Jonny Jacevicius

So we wanted to basically review a bunch of our major items in the game. So looking at armor, weapons, ships, and basically start to apply more logic to why they are being priced that way. We started with the weapons and armor, basically. So we started looking at things like applying value to different aspects of them. So looking at pure size and associating a rough material cost: a pistol is obviously going to be less material cost than a bigger rifle or a shotgun or something that's a bit chunkier. So obviously there is a weight of value associated with that. Then also looking at things like manufacturers, because some of them have a manufacturing quality associated with them, or a prestige. Looking at the different tech levels: we've got some very basic ballistic weapons and we've got some very advanced electron or laser weapons that are going to have manufacturing costs associated with them. So people can go to the shop and look at the different weapons against each other and go, oh, okay, this makes logical sense, because this is rarer, or this looks more expensive and feels more expensive to use. And we did the same thing with the armor too.

Then we started looking at some of the bigger ticket items like our ships. So again, we applied very similar logic to those, where we go, okay, let's look at the size. Let's look at how they're being used. Are they used to make money? Because if you think about a commercial vehicle in the real world, typically they cost more because you're going to be able to make money with them. And then looking at manufacturers, quality: is it a luxury ship? That then applies more value as well. And then obviously weighing that up against the actual prices that you're paying real money for as well, and making sure there's an association there as well. And that also allowed us to look at a lot of the outliers that we had previously and go, oh, okay, some of them are sitting way far above everything else for some reason, and some of them are sitting way far below everything else. So it's been a way of leveling it out and applying logic to a lot of that stuff as well.

There were a couple of other things that we looked at too. We also looked at balancing salvage out, because I think that had not had a thorough pass before, and we saw people just getting millions upon millions of UEC through salvaging. So we felt that that was basically flooding our economy with alpha UEC, and that was causing problems: the value of things just goes down so much, and it becomes meaningless when you can exploit a system like that. So we've applied some more logic to that and brought the gains down on what you can get from salvage. And then we also took a look at balancing mission rewards. So instead of everyone having to default to salvage to make money, we're now looking at the effort versus reward algorithm that we're applying to our missions and basically going, hey, how much effort, how much risk, how difficult are they? What are you putting into these missions? Is it super difficult? Okay, you should earn more money from it. Is it long? You should probably earn more money from it as well. So overall, things should feel a bit more as you would expect.

And this isn't the end of that tuning in 3.23.

No, this is just the first pass. Well, the next pass anyway.

Yeah, on that note for economy, I think I touched on this in the Letter from the Chairman. I think a lot of these systems have been around for a long time, like claim timers, insurance, obviously the economy values for missions. And they were balanced correctly as and when they were done a long time ago. The game's been out for a long time. But we need to start bringing these systems a bit more cohesion in how they talk to each other. So going forward, I think the players and the community should expect to see some significant changes to those systems as we move towards trying to create a more cohesive experience in the game. Because I think right now, if you just take 3.22 as a good example, if you really know where to go, like JJ said, you can just make millions upon millions. And once you've got so much money and everything is linked to progression with money, you can just buy your way and that's it, right? You lose the desire or the motivation to keep playing the game. So I think we want to build that motivation in, that, okay, I'll go and do this because I enjoy doing salvage and it gives me this reward. And then obviously the other side of the coin is we don't really have a lot of money sinks in the game right now. So in terms of insurance, your ship blows up, you just claim it back immediately. You die... we've talked about Death of a Spaceman for a long time, but we want to start bringing all these systems in place. And I think going forward, we will have some more changes on that front.

Yes, so we're going to look to wipe alpha UEC and rentals, I believe. And that's purely because if we don't, all of the analytics that we get back from people playing the game are going to be basically false reports, because people are going to be using all of their banked cash and it'll just be like, oh, people are just buying all of these now more expensive items, for example, and that then tells us, oh, do we need to make these more expensive? No, not really. It's just that people are using giant cash reserves that they've been keeping for a long time. So while it might be disappointing for some people to lose the money they've built up, it really helps us in informing us: have we pushed the economy in the right direction, so we can keep making iterations and informed decisions going forward.

