Johan "Joies" Holmér

So that's one of those kind of weapons that I just mentioned that requires a bit more tech to get working. So we've got the Novia crossbow, we've got some of the vault weapons as well that are expanding on the typical weapon behavior that we've got. And while it's just a crossbow, it just fires a bolt and it's nice and easy, obviously there are implications there that require our team and other teams to chip in on to actually get working. So it's not going away, but it's on the horizon.

Yeah, something with the crossbow. In any game, you expect to shoot the crossbow bolt, and then that sticks to surfaces and sticks to people and so on. That requires the physics team to do some work, and they've got bigger fish to fry.

You mentioned the vault weapon, for instance, like the Parallax rifle. That's one of those weapons that's quite cool in the way that it's got an evolving fire mode. So it's going to start out being a projectile-shooting weapon as you start firing. It will then evolve into a beam. So it'll start out with a tug, tug, tug, tug, then you have the beam. And it also has the potential for overheating. So that is something that's coming.

Yeah, again, more engineering work that we're creating for our poor engineers at the company. But it should be fun to use when we get it.

Parachutes. Yeah, parachutes sound nice. As we're adding more gameplay and stuff to do on planets, we're expecting to have more dogfights and so on on planets. So absolutely, you need to be able to bail out of your ship and survive the fall and not just fall to your death. So it's something that we want to do. And it needs designing from our point. And definitely something that I would like to see in our game.

It's funny, actually, because I do sometimes scan the thread on Spectrum before we come here. And I saw this question, and I was like, oh, parachute? Yeah, we've talked about it a little bit before. And it was funny, because then not long after that, I was just scrolling down Twitter. And I saw, sorry, I can't remember who it was, but someone put a community vote up there: what would you like to see in game next? And it was like a Banu hover bike, a couple of other really cool things, and then parachute. And I was like, let me just look at the results. Parachute was like 90%. And so it was like, oh, wow, you guys really, really want a parachute. So yeah, that's something that we'll be looking at in the future. But like Joes said, there's just no timeline on it right now.

Yes, yes, definitely. If you look at some of the games that are being released right now, most of them have this parallax effect on aiming down sight with holographic sights and so on. And it's definitely something that we want to do. It's just a matter of priority at this point.

Yeah, I mean, us as the design team do a ton of competitive analysis, especially with the weapons, just to make sure that we're on top of things, because obviously as new games come out, tech gets better, weapons start to feel better. We obviously want to make sure that we're on the cutting edge of making our FPS experience feel good as well. So this is something that we've looked at quite recently and just started to discuss what it is we can do to start making improvements to them, because from a technological point of view, we've not really had much engineering work on the actual visuals of the sights themselves for a long time, probably several years at this point. So again, we're trying to get the core systems in game right now. So this is just something to come later as almost like polish.

Salvage is a really, really exciting feature. It's something that I'm working on currently. And you're going to be able to salvage the hull from a ship. So I'll give you one of the examples, right? So you're in a dogfight with another player. You blow up their ship. You've taken some damage to your ship as well. You're going to have the multi-tool and you'll be able to jump out of your ship and salvage the debris from the guy that you just took out and then float back to your ship and do some patch repairs onto the different parts that got damaged. Visually, it looks really cool because you just hoover up the metals from the ship. It just feels really nice to use. And it provides you a way to repair your ship or also gain some resources from destroying someone else's ship. We do have quite a lot of ships in our game. So you need to be able to salvage pretty much every ship in the game. It's what we're working on.

It's a technical challenge. Obviously, we've had some ships that were made several years ago. So there's obviously problems that arise from those: people fixing issues on them, re-exporting them, and not realizing something's broken. Or tech has advanced on the newer ships that has made them potentially look a little bit better when they take damage and things like that. So there's some catch-up work to do on both the tech and content side. But what you showed me the other day, Joes, this was really cool, where when you're actually repairing the ship, you don't actually restore the paint. You just restore the base metal layer, where it's like, oh, this is super cool. I've been through a dogfight and I've patched myself up. I can see exactly where I was hit previously and where I've repaired. There's a scarring on the ship. So when you start seeing people landing at space stations and whatever, you're going to actually be able to see, oh, this guy has been through some stuff. It almost tells a bit of a story about where they've been. So it's really, really exciting. I'm for sure going to be messing around with it when it goes live.

Yeah, yeah, you will. It's working currently. I'm mostly using the ships when I'm testing it in my test levels. But yes, you're able to do it on ground vehicles as well. It's basically using the damage map system. So currently if you shoot a ship on the wing, you'll see a big hole on the wing. And we've expanded on that system. Without going into too much technical detail, we've made it more consistent so that players will see the same type of damage holes, and also made sure that you can't cheat with the damage map.

What do you mean, can't cheat?

Basically, we've moved it from the GPU to the CPU. I don't want to go too much into technical detail, but networking, basically. It works over the network now.

There was a big conversion that had to be done, that basically was showing what you were doing on a surface, and it would show for someone else. And yeah, it was a big tech hurdle early on that we had to try and get over.

It was client authoritative, and now we moved it up to the server.

Yes, exactly.