Chris Parry

So I can maybe answer the first bit and maybe the second bit. So with the refuel, there's two options. Again, not in 3.23 because we're not using fuel for that. It's worth mentioning that EVA fuel is in lore meant to be compressed nitrogen. So this might make more sense with that in mind. So if you're in atmosphere, you refuel automatically. And the idea behind that is that we want EVA to be accessible and to be able to use it as often as possible. But when you're out in the void, you should be considering how you're using your fuel. So every time you step out that door, we want you to be in a situation where you're ready to go, but you've then got to consider how you use your fuel on the go. And then in terms of refueling while we're out there, we support MedPen injections, or it's not a MedPen, it's a refuel injection, but it's the same thing you're used to with MedPens and symptom masking pens where you just jab yourself with one of those. What's the other aspect of the question? Sorry, my mind's gone blank.

Will the weight of your equipment affect fuel consumption?

Oh, does mass affect it? Sorry, I misunderstood the question. In that case, at the moment, I don't think it's a big factor, but we definitely want to look into that moving forward. I don't know when, but for 3.23, I don't think it is.

So for 3.23 at least, fuel isn't in 3.23. So when the first version of fuel comes online, people aren't going to have to manage the, oh, I don't want to carry this weapon or this railgun with me because it's going to burn up fuel faster.

Correct, yeah. Moving forward, we do want to have different roles for armor. We have that in consideration, so you might want to put on a certain armor type to go out in EVA, and it's better at that, or it's lighter weight, that kind of thing. But that's further down the line.

So for 3.23, no. We're focusing solely on the prone stance, and that's the lying down stance. We just really want to give a great experience for that. So there's a lot of animation work that goes into that. The guys are doing a great job with it. But yeah, the focus is the prone stance and that's twofold. It's prone because when you attach, again, not EVA, it's the zero-G traversal thing where you attach to a surface, that's prone as well. So you get a seamless transition between the two. But also the silhouette that you maintain whilst you're moving through a ship. If you imagine flying like that through a corridor, it's a lot less awkward if you're doing that than that, because occasionally you bump into things. So for now, 3.23, no, but obviously we're aware you guys are interested in it, so we'll see what we get down the line.

It's all about building out that systemic experience at the moment, where all the features just work together, and the stand-up stance doesn't quite work with that at the moment, so it will need some more thinking for the future.

Currently, we can even have this speed if you use grapple hook mode along with the thruster pack. So if you use the grapple hook and drag yourself, it will be exactly 10 meters per second. So yeah, you got it.

But not quite the 15.

Not 15, but yeah, middle ground.

And that's to say, these are the speeds we think are fun, the speeds that we enjoy. We're playing it right now, but you guys haven't had them, right? So you'll obviously be able to give us feedback and say if you're enjoying them and if you need to go a little bit faster maybe, but it's what we think works well, and we're in development still.

So just to be clear, you're saying the 10 meters per second now. We were talking about the 36 meters per second before, that was jumping out of a vehicle.

Yeah, around 36, I think, is the overall cap for an actor's movement in the game at the moment.

So 36 is the cap jumping out of a fast-moving vehicle until you eventually slow down. And then just you on your own with a grappling hook, you can potentially get up to 10.

And just to clarify, when I'm saying grappling hook, we're talking about the tractor beam. There's no physical ice hooks. Not yet. For 3.23, it's just the tractor beam.

So for 3.23, it's very similar to what it is right now. You still have to go into interaction mode and move the cursor around. Instead of the floating text to choose the different interactions, you'll see a prompt now. It'll just be one option to click on. But then you bring up the wheel with right click instead of left click. And then you've got the options that you would normally see as a list there on the wheel to select from. Moving forward, sometime after 3.23, we want to make a few changes so that free look actually becomes the mode you look around and interact with in the cockpit. So no more holding F and then moving the cursor around. The idea is more that in free look, you're just looking around and you're seeing the prompts come up more naturally. It's similar to the game when you're on foot, and we think it works a lot nicer. In addition to that, we want to have the MFD screens show the little cursor on them as your camera's focusing on them in the center of the screen. That gives you a nice accurate way of selecting things all in one mode, without having to move into a different mode of moving the cursor around with the camera moving slightly with it. It just feels like a smoother experience.

Yeah, so we had to try to compromise a little bit on the dashboards, because obviously having the prompts on every single button while you're flying a ship is really not a nice experience. So that's why you still have to go into interaction mode, so that way you have full control of it, and we try to minimize the disruption to the player. Like Chris said, we have a few ideas that we still want to do to make this experience the best we can.

I want to preface this by saying what you saw in ISC was absolutely work in progress. You're looking at a feature that's not scheduled to be live for a couple of months yet. But how is it supposed to work, that transition from EVA down to...

Very quick and very seamless. Yeah, that's the intent. And that's how it feels as well. I mean, it's never going to be 100% without mild vomit inducement if you're doing like a 180 turn and intense acrobatics, right? So what you see on screen, in first person especially, is not always going to be non-vomit-inducing, but it's meant to be smooth and quick. There shouldn't be any sensation of, oh, I'm waiting for the animation to finish, or that sense of loss of control. It's so snappy that it's not really there.

I even tried it in game and it's perfectly fine, in my opinion. You can land, spray the bullets and keep a steady position and fire. So yeah, it's fine.

