Emily Hanson

I think we agreed so much with this.

Yeah, I've actually been working on this this week. So now you will be able to sit in the ship and you'll open the star map and it will open to the star map, and if you are anywhere else it will open to the interior map if you have an interior map. We've also started the star map out further now, so it will zoom back out so you get a view of the system that you're in a little bit more, rather than being face up with a planet's texture. Another thing I've added is a keybind so that if you're in the star map you can just press that and go straight into the interior map. We don't have the other way yet, but we have that way. So hopefully it's gonna work a lot more smoothly now and you can be in the context you actually want to be in.

Yes. Emily might have some answers. I was just stealing her thunder a little bit.

Yeah, so there are a lot of plans and a lot of thoughts that we have. We obviously want to use the AR space for markers. If you're going into a hangar, have a gate bracket so that you know the bounds of where you're trying to go. A ladder sort of system so you have a guide to where you're trying to go. And then also we want to make use of the radar display that you have as well, to actually utilise the area map tech again to display your ship and the ground underneath you. And then obviously if you have a landing pad, it will show you your landing pad, and if you don't have a landing pad and you're just trying to land anywhere, it'll have a line with a shadow kind of thing and it will sort of guide you to whether you can land there, whether it's flat enough, that kind of thing. So these are the sorts of things that we're thinking about doing.

And that'll tie into how we want to show terrain and things like that in our map system, because I want that to be a thing.

So this is actually one of the things that I fixed recently. You couldn't route between zones. I had it working initially, but it turned out that it didn't work in a server environment because, again, things aren't streamed in, and those entities that I need, those transit entities, don't necessarily exist. We do have a temporary solution for that. So it should work so long as the zones that you need to route between are streamed in. But there's a longer-term plan to make that work totally regardless and much more reliably. I think they're doing a transit refactor. So there's some dependencies as well on some systems. So the routing within the last couple of months has gotten a lot more robust. So it's a lot more reliable, but there's still quite a ways to go. And I'm kind of at the point where I'm starting to depend on some other systems, and I've got to wait until they're further along, and then that's going to benefit the map. Because it uses AI, and if that doesn't find a path, then it's got to use transit. So those are two different systems that are being developed, at least for the interior map. I don't know if you can comment on the star map routing.

Yeah, the star map routing, I know we want to refactor that as well. There are some issues at the moment, obviously, because you set a route and then you go there and it's moved since then, so it blocks things, and that gets really frustrating. So we obviously need to look into ways to handle that in the future, so that whenever you go anywhere your route always exists and you can always do it, you don't have to reset it and all of this. So there's a lot of work still to be done on that.

But when it comes specifically to this, it's also a bit of design, right? A decision was made that you can route from your ship because it's the hardware in the ship doing the routing. But from seeing feedback, discussions have been started. We'll see what happens in the future with this one. It might be something that we want to implement, where people can do it from the surfaces of planets and so on.

I think the main reason it's in the ship at the moment is because the system is tied to checking whether you have enough fuel, right? And if you don't have that ship available, it doesn't know whether you have that fuel. So we need to account for that and consider that if we're going to allow you to do that from just standing anywhere.

And for the folks in the chat that are picking up on transit refactor, it's not anything super sexy or amazing. Just consider that with server meshing you have to be able to divide all these areas into different servers, and that includes sometimes landing zones if you guys all decide to go to one, and the trains need to work across servers. It's just some underlying tech stuff.