it. And I can tell you that we already are going to continue working on this after this release. So there's going to be more to be done all around. But for this release, the way that it's going to work is if somebody who is not in your party somehow ends up in your hangar, then what we'll do is we'll treat it kind of similar to the impounding behavior that we have for the landing areas, where they'll get a bit of a warning, but then soon thereafter, they're going to just get kicked out and teleported out into the station. If they're in a ship, the ship will get impounded, and that'll be that. It's in an armistice zone, so the players won't be able to draw weapons or shoot or anything like this. But we do want to make sure that players aren't just murdering each other in there. But we can do better. Like I said, we want to have improved security in the future and make it a less gamey kind of experience to have heightened security in there. But it is just going to be using the impounding and teleporting behavior for this release.

Yeah, so if someone's in a party with you, they have access to your hangar, even if you're not there. So let's say my home location is Area 18 and Jared, you're in a party with me. You can go to Area 18 and you'll have access to my hangar. You can go in when I'm not there, you can go in while I'm there. You can use the freight elevator kiosk while you're in there. You can use the item bank. We want to make multi-crew gameplay as seamless as possible, so this is something in particular that we were definitely really thinking about throughout the whole process. Effectively, the way that it'll work is when you go to the access elevator in the station and you call the elevator, you're not going to get a list of every hangar at the station. I can't just go to somebody else's hangar randomly. Rather, what has to happen is I need to be in a party with them. And then when I go in the hangar, I'll see my hangars in the elevator list and any party members' hangars in my list as well. This is also another way that we tamp down on some of the griefing. It doesn't get rid of it immediately. I'm totally aware of this, and we can just walk into the elevator. But the point is that you can't, without someone there, use the elevator and go to somebody else's hangar independently. However, you can do that if you're in a party with them. That's also a way to manage the rights. So if you're in a party with somebody and they end up misbehaving, all you need to do is actually just kick them from your party and very quickly they'll just be removed from the hangar and kicked out. It's a way for the players to kind of control some of the access that they're giving to other players. But when they have given that, we do want to make sure that it feels like a very seamless experience.

Yeah, great question. It's one of those things that I should have gotten into more detail on in the ISC. It's funny, even when my wife watched it, that was the very first question that she asked me after it was done. I know everybody was immediately like, well, what if I get another ship or whatever? So yes, we've thought about that. For this release, again, this is just the first release. We're going to improve on this aspect of it. For this release, the way that it will work is if you buy a new ship, whether that be outside the game or in-game with in-game currency, and then you go to request that ship, you can't do it if the hangar isn't large enough. So instead, what would happen is you would be given what we call a public hangar. And a public hangar is similar to a personal hangar, just the difference is that if you were to leave the location, anything that you left in that hangar will be cleaned up and thrown away. So you can't treat it like your personal hangar. The personal hangar you can decorate and leave all this stuff everywhere. You log out of the game, log into the game, it's all still there, etc. The public hangars aren't like that, although they're not really that different. And what I mean by that is, one of the things I didn't have time to really go into in the ISC is, how does all this work when you're not at your home location and you're not using a personal hangar? Let's say my home location, again, is Area 18 and I go to Baijini Point and I land. Those are still persistent hangars. They're just not your personal hangars. And the distinction here is just that if I were to take my ship and land at Baijini Point, and then I'm given a public hangar while I'm at Baijini Point, while I'm there, anything that I leave in there is going to stay in the hangar. So let's say I just drop a bunch of boxes on the ground and then go into the station to sell some commodities or whatever or do anything else, me and my friend. Then I go back to the hangar. The stuff in that hangar is still there. If I'm going to log out of the game and log back into the game, I actually still have my stuff there. It's only when I purposefully leave the location that that stuff is taken away. So that's a public hangar.

And when you say taken away, what do you mean?

