Chris Roberts

The idea of Death of a Spaceman is to try to get some kind of meaningful consequence to dying in a game. Most games you play, modern games anyway, you die, you respawn back a few seconds before you die and you keep on doing it again. So it doesn't really feel like there's much consequence to dying, and a lot of times your gameplay approach is pretty sloppy. I know when I'm playing a standard FPS shooter in the story mode, I just keep blasting in at people. I don't really think about it. I die. I start again. Whereas if you play a game like, say for instance, Demon's Souls all the years ago and all the ones past it, there's real consequence. You die, and you've got to fight back through all those enemies. You've lost all the experience that you've gained, the souls in the case of Demon's Souls. But the thing with Demon's Souls, it was one of the things I was playing, it reminded me of the good old days in the 80s and the 90s when you'd make games, and dying had a real consequence. You wanted to finish your level before you died or else you had to do the level again, right? And consequently, when you finished the level or achieved something, you really felt proud and happy, which is definitely, I think, one of the mechanics that makes Demon's Souls and its subsequent games both infuriating and rewarding when you manage to do it. So the idea was, what kind of consequence can we have in our persistent universe in terms of how do we encourage the players to stay alive? We don't want people to just go, "Oh, I got a scratch, I'm just going to respawn in a perfectly pristine state for the character or the ship." And so Death of a Spaceman was sort of an idea to give an association with your player character in the game in terms of: this is who you are, and you want to keep yourself alive as much as possible, and identify with your avatar as an actual real person and character that you care about and you want to keep alive. And then finally, when you've had one too many close calls or lost one too many battles, you no longer can be resuscitated and you have to pass on, essentially, to your next of kin, which you will call out basically when you're doing your character creation. And that idea is, whether it's passing it down to your son or your daughter or a relative or a friend or whatever it would be, you call that out, and when that happens, your possessions and reputation kind of pass down, but not all of them, right? So there's inheritance tax, and the sins of the father aren't fully invested on the son, but there's a little bit of that. And so the idea would be you would want to live as long and healthy a life as possible before you pass on to your progeny or whatever. And so that was the inspiration of Death of a Spaceman, to really give a sense of close association with your avatar and your character. And if at the end of the day you've got to be there at, essentially, the God view of the funeral of the character that you spent a year or so venturing around Star Citizen with, there should be a tear in your eye when it happens. So that was the goal. And so it was really a mechanic of how can we do that inside the game, inside our science fiction setting, which was coming up with this concept of: in the future, with all the medical science we have, in states where you may consider you would be dead now, you would not be able to be brought back to life or repaired, potentially we could do that in the future, but maybe we could only do it so many times. And so in some ways it's a little like the old school of you've got so many lives, right? And once your lives are done, the game's over. And the concept was that maybe the worse the death, you're in some big fireball, that's more serious in terms of the lives you lose off your character than it would be if you were down and bleeding out and someone came and got you and managed to repair you, fix you up in the medical table or a hospital. And the idea would be you would want to not run out of lives, and potentially there could be things you could do over time, go get some gene therapy or whatever, that maybe add a life back to you. I'm talking lives in a game sense here, but in general we're trying to put it inside the fiction of the world. But the idea is to have real persistence to your avatar and wear and tear. It's also one of the reasons why we've got things like wear in the game. It's essentially one of the things that we have for equipment; we're going to have it for characters. You're going to get older, things are going to get old, and all of that. We have parts of that in the game, but it's not fully working, but that's all systems that are on the plan or that we need to turn on properly, because that's part of the problem with what we're doing right now: we're building this incredibly complicated, interconnected simulation system, and not all the pieces are there quite yet. So even though we've built some of the pieces and we can functionally do stuff with them, because the other pieces aren't there, the whole system doesn't work yet. And that is actually one of the challenges of building a game the way we're building it, while people are playing it. Death of a Spaceman is a good example, because it's something that I talked about at the very beginning as a core concept. It's always been a core concept, but we're only just now getting around to starting to implement the actual functionality and gameplay features that will enable it. And I think when you have it, that will make people behave very differently in the verse, which is going to be super cool.