And that's a good thing to note as well: we're a live game. Just because we changed the prices in 3.23 doesn't mean we'll then change them in 4.0. We want to put them in; this is our first rebalance or re-leveler. We'll evaluate, and that's why we want to do that. We'll evaluate, okay, look at the data, and then base our next decisions on that data.

So sniper glint was basically our first proper foray into giving you some good feedback against someone who's using a sniper rifle. So this was actually a very low development cost feature that we wanted to basically try out. And it's not to say that there are other things we can't do later that might be better for the game that we're heading towards eventually. But this was something we wanted to try out purely because we start adding more and more systems into the game that lead us to this Death of a Spaceman kind of future, which for people who don't know is basically there's going to be more punishment through death. Death is going to be a very big deal. And if you have a moment where you die and there was nothing you could have done about it because you had no idea about what happened, that's where it becomes a big frustration. If I come and kill you with a shotgun, you probably could have heard me coming and you could have prepared for it and shot me. You see me as part of that process. Whereas when we start looking at shooting people over the massive distances that we have on our giant planets, if you dial in your scope right, you can shoot someone from over a kilometer away and you're not going to be able to see them. So it was our first attempt at looking at what kind of feedback we can start providing people to cut through some of that frustration. Now, there are other things that we can do in the future that I think support that as well. So looking at bigger muzzle flashes that you can see at longer distances, and improving our whiz-by system and hit reaction and feedback and things like that. Those are things we can work on, but they take a lot more time to get right. So ultimately, we want to play with the sniper glint system, see what people think, see what we think, dial it in more if we like it, or if we've decided it's not the ideal solution that we eventually want, we can always turn it off. It was very low cost, like I said. So ultimately, it's good that people are giving us feedback because it's going to inform us on how we want to move forward.

Well, first off, I think, the fact that we're working on a live game, the issue is that we should always be looking at, even if we've got a system that's out in the wild, evaluating it: does it deliver the gameplay that we want, that the community wants, that Chris wants? So when we looked at the combat as a whole, and we're talking a long time ago now, I was probably still on Star Citizen, it was probably pre-Squadron when we started talking about Master Modes. A lot of the combat that we saw across the broad spectrum of the community, not just the new players and not just the very well experienced players, but the broad spectrum, basically became jousting, and we felt that we could do better than that. Now, I know that there's a lot of discussion points around Master Modes where we're talking about lowering the ceiling cap. That was never the intention; that's not our inspiration. Our intention really is to try and create a system that is fair to use for all players, that allows players to come on and still feel like they can engage in the game and compete, but still reward the very best pilots. And Master Modes, the iteration that it is today, has been through probably 20, 25 iterations of different tweaks and changes, and we want to try this and we want to try this. And even the iteration that we're going live with in 3.23, that's not the end. That's just the beginning of that process. We will put it live. I already had a meeting literally this morning to discuss with Yogi spool times between SCM and NAV, or what are we going to do with snub fighters that don't have a quantum drive? Do they have a NAV mode? And I was like, well, yeah, they should do. So the expectation is that Master Modes came from the goal to try and improve the overall flight experience for both combat and non-combat in the game, so that if you want to be a space trucker, that's cool, you can switch in, or if you want to be a trader or a miner or combat. So it's about taking something and making it accessible to new players, that has a lot of depth for existing players to then take advantage of. And really, that was the inspiration. There's never really a moment in time where you start going, this is a problem, we just need to fix it. It's more about you evaluate these systems over a longer period of time and then start to think of solutions about how to improve it. And then those solutions grow and grow into a new system that you go, oh, this could be a solution that we could do. And with Master Modes, you mentioned all the times that we've talked about it, but we've also done several tests with the community before we've even got here, outside of just the 3.23 Evocati and PTU. We tested it in Arena Commander. We tested it with players a long time ago. So this is the result of a lot of effort and work by a lot of people to get it where we are now. And I believe in it. And now it's about getting it to the broader audience, and then we evaluate that feedback and we tweak it and tune it and get it to where we think it could be. Because I think you always have to change the foundation before you can start. You either have to do revolution or evolution. And I think with the previous system, the evolution wasn't going to give us what we wanted from the end result. So we had to go slightly back a bit to then go forward.