You lose them. They're forfeit. So again, something that we want to improve on in the future. What we would prefer to have is rented storage. In fact, I'll get to that in just a moment, so that if you leave, it's more like you kind of have to buy it out of impounding, or pay the fee for the storage costs. For now, they're just going to be discarded. You will get a warning when that happens so that you know that you're going to lose that stuff if you were to leave it on the ground accidentally in the public hangar. But for now, you're just going to lose them. But kind of what my point was with bringing all that up regarding your own ship is that it's going to be the same behavior as if you were to go to a different location in the game. But that is still a somewhat persistent experience anyways while you're there. What we won't do, and where I think some people have kind of imagineered, is that we would grow your hangar magically larger and rearrange the things. We're not going to do that. And instead, what we want to do in a subsequent release is to add a whole pipeline and feature set for upgrading your hangars, including moving things around. And on top of that, renting the hangars at other locations in the game. It's not the intention that the hangars are only at the initial home locations. It's just where we're starting now, because we don't have the time to implement all of the feature work and back end that's needed for rentals and upgrades, including fees and overtime and all this stuff. So what that means is just that you're going to have the one at the home location now, but in the future, absolutely, we want players to use this as a way of having a sense of progression in the game, so that when you're playing, you can accrue wealth. You can then use that wealth to expand your area of influence and where you can have extra inventories, have extra storage locations, kind of spread throughout. And I think this will become especially important once we bring more solar systems online. You're definitely going to want to have, I think, more hangars across the different solar systems in the game. So this is just step one. It's not the final stop in this progression. We know where we're going. It's just trying to find the way to carve up the feature to still hit an initial release. So this is one of those things that we kind of took a step back, simplified it for now. But we're going to do more.

Yes. So if someone is in a party with you and they end up in your hangar, they can use the freight elevator kiosk. And when they use it, they'll access their own inventory. And if they were to use an item bank in the hangar, they'll access their own inventory when using the item bank. Something that we actually started working on, and in fact had working, was having them also access your inventory. So if we were in a party, you could come to my hangar and then have the choice in the UI about whether you want to take things using the freight elevator kiosk from your inventory or my inventory. But we had some concerns about security, given that party membership isn't maybe as strong of a guarantee, because you'll end up in missions or doing things with people that... It's a little bit maybe too much power to give to somebody just because they're in a party with you to have them access your own inventory. So we still want to do that part. We just want to add more security and authorization functionality to be able to say, OK, for this person, they can access my inventory, they can't. So we want more as far as permissions before introducing that part. But they will absolutely be able to access their own inventory in your hangar.

Just the one for now. And no, they can't change the home location for this release. So once you get it, that's the one that you have. Again, in the future, we want to do more for upgrading and rental. We will think about moving. I'm not sure how I feel about that for the initial one. So there's still a bit of design thought about every single corner case there about what we want to allow for players. But for now, for 3.23.x, you're not going to be able to move the persistent hangar location.

So that answer was very candid and truthful. I want to make sure that that's understood, because when people make this decision, I want to make sure that everybody knows to consider it. When this patch launches, you will get a decision to choose your new starting location for the duration of 3.23 until whatever comes next. When you choose Area 18 or microTech or Hurston or whatnot, you are locking in your persistent hangar, your persistent personal hangar, for the duration of that patch until additional functionality comes on. Don't lose that information.

Indeed. And just to kind of ramp another, I read everything. I know every question you guys have thought about. And another thing that people have raised as concerns is pirates. What if I'm a pirate? I don't want to set my home location forever to be Area 18. I'm going to go to GrimHEX. Am I just screwed? Do I not get a personal hangar? The answer is, again, for 3.23, we just don't have the functionality to allow for those other locations to have them. But it's not that we don't want to allow that. We do want to. It's just not going to be in this particular release.