Well, we've already kind of started. Body dragging was the first feature that we released that gave you the premise to be able to manipulate dead bodies. But as Chris calls out, death is going to be a really important factor in Star Citizen. Now, there's kind of three deaths along the spectrum. There's what we're calling the downed state. So that's when your health has gone to zero and you're there. And when you're in that scenario, you'll be able to choose to stay there and be like, "OK, I need my buddies to come and rescue me. I need the law enforcement to come and help me," or maybe I pay for some insurance that rescues my body or something like that. Then there is the kind of you've died in terms of you've given up the ghost. Nobody's coming. You're like, "OK, that's it. I'm leaving that body there and I'm going to go back to a hospital and be revived." But that's kind of part of your DNA. That DNA is going to be re-impregnated into essentially a clone of you. And then you'll be able to go back to your location and you'll be able to see your dead body there. And as long as nobody's been there, you'll be able to retrieve your gear and so on and so forth. And then the third aspect, in terms of you passing on to your next of kin and that kind of thing. So what we're actually evaluating now is how this is integrated into the core healing gameplay and the actor status. So we already did some of the actor status with temperature, in terms of hypothermia and hyperthermia, and things like starvation. And what we want to do now in terms of the next iteration of this is what we call the healing and actor status T1. And what that will do is introduce drugs. So you'll have a blood drug level and you'll be able to manipulate things, but it will also introduce all the different statuses that are surrounding you as a character. So for example, when you're in battle and you take a really bad wound to the arm, you might say, okay, I've got a fracture, so my arm, I've got a permanent fracture. I'd have to go back to the hospital to get that repaired. Otherwise I'm going to start to suffer some status effects surrounding that. But if you keep taking damage and you keep taking more damage, that fracture might turn into an actual break. And then it might turn into actually coming out of your arm kind of thing. And the level of that status will dictate the level of care and level of healing that you need to go and basically get that healed. So you can go to a med bay and get them repaired. But it also allows other people to act as support roles and come and help you. Let's say you've got a really bad broken leg, which means that you can't walk anymore, because you haven't just fallen over and taken a little scratch. You've repeatedly taken damage in your leg and you've not gone to heal it, because MediPens, for example, will no longer just be like, "Oh, I'm a MediPen, I'm full health." You will have these permanent statuses like hypothermia and hyperthermia. And those will only be able to be removed when you go to these locations, either a medical bay in a ship or a medical bay at these hospital locations. So when essentially you go into that downed state, that's where body dragging will come in, so that people can come in and drag your body back to the medical facility. We're going to have obviously the medical gun in terms of the multi-tool attachment; we'll be able to inject essentially the material that's inside the MediPens, but a stronger version of that. So the MediPens will basically turn into something that is stabilizing you in the moment. You'll still be able to replenish your health, but if you've got a bleed or something like that, it'd be like a clotting agent that stops that bleed. And that allows you to get back to safety. And at that moment in time, you can then go, "Okay, do I want to go on and push on? But I've got this status effect." If I go back to the fractured arm, my weapon's now swaying more, similar to how we have the eyeball effects with the other things. And that progression of the actor status T1, in terms of the different limb statuses that you're going to have, in terms of whether you've got a traumatic brain injury, whether you've got leg injuries, whether you've got arm injuries, whether you've got internal bleeding in terms of your organs, the level of those statuses will basically go up and up and up to the point where you're like, "I can no longer function now and I need somebody to come out." And you'll have plenty of opportunity to back out. So it's not going to be something that's going to be like, "Oh, hello, you've broken your legs and that's it." It's going to be something like the other actor statuses, where you're going to have junction points where you can make a decision: should I go on? And it's that moment like in the Arctic: I'm close to the edge, but I might lose my toes. So essentially what we're working on right now is that healing circle and that healing gameplay. And it also allows that cooperative gameplay, that when you do go into this downed state, which covers the first of the three death states, that's the state where you really don't want to go to the next stage. Because as soon as you go to the next stage, that is what Chris touched on in terms of, it's almost like the DNA integrity, because you're going to go to the hospitals. When we release this, hospitals will be live in the locations. You'll be able to go to these hospitals and almost download your DNA matrix into the hospital database and say, "OK, if my body is unrecoverable or my friends can't get to me, then I'm going to die and have to be recloned into this body. My DNA is going to have to be re-imprinted into this shell." And during that process, that's the process where your DNA can kind of fracture or lose some of its integrity. And that is what Chris touched on in terms of you're losing a life in gameplay terms. That is what's happening as it's being imprinted into you. And depending on the manner of your death, and depending on, "Oh, if you've just been ignoring all of these statuses and all of your arms don't work and your legs don't work and you've got a brain bleed," some of that DNA integrity, as it's being injected back into your body, can be re-inherited from those systemic statuses that you've had. And that means that you might come back in your body with a prosthetic arm, or you might come back and your eye color has changed, or you're not as tall as you used to be, because there's something that's gone wrong with that DNA imprinting. That's kind of what we're working towards now in terms of that hospital healing gameplay loop, actor status, the extension of the actor status system that we went live with before, and obviously body dragging and all of that, setting your spawn point in game terms and the lives. That's the stuff that we're working on right now. And to be honest, that's going to be a significant change in how people play the game, because when you go to the third stage, where you're shedding your tear... I'm not shedding my tear at the character I've lost, I'm shedding my tear at the inheritance tax that I've just been levied. And it's at that stage, that permanent death where you're having to pass on to a next of kin, where it is the sins of the father. You're still going to have some of your reputational statuses, but they may not be as high as they were, because it's like, "Oh, your dad was part of X, Y, Z, but you're going to have to prove yourself." And that kind of loop is a really unique aspect in terms of an MMO. And that really ties into death having a real meaningful consequence. Like in Demon's Souls, the amount of times you get to the boss and you get to that 1%, and your palms are sweaty and you're moving the mouse and you're like, "No." That all of a sudden changes when you get to the edge of that cave and you're like, "Yeah, I'm just going to go in there, and if I find something in there that's not friendly to me, then I'll just respawn." Now it's going to be like, "Well, if I respawn, what happens to my ship? Am I going to lose my gear? I'm going to have to come back to it," because obviously physical inventory ties into it. "And then, oh, will I lose some of my DNA integrity?" And all of a sudden, it changes the choices you make along the journey that you're going on. And that is critical.