To be honest, I've been playing Master Modes for a long time in Squadron, getting a feel for it. Does it feel right? Sometimes you have to sit with a feature and play it and get the everyday scenario. You can't just take half an hour and go, oh yeah, it's approved. You have to play the game and play it for yourself in all the different scenarios and then make a judgment, and then get that feedback, and then we can tweak and improve.

I think the interesting thing as well is, because it's been going for quite a while and obviously we've been playing it internally a lot, we've had a lot of very passionate pilots, aces and pilots at the company, who at first felt averse to the change, like some people in the community are as well. But it's been amazing seeing them playing with it, spending time with it, and coming around on it and going, actually, this is really fun. I prefer this now. So it's been very cool seeing that process happen internally, and it's going to be interesting to see how it develops in SC as well.

Hopefully Rich isn't next, because this is quite a quick answer if you wanted a break. So basically we're not doing a full reset, so your home location is as it was when you last set your character. When we do a full reset in future, that will give you an opportunity to choose a new home location. But I believe, and people will probably correct me if I'm wrong in the chat, you can use the character reset function on the website. But, and I'll look into the camera when I say this, this will mean that you lose everything that you've earned in game. So if that function is there and available, just be mindful when you actually use it, because you'll lose your UEC, you'll lose your bought ships in game and things like that. So if you are really desperate to choose a new home location, I believe that is an option that you can pick and choose.

So we'll just assume that's off the table, because you don't want to lose all your stuff.

Correct. I would wait or move your things manually to a new location.

So, not in 3.23. This question coming up actually spurred me on to go and investigate this more, to find out what was involved. We do actually, funnily enough, internally have Grim Hex as a developer location, so it's set up to be a home location for us, but there are potential knock-ons with that, so we can't just switch it on and assume everything's going to be okay. Because if you think about the landing zones, they're huge. They've got loads of facilities. Some of them are set up for the new player experience and things like that. Obviously Grim Hex is a much smaller, condensed location. You've also got the problem that if you start to leave the station, you're more than likely going to be around other people who are going to be ready and willing to shoot you. So if a new player then accidentally picks Grim Hex, not understanding the implications, that could be very frustrating. So there's a few things that I need to look into and chase, but it's something I want to do. So I think we can definitely do it in the future.

Yeah, so for us, it's a much more gradual process. There's not really one moment in time where it's like, is this thing ready or not? It's more of a constant review of how features are progressing. And we like to be very hands-on with the team and with the features. So typically, we will be playing the features regularly, individually, as a group or with the team that's actually making the feature, giving feedback, trying to harden it, and also at the same time evaluating where it's at. So there are several moments in time as we're going where there will be a point where we have to decide, is it ready or not? But there's no line in the sand necessarily where we go, this is definitely not going, or this is definitely going. There'll be points in the process, like we had to do with Cargo, where it's basically like, this is a core feature, it's not where we want it to be. At this moment in time, we want to push it a bit further out to make sure we've got the time available for it. But ultimately, as I say, the process has changed for us in that there used to be more one date, everyone's working towards that date. We are constantly trying to be on the ball with all of these individual features and knowing exactly where they're at and if we're happy with them.

Well, for Cargo, it was... You came to me on the day of ISC and were like, is it in 3.23.0 or is it in a .x? And I was like, I'm still deciding.