Yeah, essentially anywhere that has hangars, we'll have personal hangars. That's the long and short of it. So the rest stops, GrimHEX, we want it to be a prevalent thing to give the player options. Of course, we'll come up with our own decision making as far as the economics of it. Perhaps we will consider maybe charging more or less or having different dynamics for the rental aspect of it or whatever. But we want it to be a very open thing. We don't want it to be constrained. Again, another thing that I've seen people comment on is that we're trying to push people to play on the landing areas on the planets, that we're putting a lot of focus to keep people on the planets. That's not actually our goal here. It's just what we needed to do to get this done for this particular release. We want people to be able to go out in the universe and claim some part of it and feel like that's their home. And if you have a preference that's not on a planet, we want to empower that. We want you to feel like you can go somewhere else and call that place your home, GrimHEX, Pyro, whatever, and have multiple even, so that you can bounce around. So if you're spending a period of time in one region of the game, especially once we get multiple solar systems, we don't want you to feel overly punished because you just have this one location and you'll never go back to it because it's so far away. We want it to feel like... basically we're balancing here. And this, I think, also kind of gets to the core of Star Citizen as a game, which is we're threading this needle of a simulation and an enjoyable game experience. So we want to make physicality and inventory tie into that and make the game feel tangible, give you important decisions to consider, have risks involved with certain decisions so that you have to be thoughtful, and that feeds into all aspects of the game. So for example, let's say I have a bunch of inventory as far as the guns and loadouts that I have access to at my home location. If I'm going to go take a bunch of missions on the other side of the solar system, we want you to actually think about that. And then when you're over there, you don't have as many options as you had before. You can't just quickly change out your loadout. You can't necessarily quickly stock up unless you thought about it ahead of time. So we want you to be thinking about it. At the same time, we don't want it to just be super punishing, so that you play for 30 minutes, die once, and then just feel like, okay, I'm just done here, I don't want to play this game anymore. We're trying to find that balance to make it an interesting, fun experience, have those simulation aspects where it feels like a real space game. It's not magical. You can't just summon a thing out of thin air. There are important reasons why. You need to think about what you take with you. But it's not overly punishing, which is a different track than other games. As an example, a game like Diablo 4 or many other classic big games, that game, you just have this invisible inventory. I mean, you access it from a chest. But the point is, you can access it literally anywhere in the world, and it's all the same inventory. And that makes sense for that game, right? They have different problems. They have different play patterns that they want to encourage. But for the game that we want, we want it to be a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more tactile, but not as super punishing as maybe Escape from Tarkov or something.

Yeah, so whenever you go to the elevator access in the station, when you call the elevator, that carriage is your carriage. So when it shows up, it only has the stops in it that you have access to. So by default, if you start in your home location, like Area 18 in this example I keep using, then I would go in, and if, let's say, I had an account where the largest ship on it was a Drake Cutlass, then I would go in and I would have a medium hangar that I would see in that list. It would say, whatever, Cthulhu, Dark Cthulhu Lord's medium hangar, because that would be my name or something, something edgy like that. So the point is that I'll see my hangar in there, but nobody else's. When I'm in a party with somebody and then I call that hangar, I'll see their hangars at that location there as well as mine. But unless you have a lot of party members, that list is not going to be long. And in fact, it's going to be much smaller usually. Usually it's going to be one or maybe two, maybe three. I am totally aware that there are people that go out into the server and they just make this giant single server party. If you're in that party, yes, you'll go in and you'll see like a hundred in that list. I don't know. I guess in that case, you're going to have a little bit of a rough time, but this is obviously a pretty big corner case. So that's the main mechanism.

That will get resolved as the feature continues to develop. People can choose more locations. Right now in 3.23, they're limited to the four primary locations. But as people begin to be able to choose different locations for their primary personal hangar and whatnot, that problem will get diminished.

And actually, I'll use this as an opportunity to kind of re-impress a point, which is that it's only the ones at that location that you have access to. So if I were to go to Baijini Point and I have a party member whose personal home hangar is at Area 18, it's not going to show up. So it's tied to the location. So for that reason, it does get parsed out. And if, as you were to say, in the 100-person server, unless all 100 people pick the same home location, it's still going to be spread out amongst all the locations that they all picked independently.

Yeah, so in this case, it won't be back in the hangar for this particular release. Again, this is just one of those things where there's a lot of complexity in how the hangar instancing works and considerations across shards and server meshing and all of this. So for now, no, it won't be that if you were to log out in your ship in your hangar and then log back in, you're going to end up in your ship in your hangar. But we do want to revisit logging in and out with the hangars in particular. So that's something that we're going to be absolutely looking at more specifically. And if anyone's kept up with my hot take commentary on Spectrum, they'll know there's already some discussions more broadly about login flow. And this definitely ties into it, about just generally how logging in is supposed to work in the game. And hangars are an important aspect of that, but we're thinking much broader than that. We're thinking the whole game, so we also need to be thinking about things like habs, like bases, all of it. So this is definitely an aspect, but in this particular release it's not going to work out like that. You'll end up just logging back into the station.

I mean, as it is right now, and somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure if you try to bed log in a ship in the hangar, it doesn't let you, because to try to avoid it, it gives you a restriction or whatever. But yeah, as these things become more of a home for players, as they begin to decorate it, I can see the desire for that behavior to change, which is probably where that question comes from.