Yeah, one of the other things we're doing is that we're not going to be despawning player bodies anymore. So when you die, the body that's there and all the equipment will stay there. So if you end up having to be recloned, you could essentially go back to where you died and recover some of your stuff and see the skeleton of your previous incarnation. But the other thing I would say is that the cost of the new life, basically, and you're only going to have so many of these to degrade, is much more than getting rescued or having someone come and grab you and fix you up. So there will also be an economic incentive to live, to essentially not just go, "Oh yeah, I'm just going to respawn," because A, you're only going to get a very limited number of those, and B, they're going to be very expensive. So you would prefer to have other players or your friends or a service come and get you and fix you up. And I think that'd be really useful and important, because even in gameplay like that, okay, if I'm now exploring in a corner of the universe that doesn't really have a lot of people, my level of risk there is much higher than if I'm in the middle of a really well-traveled area of space. I think in terms of gameplay, things like finally getting around to the full health, Death of a Spaceman setup and the physical inventory, the gameplay potential and just what's going to happen and the interplay with players... there's not other games that I can think of that quite have all this stuff all together to do this at this level of detail. And personally, I'm super excited to have these come together. We've talked about them for a long time. Obviously it's taking a while, but that's because we're building something incredibly high fidelity with all this detail, but with all the scope. But it really will change a lot of the gameplay mechanics. A lot of how people are playing the game right now, you just wouldn't want to do. It just wouldn't make sense. And I think that's super exciting.

And hopefully you can see some of the method to the madness of the development. Because it's not like, "Hey, overnight we go, let's just add this cool thing." It's like, okay, it's underpinning these things. So when we add actor status, when we add eating and drinking, when we add physical inventory, when we add the ability to hold things in the hand from grenade throw T1, all of that is tying into the bigger picture of what we want to achieve. And that core gameplay loop of: I'm not just stepping into my ship and flying into space and I could just open my PMA and have access to everything I want. There's no consequence, there's no feeling that you're in the world, because you have access to this infinite bag of holding. This consequence of: I'm going on a real adventure. The things that I take with me are the things that I have access to. The ships that I have dictate how much storage I have and what I have access to inside those ships. Do I have a kitchen that provides me food and drink? Do I have a medical bay? Have I got room to take a buddy with me? Is he going to wear support armor that allows more replenishment of the medical gun that can revive me when I'm down in the cave and we can get out together? All of a sudden that becomes not just a single player "Oh, I've just got access"; all of a sudden those shared experiences are the things that make it a true experience. All of these individual systems in isolation, they're really cool, and we put a lot of effort and a lot of heart into them. And they're complex because we want scalability on the size of Star Citizen. But when you pull them all together and they start talking to each other, and they start, "Okay, have you got space for the amount of food and drink you need? Have you got space for ammo? What guns are you taking? Am I going to take the grenade launcher? Well, I can only fit so many magazines of that. Well, maybe I should take an energy rifle because that recharges." All of those different decisions tie into making it... That's when all of a sudden you go, "Hold on a minute, the game was already there. We just needed these systems to start talking to each other."

I feel like at some point we need to rebrand this to the Life and Death (and Taxes) of a Spaceman. It would be more appropriate.