You want to air the laundry? Okay. So the day that our cargo episode was supposed to air, or did air, was the day of the go/no-go. So I had two versions of hosting, as we often do: one where it's still targeting 3.23, and one where it's not going to be in 3.23, it's going to be in 3.23.x. And you might remember we were so good this season about getting all our episodes out at 8 a.m. Pacific on the dot, because we moved editorial over here and we've done a lot of structural improvements thanks to David and Tom over there, who've made things a lot better. We had a great streak going of every episode right there at eight. And then I was like, well, what version do we put out? And he's literally in there surrounded by everybody playing it. That whole story he's telling you, playing it, going through. And I'm just pacing out behind, breathing on the window. Which version? Just to see whether it gets the go or no-go. And it was: we still don't know yet. We're going to give them another two weeks, and then we're going to make the hard call. So it was like, all right, so we go with what we call the truth in the moment. The truth in that moment is that it was still targeted for 3.23, so we go out.

And I wanted to give the team every opportunity to be able to get it into the game. But it needed to pass a certain level of quality bar to get in there. And ultimately, they didn't manage to do that. And that was the decision I had to make.

So night vision. So I've got some good news. I saw and was playing with night vision on weapon optics yesterday. So we have got it to a point where we can put them on the optic lenses using our new optic tech that came in with 3.23. This is not to say that this is coming out with 3.23, to be very clear, but it does mean that we can look to a fairly close release whenever we feel like we can get the content out to people, so people can actually start using these. And it works: it exposes more light when you're on the dark side of a planet, so you can actually look around and see what you're trying to shoot. And it's a little bit more uncomfortable to look around in a well-lit environment, kind of as you'd expect. So that's the good news. The slightly less good news is that I know people are probably going to start asking when can we get it on visors and ship cockpits and things like that. The answer there is we need to assign some more time to it. It's a bit more complex. The new optic system gave us a really good opportunity to play with some of those settings, but the visors and the cockpits aren't set up in the same way as those. So it's something that we're going to start looking into and finding where we can fit it in the roadmap, because we definitely do want to provide that for people. But we've got some design questions to answer first and some engineering to do as well.

Two things to add to that. One is that we've broken the back of getting it working, so now it's more of just a content and scheduling problem rather than a technical problem, which is great. And it is really good, by the way. And the one thing is that I want to make sure that everyone's clear: it's not true night vision, it's light enhancement. So when you're looking at something, even though it's on the dark side of the moon, you still get a very good clear picture, you can still call things out, but it's not what you'd imagine as stereotypical night vision.

It's like upping the exposure on a camera.

The difference between projecting a light, like an infrared light, and seeing the red infrared light, versus just amplifying the light that's already there, like starlight.

So from the player's perspective, it will give them what they want: they can see, and they'll be able to pick things out in the darkness. But I just want to clarify, that's what we're working towards, because that's a more achievable solution for us. It still gives us what we want. And like JJ said, we do want to then propagate that to the visors.

Really good. Obviously, there's still work to do. Obviously, a big proponent of that, as you mentioned, it was in Squadron stream. Now we're dealing with things like networking, and this is going to be true for a lot of the features that we talk about today, is that there are unique challenges that come with putting things into the Persistent Universe and Star Citizen. It's looking really good. And obviously the guys yesterday, if you missed the ISC, they did a very, very good job of explaining the systems, but I'll give a quick summary of that. Basically, how we felt previously about the old EVA system is that it wasn't really up to scratch. The player experience and just the feel of the movement wasn't really as responsive and as basically easy to use as we essentially want. So as the game's evolving, we're finding that we're going into these environments where we're making tighter turns, we're going through wreckages, we're trying to do things like that. And if you think about the old EVA system, because you're flying around so upright, you have a silhouette of movement that's kind of like my forearm here. But if you think about it now, because we're going into what we've called the Iron Man pose internally, where you're kind of leaning forward, your arms are down by your side, your silhouette is more like this. So you're facing directly forwards. And what that means is if you're going through tighter spaces, it's a lot easier when you're rotating; you're no longer rotating like this, you're more rotating like this. So you can fit through those gaps easier and you're not bumping into things quite as often. And then on top of that, if you're winding your way through, you're almost mirroring a bit like a snake-like motion. And you can fit through all those tight gaps and turns and things like that too.