No, I'm laughing a bit. There was actually something of a bug that we had recently with people being able to draw weapons in the green zones. But no, that's not going to be possible. You will be able to use the tractor beams in the hangars to be able to move things around, but you're not going to be able to pull out a gun. It's not going to be a stand-your-ground law zone type situation. For now, that's something that maybe we revisit. Maybe a different location in the game, like GrimHEX, maybe a more pirate-focused place, having a little bit more stand-your-ground type laws regarding what you can do. But for the moment, it's just going to be, you can use your tractor beam and that's it. One thing we don't want, just to maybe unpack that a little bit, is because people are going to still be able to get in through these slightly corner case ways, like someone can just fly in or someone can just walk into the carriage. If they can draw their gun, then while we can punish them for that, they could just walk up, shoot you in the head, kill you while you're just hanging out there moving cargo. And then, yes, they're going to get punished. But for someone that's griefing, they got what they wanted, right? It doesn't matter if they end up dying or even going to prison for a period of time. They kind of got what they wanted out of that. So we're just not going to have that here for now. We'll revisit it again whenever we have better improved security mechanisms and more opportunity to consider all the design aspects of it as well.

So first off, shout out to people who remember the old OG hangar flair. I remember way back in the day we had fish tanks and the jukeboxes and all of that. And in fact, my team was the team that worked on a lot of that stuff way back in the day, and unfortunately saw it kind of rot over time to the point that we ended up removing it. It was implemented in a way that was very divergent from where the rest of the game was going as a more persistent game. So it definitely has a special place in my heart, a lot of that stuff. Unfortunately, this release, we're not going to have revisited that. The prop team would need to go back and rebuild some aspects of it because they're quite old at this point. There's a lot of changes in the way some of the features work, especially things regarding interactions and usability and all of that. There's some work there on the props and interactables team to be done, and they've been really focused on the mainline feature work for this release, so it's not something that we've had the time to get to. But it's not something that we've forgotten about. Definitely, we remember those things fondly. But it is kind of easier, actually, sometimes to make new things rather than revisit a lot of old things. So one of the things that we are adding in this release is furniture. So you are going to be able to buy furniture in-game at certain locations and then be able to decorate your hangar with that. Couches and stuff like this. So you'll still have some things that are more social, that are more interesting, make it feel a little bit more homey to decorate your hangar with. And otherwise, I look forward to all the fun shenanigans that people get up to with where they end up putting these things. But we definitely want to encourage that kind of thing. We want players to feel like this is their home. We want players to have some fun things to be able to decorate and place throughout the world. But for now, it's going to be the newer furniture, not the OG hangar flair.

As a good rule of thumb for managing your expectations, if you can pull it out and hold it in your hands today, then yes. If you can't physically manipulate it in the game in 3.22.2 or whatever patch we're on, then no, that's the stuff that's still waiting to be brought in. That's basically the process. They've got to go back. This stuff was built, like I said, a lot of it was built by our old friends at Behaviour. Shout out to Dave Richard and Christine Marsh, way back when. It was built specifically for the hangar module. It wasn't built to be handled with hands and IK and stuff like that. So that stuff's all got to be converted. It was also built in a different way, different metrics, different processes back then. So that process of bringing that stuff over... I've seen the zoo. They've built what we call a zoo. It's this giant level that's just all of the hangar flair. Then slowly, when an artist finishes on a task and he or she has like two days before the next task is ready for them to begin, they'll go over to that zoo and start working on converting another one. So it is a thing that's in process. It's very, very slow.

That's a good rule of thumb, I think, for the players. If you can manipulate it in-game now, it's something that you'll be able to gain access to and manipulate. Then there are going to be some things that you won't be able to move without putting them into an inventory container box that I mentioned, I think, on the ISC. So there are going to be some things that you can't just spawn into the world, mainly because of the art, honestly, and the kind of gameplay setup of the thing wouldn't allow it. There's just some things right now that really weren't meant to be independently spawned as opposed to attached to something. But if you can play with it in the game now and manipulate it, then you'll have access.