So for 3.23, again, things are in progress, so we'll see how we go. But the intent is to have the ability to just do a simple slash with a knife. Going beyond that, for 3.23, there's not going to be anything more involved, maybe more moving down the line, but unsure. With regards to takedowns, not for 3.23. And it's obviously something we're thinking about, because it's one of the core things of FPS combat. It's a lot more complicated to do in EVA.

One person is upside down.

Exactly. If there's someone in front of me and I'm crouching behind them, it's quite easy to say, yep, I'm going to knife them in the back. There's all sorts of different angles you can approach from, and as a result so many different animations you need, and so many things that maybe feel fine and easy to understand and intuitive in a ground gravity environment, that it's a lot more difficult to get an idea of what's going on in EVA. So for now, definitely not for 3.23, potentially later on. And unarmed, as in fisticuffs, not for 3.23 either. The intent is to do something similar to the knife, so you get a simple jab. Beyond that, I'm not sure, but we always want to improve things. So we'll obviously take your feedback into consideration and see where we go moving down the line.

This goes to a bunch of accessibility stuff that, quite frankly, we still have yet to address.

Yeah, and for 3.23, we won't have that option. But as you say, we really want to address it moving forward.

There's also talk of helmet styles affecting the color of your visor, depending on what manufacturer you're wearing, things like that. So that's another consideration for it in future.

Yeah, I know this is a question that comes up a lot, and I don't suffer from a lot of the things that a lot of folks do, but there are colors in the spectrum that I have trouble seeing. I just want to say, if I can speak for myself, I understand, we understand, we hear you. It's definitely on the list. Nobody's ever heard a conversation where it's like, no, we're not going to do that. It's just a thing of priorities, and a thing of people can only work on so many things at one time. We actually just built out a new UI team in our Montreal studio to help the UI team that's here, to help tackle as many of the UI-related issues that are still outstanding. So that's not to say this will come soon or anything, just that we're building up those teams so that they can tackle more things.

Also, Richard Tyrer has told me that he really wants it as well. So accessibility in general is going to get a focus at some point.

You've already mentioned some of them, the refill canisters for fuel.

Yeah, so the pens you inject yourself with. So as I mentioned earlier, we do want to have that difference in what I'm wearing affecting what I can do. So you might have one EVA core armor piece that's quite slim and light, and then one that's a lot bulkier and has more fuel. We're going to have backpacks that can, again, have more fuel. Bigger is better, and you can get different items and equipment. Again, not for 3.23; all armor can EVA in 3.23. So there's the sense that you can have different backpacks, different core armor that behave differently and have maybe different thrust, not sure yet. Certainly different fuel. Oh, and it's also probably worth mentioning that, again not in 3.23, but when your fuel runs out, your breathable air gets used instead. So if you're in the middle of nowhere, you can opt to just start thrusting with your breathable air. And there's a double reason behind that. One is it's there, so why can't I use it? So yeah, great, use it, thrust. So you just get that little bit further. So if your airlock's just within reach, you can get to it. And the other is if you want to try and get somewhere and you can't reach it, you're going to die a lot faster, instead of just staying in the middle of nowhere waiting for half an hour to die.

So yeah, as I mentioned, in a later release, we're looking into having the free look mode, looking around the cockpit rather than using the cursor to look at all the different interaction points. So we're actually just looking at them in a sort of fluid motion. And then as part of that, we want to have the cursor show on the MFDs. So if you imagine you've got your visor, your view on your monitor, the center of that will dictate where the cursor goes. And it's just as accurate as when you're using it in interaction mode right now, if not a bit better, because you're focused on it always. And then also at some point, we're looking at being able to go into a focus mode on each MFD. So whilst you're looking around the cockpit, you can quickly interact with interaction points, with the prompts popping up and the cursor on the MFDs, click on things, drag on sliders. You can also then zoom into the MFDs. Again, not for 3.23, but hopefully soon TM.

So there is a reaction time you get when you're coming in, and again, this isn't 3.23 because we're not attaching, but when you come in to attach to a surface, part of what informs you that's going to happen is, at the moment at least, your hands rise up. But we haven't done it based on distance, we've done it based on time to hit. So if you're coming in really fast, the amount of time you get to press the input in response to that to attach is roughly the same as if you're coming in really slow. So yes, it does have an impact, but we're trying to mitigate it by having more time to react. So if you press the button at the right time, you'll attach. And then for the manner in which you attach, what we want at least is that a different animation plays. So you might actually lose control for a little bit longer than you would, because the animation you're playing is really selling the fact that you've just impacted the surface. Versus if you're going slower, you'll get control back a lot faster, and the animation will be a lot shorter.

Mostly killing myself by mistake.

EVA in itself is a complex system. We're trying to combine coupled and decoupled modes for movement. And for rotation, it's an interesting combination of regular FPS rotation, but as we're in space, we rotate in any direction, full 360 rotation. So yeah, it's full of edge cases. About what fun bugs we have: not too much, except face-planting most of the time, at least in an older version. I can recall one when we worked on attaching to surfaces. Imagine you're flying through debris, metal plates and boxes and stuff, and you press attach and you attach to some small metal plate which is rotating, and you inherit the rotation and you start to rotate as well. It's weird.

I think the most frustrating one was every now and then you'd sort of attach but flip onto the other side of the surface, so you'd just be killing yourself every time, basically. Yeah, that was more frustrating than funny, I guess.

Yeah, it's been a fairly awkward one in general, because the development of it has gone on for a while and there have been different approaches tried and things like that, and finally we're at a good place with it, but it's been awkward to get to this point.