Ultimately, we do joke a little bit about it, but the goal with Star Citizen is, essentially, it's a virtual life. We are trying to simulate, obviously in a more primitive state than the real world, all the things that would happen. Naturally you would think, okay, if I'm going to go to the Antarctic, I've got to bring my supplies with me. I've got to worry about if I get hurt, and all these things that I think create great gameplay opportunities and also great cooperative gameplay opportunities, right? So there's a lot of things that we talked about where clearly, if you're going to be adventuring in a dangerous place, having equipment and having people with you is probably a good thing, because otherwise something goes wrong and you're by yourself. And there's been a lot of engineering just on the very low level and some scalable stuff that we have to do to enable a lot of these systems, but over the next year or two years, we've got a lot of this stuff coming online. And I feel like when they all start interoperating together, then it will be an experience like no other. I don't know another game that does it to the level. There's some games that do some really nice... Red Dead Redemption 2 is great. There's a whole bunch of other stuff that does elements of this, but I think not to the scope and the level and the detail that we're doing. And that's one of the reasons why it's taken so long. It's definitely taking longer than I'd like it to. And it's part of my frustration when people are like, "Wow, where's my gameplay loops?" And I'm like, "But it's going to be so awesome. You've got all these elements." I know the big picture and how they're all going to pull together. And it's just one of the things that, when you're making a game live, developing in front of people, people experience what you wouldn't normally. Normally, most game developers will tell you, in the old way, certainly when I was making the Wing Commanders and all the rest of stuff, and Richard probably can opine on all the ones that he was making, that the game really only comes together near the end, right? So you work on all these disparate parts, and you do it for years, especially in today's world; people work on it for years and years and years, and then it really only comes together sort of... We're kind of in that alpha to beta stage. I know we say we're alpha, but we still got a lot of features to come, and normally a traditional alpha would be you've got your features there but you don't have all your content polished, and then beta is all content and features are in there and you're working on the bugs. So a lot of it doesn't... Like Wing Commander, you weren't playing through until a couple of months before we released the game, and it was all in different pieces. In the way we do Star Citizen, people see us develop all these pieces in different parts, and they go, "Well, why have you got that? That just seems silly that you're focusing on this aspect over here, where I don't even have this other thing over here." Well, we have a plan. We're working on all those pieces, and when they all come together, it's going to be a great experience. Already there's elements of it now, so you can go around and run around the verse, and yes, there's going to be a lot more, but there's already fun stuff to do, and there's the social aspect of it. I see amazing videos every single day. It's one of the funnest things for me, to see cool videos by whoever; there was one that Tarada just did on 3.11 that was shared around here. The point is, this is really cool stuff that people are doing with the sandbox we're building, even though the sandbox isn't finished. But whether it's me or Richard or Todd Papy or Tony Zurovec, we're all operating at the level of: we see the matrix, we just haven't built all the elements of the matrix yet, but we know it's coming together, and when it's done, it will be this amazing simulation. Our only frustration is... it's not like me and Richard are like, "Oh yeah, guys, take longer." It's like Richard and Todd and everyone else are like, "Is it really going to take you that long to do that feature? Are you sure you can't do that in half the time?" We're always on that case. I know everyone out there is on our cases, but some of this stuff just takes time to build, to test, and also to do it when you're doing it in a live game, right? Because we are building in a live game, so you can't just break everything by introducing a new feature. You've got to make sure the old features work as well. But to be honest with you, it's actually a fun way to do it, because a lot of how we're doing it also informs our development as we go along. Because yes, we've got our big plans, but some of the feedback we get helps tweak how things are coming in or what areas we'll address, or what things worked well or what things didn't work well that we need to adjust. And if you were doing it the old way, you wouldn't get that feedback. You'd just basically put it all out there. It'd be your best shot at it. And then you'd be like, "Oh shit, well, we've got to fix this thing or improve this thing." So I like it. And also just people experiencing what we're building so far is awesome for the team as well, because the team get all inspired when they see cool stuff that the community is doing. So there's upsides and downsides to what we're doing, but I wouldn't change it for the world, because I think it's one of the funnest things I've ever done in games, and it's awesome.

We're tying to build it in a simulation-style way. If you saw Ready Player One, it's not necessarily all the fictional worlds, but we want that sense of just going into another virtual universe but being able to actually interact and do things. Because of the rules of the world, the things you think you could do, you could do. It's a challenge to build something to be able to do that at the scale we're trying, but it's also hugely exhilarating as you start to put parts of it together. We're still working on making it better and more reliable but if you have a webcam you can drive [control] the face of your avatar in the game, which is a really high-fidelity face. We're using the same techniques they used on Avatar. We also take your voice and process it and put it into the world, placing you in this world with a higher sense of immersion than previously. We're working very much on things that will increase social interaction, increase the feeling of realism in the world, for you to get lost in it and have fun, escape from our world, so to speak.

The scale is really large. You can be on a planet, walk around and explore every inch of that planet and go down in caves, go into a city and various buildings in it, and then get into a spaceship. The spaceships range anywhere from small, like a single-seater that's 20 meters long, to the biggest in the game, which is 200 meters long. We have ones we're working on that will be over a kilometer in size, and they're fully realized inside. There's living quarters and mess and toilets, there's engines. It's all realized and laid out like you would expect it to be. You can get in, take off, leave one planet, fly to another planet, get out, and so there's a sense of scale and freedom. Think about some of the things you can do in Grand Theft Auto, but think on a much larger scale, and less focused on one profession. You can be the criminal if you want, but you can be the law enforcer or bounty hunter, or someone minding their own business trading cargo.

We're using some of the tools. What we're doing is slightly different than what something like a No Man's Sky would do. We use procedural techniques to allow us to create or paint at scale. In No Man's Sky, there's rules and random [seed] numbers and it creates the planets based on that rule set. With us, we don't do that because we have a specific universe with pretty deep lore. We use the procedural tools to paint at scale: an artist would go in there and we would say "This planet is in the cold zone, so it's going to be mostly covered in snow and ice, and then maybe here's where the oceans would be, the mountain ranges would be, here's where the tundra would be." The details of what's in every inch or meter comes from the procedural rules but the very high level in terms of creation is all artist-driven. If you want to create a universe that has a history and a lore, that's why we went that way. We have a pretty big write department that's been working on it for seven-plus years now that's fleshing out the different planets, the histories, the companies, historical characters, moments in time. All those combine to make this feel tangible and real.

When I first started this, I didn't think we'd be able to realize the planets and walk around them in first-person any way you want, but as we went on, the power of computers and GPUs has been getting better. The cloud's become sort of ubiquitous, we run all our servers in AWS at the moment. The power of those machines continues to increase. When we first start the game, I thought we'd have to have all these different instances, so people would play in their instance and not be able to join with their friends because they might not be on the same server. But with the new cloud power, we're gonna be able to do this thing we call "server meshing" which allows a whole bunch of servers to run in the cloud and talk to each other. So instead of having 400 servers and each server has 100 or 200 people on it, and those people can't see [players on other servers], if they all mesh together you could have all 4,000 people or 40,000 people in the same world at the same time. We're not the only people that are working on that. That's the sort of thing that you won't be able to get on a single-player game that I think can be really compelling. That definitely wasn't something people were talking about when I first pitched this in 2012.