Great question. The answer is it won't. If there's not a hangar, you won't have auto loading as an option. That is a feature, not a bug. The point is that a small outpost is not the kind of place where you're going to be doing large trades. This is something I'm not sure I got quite into as much detail on in the ISC, but one of the big changes that we're making about how you buy cargo is changing it from being a raw resource allocation. So you won't just be picking three SCU and then have the system automatically figure out the configuration of cargo that you would need to put that into your ship. Rather, the places in the game are going to have certain stock, and that stock will include the box size. So the outposts, the smaller locations in the game, are going to only trade in smaller volumes and smaller box sizes, like 1 SCU, 2 SCU. And the idea is that those places, you're going to just manually load it yourself, and you wouldn't show up with a C2 and fill it with 700 SCU of 1 SCU boxes and then have it automatically pack it for you. That's not the point of that location in the game. It's not the route that we want that to satisfy. What we want to do is differentiate the game. We want the locations in the game to serve different roles. We want there to be a reason to go to different places in the game and we want there to be a reason to use different ships in the game. If you're a player that owns multiple ships, you will now be rewarded for good decision making as far as your trade route considerations and your location considerations and your ship choices. And on top of that, if you party with people, you're going to benefit from, let's say, the choices that you have as a group. And if you're on a larger ship, you're going to benefit from them being able to help you. So these smaller locations, we don't want there to be a giant hangar there that sucks your ship into it and then just magically puts all of this huge amount of cargo volume that's, I guess, just hidden underground or something. That's not really the point of those locations. On the flip side, a bigger trade route location like the LEOs, which are a hub for feeding the landing areas, those are meant to be big routes. So they are going to support automatic loading. We want there to be big ships that go there and get these big loads and haul them around, but for those, we would like them to deal in the kinds of box sizes that make sense for high volumes. So the 24, the 32 SCU boxes. Think of it like this. I'm from Oklahoma, so I'm going to drop a reference. I don't know if anybody knows what a Love's is, but it's a small truck stop, right? So you wouldn't show up to that with a huge truck. I mean, you would with a truck, but you wouldn't then take 10,000 boxes of Twinkies and then load up your truck and then go to another Love's somewhere in the world. That's not how trade routes work, right? Instead, you have smaller shipments that will feed smaller routes. But then for bigger trade routes, we have these huge ships that carry huge loads of freight across the Panama Canal, all this stuff. And they have really particular routes that they go to with these much larger shipping containers. So that's the idea here, is that there are going to be places that just deal in higher volume. There are going to be places that deal in smaller volume, and there are going to be some places in between. The locations will have the facilities there that make sense for them. However, I totally understand there might be someone in the game that just never wants to pick up a box, right? They just never want to do that. And yes, that means that sometimes whenever you're hauling cargo at these smaller locations in the game, like the outposts that don't have automatic loading, you're going to have to take the box out of your ship and put it onto the... But that is a pretty short loop, because the way that it's going to work at the outpost is that the freight elevator is literally attached to the landing pad. So it's a matter of a few feet away. It's not like you have to go through this huge experience. You just land, you put the thing on the freight elevator, you interact with it. It'll take you not very much time. Again, for the loads that you're dealing with, we're not going to have you move 500 SCU at an outpost one box at a time. These are going to be small loads. Whereas on the flip side, if you want to move 700 SCU manually from a C2 at, whatever, Area 18 or some other location of the game, and you have a crew of people, you can do that. And you'll potentially be rewarded by having a more favorable profit margin. But obviously you're going to have to have thought about that ahead of time. If you chose a bad configuration of boxes, that might take longer. Whereas if you bought your cargo at places that don't have larger box sizes, you're going to give yourself an easier time. So we're basically giving the players more choices, but also parsing it out to where it makes sense about why you would choose certain routes and what you're trying to get out of it.

For auto-loading, obviously the time for an auto load is something we can adjust. And it's something we absolutely certainly will adjust. Whatever it is in 3.23 will not be what it is in subsequent patches.

In fact, I will point something out, which is a lot of people in the ISC, of course, dissected the video to death. And so one of the things that they did is they would pause the video when the different UIs were on the screen and really delve into the pricing, the times there. I will just say all of that was dev data. Don't take that seriously, because that's just the data that... So I don't want people to have certain expectations about timing or pricing and then get to the game and realize it's different and then be disappointed or surprised. Just don't take those numbers seriously, I guess.

