Ines Caldas

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.

No, we do have some physical interactions with some UI screens, like we showed for the elevator panels, but any more screens with more complex interactions, we are avoiding it at [the moment]. It's a bit hard to get the balance. We want to do some search or do certain operations in the screen, so having that doesn't really work very well. We talked about maybe having a pose on a player, having a bit more connection, so maybe we actually see the player with the hands on the sides, not for ships, but at the terminals and kiosks around the game. But all this is still, we're still discussing options, but at the moment we're not thinking of adding [it].

I would just quickly say that one thing for me that was important is that if you start putting the hand onto the UI and it's quite a high-fidelity UI, then you start obscuring the UI. So I always felt that would kind of lessen the... you kind of want to bring the UI in focus, right? And you want to use your screen space and you want to see what's going on there. You want to see all the little interesting transitions and interactions. You don't want to see a big hand covering everything interesting happening.

It will. We're working on it. So yeah, the PU version will have armor and clothing. Basically, we'll have two views. So we have the main view, which will be very similar to what we showed at CitizenCon. And then the secondary view that the player can go to by using a keybind, a shortcut, that will bring up either clothing or armor depending on the context, and all the similar operations we currently have for the other ones.

Yeah, I think our main concern at the moment: it's very clean because for Squadron, we have a very controlled limit of items that a player can carry. The PU can go wild with heavy armor. So I think, yeah, we are in talks with UI and the experience teams to try to balance it out, get the best experience, but try not to clutter as much.

We touched on it with the UI team. We had the UI team on last week, but it bears repeating here because not everybody can watch everything that we do. These Squadron 42 technologies, these UIs, these features and whatever, they're not just brought over to Star Citizen by checking the multiplayer box. A lot of these things have to be reshaped and reformed to work with the persistent universe, with a persistent universe that's continuously evolving. When they were first developing Squadron, they might have included the way the PU was working then. But it's always this thing of them diverging and then bringing them back, and then diverging and then bringing them back. We're in the process of bringing them back right now. So those adjustments are what's going to take some time, and why we can't say that this will be out in January or February.

The one thing I think of when I see that question is always, so for me, you have the two screens, right? So you have the first-person screen, the loot screen, that's all about, I'm in the middle of combat, I need some ammo, I need some grenades. And I got the big screen where I'm a paper doll, I'm in the middle, I can dress myself, I can move things between bags, I can have, here's a bag with all the helmets I've collected, here's one with my favorite knick-knacks and whatever. And it's funny when you say that, the first thing people ask me is, where's armor? It's like, in the middle of combat, I need a quick way to completely change my outfit, because this encounter will not go well unless I'm wearing that pink helmet.

It is the screen as well. It is game-changing. It is so nice. It works like you'd expect, and it's just fantastic to use.

Yeah, I think if you get it for the weapons, even if you don't get armors, it's still such a win.

When you're panicking, you need to grab a medpen, you just have that. Again, it's that fluidity, right? It's like, you've gone in, you grab the thing, it's done what you'd expected, and it's like, yes, I'm in the zone.