Absolutely, and we're quite far along on the tech to deliver that. I know Amazon has been working on some of this behind closed doors, [Google] Stadia is perfectly situated to do that because their whole setup is in the cloud, including the clients. For an online multiplayer game, that's really interesting. One of the problems you have in traditional multiplayer games is that you always have a client [the machine the player controls directly] and the servers and there's always a distance between the two. Even if you have fast internet it will maybe take 20 milliseconds for the message to get from your client to the server and the server has to simulate what's happening, which could take another 15 milliseconds or 30 milliseconds. Then it has to send that message back to your client and tell you what the results are, plus telling you what everyone else is doing, that's another 20 milliseconds. And this is only if you've got fast internet and are close to a data center. So you've already got a lag that's anywhere from 70 to 100-plus milliseconds. In multiplayer games, people can get slightly out of sync and it gets laggy. The cool thing with Stadia is if everything's in the cloud, there's almost no time difference to talk between servers and clients and there really isn't any difference between the two. The quality of a multiplayer experience will increase because you'll have much less latency, you won't have any issue of cheating, you eliminate the issues you get with lag.

The concept of Star Citizen is it should always be a live game that people are playing. As long as there's an audience, we will be improving it and adding content to it. World of Warcraft is still going pretty strong now. There's some other MMOs that have been going longer. Our model is something that keeps us more on the cutting edge. If you look at World of Warcraft, it hasn't moved on with the rest of gaming in terms of visuals.

That [live-game model] is probably one of the big shifts in gaming. The past gaming sensibility was: you make this game, and then people would buy it, play it, consume it in two weeks, and then they would buy the next game. There is something a bit frustrating if you [work on a game for a long time] and people are done with it in two weeks. People are still buying GTA V to play online and they've been doing this now for quite a few years. They're doing all sorts of cool, community-driven content, whether they're doing crazy stunts or having car meets. We see something similar in the Star Citizen community. Our community makes better videos to show off the game than we do. It's crazy. They do all sorts of wacky things. That's definitely one of the future things in gaming, that involvement of your gaming community that really invests in this world or universe. That's been a huge shift. From a creator standpoint, it's really fun to build this tool set and see how it excites or inspires other people, and then it turns around and inspires us. There's definitely a symbiotic relationship.

Well, it's definitely a step in the right direction. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that still has to be dialed in. We've got aspects of it that aren't finished. So the next quarter, one of the things we're working on is sort of the VTOL hover stuff. We've actually, on our internal stuff, already done a lot of work on it. So we've been playing around with it and it's quite nice, which is going to make the sort of low speed hover stuff just feel better and give you a little bit more control and also sort of play into the takeoff and land. Because really, with the remodel of the flight model, we wanted to get more realistic, as in the maneuvering thrusters couldn't put out six or seven Gs in every direction and were at least as strong as the main engine, which was like 10 times as big visually. So we wanted to sort of go closer to what it should be like. Maybe not a hundred percent, like The Expanse does a pretty nice job of sort of, I don't want to call it... It's still science fiction, but it's got a little more science fact behind it. Your main thrusters, your main engines should provide most of your thrust and the maneuvering jets are helping maneuvering, and generally they should be more useful in space and less useful in atmosphere, and in atmosphere maybe various lift surfaces, whether it's your wings or tail or whatever, would help you to move. So we wanted to move towards a more realistic model where if you had a ship that had atmospheric features, which we have quite a lot of, they have an advantage in atmosphere over a ship that's not as atmospheric friendly, so to speak.

The Herald.

Yeah, like the Herald. That would be a good example of one. It's not so atmospheric friendly. Or the Starfarer, it's like a big tanker. And so we wanted to have that, and I think I can already see people flying it, people having fun, seeing the difference between the atmospheric and the outer space, and the fact that the maneuvering thrusters are a lot less powerful than they used to be and that you can get additional forces from lift on your wings if you've got more aerodynamic ships. All that aspect's good. The VTOL hover side of stuff will enhance things, because really what should happen on a really big ship where it really doesn't have the power of its... Yeah, here we go. Well, this isn't a big ship, it's a Nox. But basically, say a Starfarer, right? So a Starfarer should be able to slowly push its way up, but it doesn't really have much more than say like one G or something in terms of being able to go up here. So then you have to engage your main engines to sort of go forward and start to go like that. And then that's how you would leave the atmosphere. And if something had big main engines that rotate down, then they could probably go like this pretty easy, or much lighter craft. But I think it would give a more realistic sort of takeoff and entry. And I think with some of the VTOL and hover changes that we're going to bring in for 3.6, landings will be cooler and better. And we'll also be able to get that sort of, what you normally see in movies, or helicopter gunship kind of things where you can sort of be hovering and doing this. So the Valkyrie and stuff could be cooler with some of the newer stuff that we're doing. So we're doing that.