Yeah, two things I always want to remind folks of. Obviously, there's the Alpha Live environment where things will change. Then there's PTU before that. Then there's Evocati before that. And then there's where my guys, Will, Dave, Alex, and Toby, are working in the absolute... They do work that I could not do. I don't have the patience for it. That information is all temporary. Just don't believe anything you ever see in a UI screen on ISC. It's way too early in the process. Learn the lessons. Don't give yourself the ulcer. Just remember it's work in progress.

To go a little bit further with that, a philosophy that we have here is we want to encourage people to engage with the manual loading. So you should expect that the pricing and the loading times are going to be more favorable for manual loading. If you want to do automatic loading, that's totally cool. We want that to be a viable path. It's not going to be unprofitable, but it's not going to be as profitable or even necessarily as time efficient as manual loading. So we want it to be an important trade-off for players to make that decision. In addition to that, we want the pricing and the load time to be a little bit more intelligent. It will take volume into account for sure. More cargo is going to take longer and cost more. But the other thing is we want to encourage people to be making smart decisions. You shouldn't show up to a place and buy 700 1 SCU boxes and the cost and time to load that is going to be the same as if you got the same amount but in 32 SCU boxes. It's much more efficient to move a larger box than a lot of smaller ones. So for that reason, the pricing and timing is going to be considerate of the number of boxes, not just the volume of the SCU. So there's a little bit of nuance there, but I want to be transparent about the thought process going in there and why it is the way that it is and what we're trying to encourage.

Yes, it won't for this release, but it's something that absolutely we've been talking about. Part of the problem is, it's more like we would have done it, in fact, even this release. But there's some interesting, I'll put it, considerations for the physics aspect of it. Right now in the game, it wouldn't be too difficult to make the cargo boxes that are attached to the actual cargo grids impact the mass of the ship. But the problem is that if you were to detach the cargo and just lay it in the ship, it won't. Because anything that's inside the zone of the vehicle doesn't contribute to the mass of the vehicle at the moment. But that's true of anything. You could drop a gun, dead bodies. It doesn't matter. Anything you just chuck into the ship loose is not necessarily contributing to the mass either. So that's kind of a bigger question about how we deal with mass inside ships. And it also feeds into other things about forces and inheriting forces and pushing things around, which we also want to use to encourage people to use cargo grids as an advantage over just dropping stuff in your ship. So we're not there yet. We've absolutely been talking about it actively. It's something that we are planning on adding because we want, again, that to add some interesting decision making as far as not just the ship, but also if you load up a ship full of cargo, we want it to fly slower. You're going to be a little bit more endangered. So if you're a big hauler, you're not going to be as agile while you're moving your cargo. And that might encourage you to want to party with other people who can defend you. And then also on top of that, it can help you make considerations during the loading process. You may want to spread the cargo around in your ship, which will take longer, but it'll make it maybe fly better. So it'll give you some interesting decision making during the loading itself. But yeah, not for this release.

It's coming, but it's not as far along as I was hoping. So I think this release, there are going to be some probably notable things that are missing. I don't want to say just yet exactly what, but certainly vehicles are not going to be able to be attached to cargo grids this release, that I will speak confidently on. And that's just more of considerations as far as if the entities themselves are really ready to be attached to things dynamically like that for physical reasons, or if they're ready to be just spawned in the world independently like that. So for example, ship items, a lot of them are not really designed to just be sat there in the world. If you look at them, some of the geometry on them isn't even complete. So it's that kind of stuff where we're not quite there yet. And there might be some other gameplay aspects with that, with more testing, that we find that whenever they're attached, they cause problems that need to be sorted out. And we might have to pull back on what ends up being literally attachable to the cargo grid. That doesn't mean that they may not be able to be called up on the freight elevator, because we can still place things loose on the freight elevator, but not literally attached to the grid in those situations if we were to need to. But as far as attaching them to the cargo grid, for example, on the ship and then flying around with them, like on the exterior of the Hull C, like in the ISC that we showed, we still have that ambition. It's still the governing principle, which is if it's in-game, I want it to attach to a cargo grid reasonably.

But not corpses.

I know. I made that joke, actually. That, I would say, is an unreasonable thing, even though I mentioned it as an example. You won't be able to attach a corpse to a cargo grid. Sorry.