We also have a bunch of stuff that's moved in that works with the flight model, although it's not fully finished out. So we're still trying to balance the component and the heat system and the power system. So there's some hiccups. I mean, this is the first time all these things are working together. And in fact, a lot of the aspects of the power system and the heat system weren't properly working before. So we finally got them to be working. And now, of course, we've got, I don't know, it's like 80 plus actual flyable ships. So making sure all that stuff works and there's balance is going to be an ongoing task over quite a few patches. So this first one, yeah, there's some cases where it's like, oh, well, this is not necessarily what people would call fun or balanced, but we'll start to sort of dial that in and also bring in more aspects. So one of the big things for the next patch is sort of the wear and the tear and the misfires on items. So as the item gets used more, and if it's a lower quality, it potentially could have a misfire or have a critical failure, and that would impact systemically the ship itself and its operation. So whether it's a thruster doing that or it's a power plant or a cooler doing that, it would have a negative impact on your ship's performance and you would see it because it's all done systemically.

So I guess the short story on the flight model is I think that we've made the right changes. It's not finished yet. It's going to be a continual work in progress. We also have some other aspects like the EVA and the missile flight guidance system that we need to switch to use the newer system from the older system. This newer system is a lot more efficient in terms of processing time and power, which is good, because that means we can have more ships out there, AI ships, more player ships. So in general, I think it's a very good step in the right direction. I think from the feedback I've seen so far on PTU, in general, people like the changes. I know there's some debate back and forth on aspects of it or aspects in combat. And I also sort of think that there's so many variables still to play into this that people are going to have to sort of learn how to do things differently. So I feel like people did things the old way, and now with this new way, some people are a little sort of like everyone is when things change. They're like, I don't like it. This is a new way. But I think there will be more variety and there'll be more potential with all the things that have arrived and will be coming in that will just allow for a lot more interest and options for players, especially in the PU, because it's not just about combat, right? It should be about a lot of other things like flight as well as the combat and how you're getting around between places. And we've got a lot of aspects that we don't really have right now in the PU, like we were showing in Squadron where there's the Coil, which is this sort of huge gas cloud nebula that's kind of dangerous.

It affects all your components.

Well, yeah, and also it's in its way its own little atmosphere, so you would perform differently in it. We'll have versions, not necessarily of the Coil specifically everywhere, but there'll be areas where you would go into, say, scoop and collect fuel, for instance. And there'd just be all sorts of different textures of experience that you can have out in space and down on planets. And so that was one of the bigger reasons to sort of move to a more systemic model. So there's definitely more systemic modeling of, say, the thrusters. Thrusters get damaged, and especially when they start to misfire, which will be in the next patch, I think it will be interesting. And I think we'll start to see over time people realize some of the subtleties, and then there will be different strategies and techniques that people use. So in general, I think it's a really good step. It's not finished yet, but I'm quite happy with the direction we're taking. And from my sense on the community side, I think that most people like it too. So there you go.

Well, in terms of quantum, they still need to dial it in. I mean, the concept with the quantum side is that the small, sort of single-seater ships really aren't built to travel across the system just in one go. And there's a reason why you would want a bigger ship like a Freelancer, a Constellation, or go even bigger, like, okay, I want to take a bunch of cargo in a Hull C, or I want to fly in my Idris and go from one side of the system to the other side. So the concept has always been that the bigger ships, they may not be faster, but they're better at extended travel, so extended quantum travel. And this will be a reason, for instance, like, okay, I've got an Idris and I've got some Gladius. Now, I want to get from one side of the star system to the other one. Well, maybe that Idris can do that in two quantum jumps or travels or whatever you want to call them. But if I did that from one side of the star system to the other side in the Gladius, it could take me 10 or 12, right? So that's why the Gladius is on the Idris and then you do the long travel. And then when you get to where you want, the Gladius launches. It's just the same reason in the real world. It's like, yeah, that nuclear carrier can pretty much drive around forever, but the F-18s that you're launching from it certainly can't circumnavigate the globe. So that's the concept.

In terms of it being dialed in for the ships, that's an ongoing process right now. So I think right now it's not necessarily dialed in, right? The way I would sort of feel it is something like a Freelancer or Constellation really should be able to jump from one planet to another planet. It shouldn't be able to do it from one side of the star system to the other side. It would take several. But a bigger ship like an Idris or a Reclaimer could do multiple, span almost the star system or half a star system or whatever you want to take. And the limiting factor that we were considering, because we have this heat mechanic and the cooling mechanic, is that the quantum drive itself is creating this sort of magnetic field around your ship that's sort of pulling you forward. But that takes a lot of energy and generates heat and requires cooling. So the bigger ships have, first of all, the bigger power plants, but also the bigger cooling capacity, so they can really deal with it. And if you look at the Idris and you see the power plant in the Idris, I think we've showed it off, it's like submerged in it. And so that's kind of the concept, that you just don't have the room or the equipment to be able to do that on the smaller ships. But as you get bigger, you have more capacity for that. So it's kind of nice because, yes, the big ships can't fly as fast, they can't maneuver as fast, but they have the advantage of the distance.

And so I think what people have been complaining about is not that concept, but that it's not dialed in. I was talking to John Crewe this morning about it because I knew this question was coming up, and he said, well, from this planet to this planet, it's like 90% of the way you get there with the medium ship. Well, okay, if that's a Freelancer or a Connie, you should be able to get the whole way unless you're interdicted or there's some obstacle in the way. So that's a matter of dialing in the numbers. But for me, the concept that I just talked about is very important. That gives you a reason to have the bigger ships, because they're the ones that you can travel the greater distances with. And that's why you would sort of have a bigger ship that carries your smaller ones. So what we want to do is have a reason for all these different sized ships. We don't want someone to be able to just get in an Aurora and do a jump across the star system the same way that you should be able to do with a much larger ship.

Yeah, so we have talked about exposing it in much the same way as, I don't know if anyone's gone to a car configurator that you can do online for a lot of different car manufacturers. And you can say, oh, I want this color, and you do your sort of customization of the car, and a lot of times it gives you a code. And then if that code gets plugged into that configurator, or you can send it to your dealer, it's all there. So we've definitely considered sharing that.

We've got a whole bunch of stuff that we're going to work on for this quarter, Q2, 3.6. So there'll be a lot more on the DNA. What we've seen right now is the beginning. So we actually have some pretty cool stuff going forward. So there'll be more options, more variety. We're actually going to overhaul a little bit of the user experience to make it easier to sculpt and model your head in a much more 3D manner. So what we see right now is good, but we've got a whole other level that I think is going to go beyond that, that we think is going to be more intuitive and easier to make the head that you want. And it's also part of what we need for Squadron anyway, so it's going to go in the specific Squadron, what do you call it, the Calliope machine or whatever. And so that will be very cool.

And the other stuff that we've talked about is the possibility of, like we have the death of the spaceman, and you pass on to your next of kin, some element of your DNA is surviving and then you're just modifying from there. And we're still discussing the possibility of blending a male and a female together. I mean, you can blend multiple males together and multiple females together, but male and female is slightly more challenging because the actual rig itself is different. In the DNA system, there's a proto-rig for a male, there's a proto-rig for a female. There is a slight difference in the mapping between those two in the bones, so we would have to have a smart way of converting it. But it would be really great to say, oh yeah, here was my mother, here was my father, and this is what I look like, and then you can do some modifications from there. So those are all things that are on the table.

But we will have a lot more hairstyles. I mean, right now the hair is pretty weak. So we have a whole new hair shader setup that isn't in 3.5 right now, but our plan is to release it with the next one with new sets of hair. And that will be an ongoing process, so it won't be like all this new hair, that's it, no more hair, and that's all you get in 3.6. It'll be like, okay, we'll roll out some of them, and then continue to roll them out. Because the current hair assets were built using an older technique, so this newer technique will create better hair and we'll just slowly be adding new styles. We're considering facial hair, beards, mustaches, and a bunch of other stuff. So it's going to be cool.

So that's sort of the early stubbing in for additional content around ArcCorp. The longer term plan is that there could be a building and you could get a mission to go in there and take out a crime boss or something. So if you look at those hangars, you can go down stairways, there's a door, we just don't have it open at the moment, right? But the concept is to add procedural content, not too dissimilar to, for instance, the underground facility that you have in Hurston, here in ArcCorp. So places for delivery missions, or maybe even some combat missions or whatever.

And then on top of that, on a longer term plan, we have the first stage of persistent habs right now, which means that if you get this hab and you have your stuff and move it around and leave things there, when you come back, your hab will still have those things in those kinds of positions, how you arranged it. But the real long term goal is that as a starting player, you get your starting apartment, hab, whatever you want to call it. And it's always like building five, apartment 28. That's always yours. It's not like that changes every time you log on to a different server. And obviously, in something like ArcCorp, there is a vast amount of buildings. So there's plenty of space, even if we have tens of millions of players. But the longer term of the persistent hab system is to allow you a persistent location. And then one of the challenges of that is, okay, well, there could be a thousand building blocks that any one of our players could be in, because they have their own persistent address. How do they get to those? So one of the ideas is those landing pads on top, because then you could just fly to your own little apartment. And then we just have to figure out how you get to the central area. Is there a bus service that runs to a thousand places? Or is there a little sky taxi that can come get you? But those are the kind of things that we're talking about. Like we were talking about in Hurston, if you expand it, it's along the rail line, and maybe there's a place that has three or four buildings off a plaza, and that's repeated around different areas of the city. And so every time we add more players and it gets filled up, we open up a new one of those sections and go from there. So that's the longer term plan for it. So people would have their own real estate. The idea is everyone will get their starting location, and then on other planets or even on this planet, you could go and get yourself, oh, I want the big penthouse. Well, I get this penthouse on the top, but that's a 10 million credit place. I've got to earn enough money in game so I can go buy that place. So that would be the other aspect.

So it is not going to be the only one, although it's going to be the only one until we've fleshed out the Stanton system. So our goal on the Stanton system right now is to get all the planets in and get all the basic landing zones in, right? And then, as we're also creating other systems, we're going to go and be expanding the existing stuff. So you could see more areas open up in Lorville. You could see more areas open up in ArcCorp. You could ultimately see more areas open up in microTech, et cetera. But first we want to get Hurston-Lorville working, ArcCorp-Area18 working, microTech-New Babbage working, Crusader-Orison working. And then, I mean, you've already seen a little bit in this release, there's now a direct line from the spaceport to the business district, which makes sense, right? Because that was how it would be done. We just didn't have time when we did the early release.

Our goal is to keep improving things, so we still have things to do on the city tech. This is our first iteration. There's a lot of lighting stuff that we can't do just yet in terms of real-time global illumination and stuff. And we have plans for it, just those are bigger projects. But in something like ArcCorp, where there's all these buildings with a lot of artificial light, and between night and day it can be quite different, you want the lighting effects and the shadowing to feel better. So I think we've done a pretty good job with the tools that we already have. But it can be a lot better. And so that will be stuff that we'll be improving, and then also improving the fidelity of the buildings, and maybe taking some of the stuff that we've improved for ArcCorp and bringing it back into some of the Lorville buildings, because the first pass of Lorville was lower poly than some of the stuff that we have in ArcCorp, right? So it's just an ongoing process: we get the Stanton system done, we get the base landing zones, and then we'll start to improve those while we're doing the other systems. And as we go, we learn more about how to make everything work better and be efficient.

Well, I mean, the idea with ArcCorp is we want you to fly between the buildings. I've already seen people doing videos. There's a kind of hard deck that you're really not meant to go below, and then your IFCS is going to take over. Right now we're fighting through some issues with getting all that to work well and have the right performance. But ultimately, the idea is, we don't really want players taking their spaceships and landing them in the central plaza, because it would be a problem. So we want to prevent you from doing that. We don't want to blow you up. If you do that, though, what we would rather do is take over your ship or fly you away. Or rather than blow you up, you just fade to black and then you fade up and you're in a jail cell in ArcCorp or whatever, for unauthorized flying, and your ship's impounded. You have to pay a credit fine to get it back. But yeah, we definitely don't want to kill you. And we also don't want to have too much HUD AR visual stuff that gets in the way of the pretty city. You want to see the city, right? So we've been talking about ways of, so even the current one, I think it's improved in 3.5, but it's still probably too much. So that will be something we'll be continuing to work on.

It's a hard balance, because even in the real world today, you can't take your Cessna and fly it over any part of the city and land it on any street in LA.

You've got to keep away from LAX. And if you do do something like that, you will be in trouble. Unless you're having an emergency landing and you had to land on the street, but even then it's dangerous. What we really don't want is someone just taking their Hammerhead and crashing it into the central plaza trying to kill as many players and AI as possible.

But it makes sense from a lore point, is what I was getting at, because less than 0.1% of humans own private airplanes and you can't fly them anywhere you want today, 940 years from now when everybody owns a private airplane...

Well, not everyone's going to own a private... In our world, not everyone owns private airplanes. You're playing one of the, whatever you want to call it, maybe not the top 1%, but the top 5%.

Yes, absolutely. So the current state of the player and the vehicle UI is absolutely not even close to what we want as a final state. And it's sort of become more and more messy over the years as we added features, but it's not been considered holistically. I kind of feel like in some ways our best version of the HUD was all the way back when we did the Dogfighting Module. So we're actually engaging in a full reconcept of how everything should feel and look. It's not coming online yet because it's going to take a while. But we basically want to build it so it has real character, it's usable, and also different manufacturers have different feels, and it's a lot more contextual. So for instance, the visor clutter, right? If I'm sitting in my cockpit and I've got my two monitors here, my ship status should be here, my ship target should be here, which is exactly how Wing Commander worked, right? I don't need to have these two big things cluttering up my visor, unless perhaps I want to say, oh look, I want to cast this to my visor, and you'd have a button on the MFD to cast it up there. And it can be contextual, where it gets smaller or bigger depending. Like right now, there's a huge X there if there's no target. Why would you waste space like that? You want to have as uncluttered a view as possible.

So there's several things. One is the feel and look of that. The second is working on the tech itself, to make it much easier for us to implement it. So up until very recently, we've relied very much on Flash and Scaleform, which is sort of a game implementation of Flash. And it's very difficult. Not that many people work in Flash anymore anyway. And it's just awkward. So we started about a year ago building our own UI building block set, to not have to deal with ActionScript, not have to deal with Flash. It's a totally different thing. And it's been led by Zane Bien, who's our senior lead UI, and so they're starting to pull it together where we have these various different building blocks that we can put together. And it should be much easier and quicker for the game teams to implement the UI, because right now it's one of the reasons why our UI is a bit... it's just hard to get UI resources to deliver all the UI we need, for DNA or for cockpits or maybe glass screens or whatever. So we are going to fix it. It's going to be much better.

Well, we did do some things, whether it was brightening or looking at putting a drop shadow, and we haven't finished that. It definitely will require more work. From our standpoint, since we are trying to refactor the UI tech, we're moving to our own system that's more flexible, that is much more 3D object or holographic object based. Because all this stuff is engineering time on graphics, and everyone's got two years' worth of work in their backlogs, we didn't really want to focus too much time on a dead system, and have that come in more with our new system. Because in the old way, it's too patchwork in terms of how the various elements get displayed, it's too custom, it's a pain. So we'd rather change things out and then work on a more proper solution. So we've done some stuff to improve it, but yes, we haven't finished, and we will. That is something we would like to make a better solution for, whether it's more a drop shadow or detecting what the value of the background is and adjusting to that on a more dynamic basis.