In the future we want to put more emphasis on basically picking equipment that allows you to EVA better. So that might be in the form of EVA jetpacks, not jetpacks, but EVA backpacks and things like that that might come with more EVA fuel, because that's something we want to do down the line. More oxygen and things like that for existing in spaces where there's no atmosphere for you to be able to breathe. And essentially, looking into that preparation phase that we've talked about before, where you're making considerations that, hey, I want to be an EVA salvager, I'm going to equip myself with the things that are going to be able to get me there. But until we get other features in, like we showed yesterday, we showed the zero-G push-pull, that's not coming in 3.23. And some of these systems we're holding back, because we wouldn't really want to implement EVA fuel without having systems like zero-G push-pull, because otherwise you might be sat in the middle of space, run out of fuel, you've got no options. You also need to build places to refuel.

100%, yes. So I'm glad you brought that up. We tried to be very deliberate in our storytelling. We said, this is coming in Alpha 3.23, and then further down the line, there's the zero-G traversal where you're climbing on the hands, there's the fuel. Some folks missed that EVA is 3.23, but the zero-G traversal, that crawling along the hands, and the fuel stuff is not 3.23. That is down the line.

It's down the line, yeah.

Yeah, so obviously we had an interaction system that has evolved a couple of times, right? And it evolves through necessity and where the game's at and where we feel like it needs to go. We used to just have the super, super plain interaction. Do you remember the old use thing that was in the middle of the screen? And looking back on that now, it was quite inappropriate, because you would hit use and hope that it was the correct action that it did. Is it going to pick it up? Is it going to open it? Is it going to close it? What's going to happen? So that obviously wasn't very clear. And as the game evolved and the items and the way you interact with items got more in-depth, and you could do three or four or five or six different things with the same item, the necessity came to basically have a selection there. So that's basically where we ended up with the system that is currently in Star Citizen at the moment, where we've got the list. Now obviously, playing with that for such a long time, we eventually got to a point where we were saying, we could definitely do better here, and it's something that we've wanted to do for quite a while. So that's where the player interaction experience comes in, where we are now condensing this down into one single use action. But unlike the old use action, you get a verb that essentially tells you what it is you're going to do. And that also ties into default item action. So I could look at all of these items on your desk, right? All of them might be very different from each other. Your laptop might be like the old-school use action, which would tell me that I'm probably going to hop down and start typing on the laptop. That folder there might be more like a pickup action, or an inspect action if it's something that's like a datapad, if there's an iPad on the table or something like that. And that allows us to basically look at all of these different item types that we've got in data and say, this is what we think the default item action for this thing should be. But again, in ISC, something really cool that we showed off is the ability to customize that as well. So we're not getting rid of all of the big list of actions that we previously had that were quite difficult to navigate through, especially in situations like combat. Combat is obviously something that we've seen a lot of in Squadron. You can envision how that generally goes. And again, through the game evolving comes the necessity to change it, right? I just want to look at a weapon on the floor and hit go. I just want to pick it up and use it, right? But as I was saying, we're not getting rid of all of the other actions that you can do with the items. It's just that they are tucked away behind a wheel. For the people who want to customize this experience or use the other interactions on specific items, it's all there, and it's in a slightly cleaner format with the wheel, so you're not accidentally clicking something on a condensed list that we used to have.

So we've spent a lot of time tuning that. So it's picking out the important items, the large items. Basically, we've got a system that essentially finds out where your focus is. So again, we have played with this a lot. If the F moving around on all these different items got annoying, it would annoy us too, because we play the game so much as well. So we're at a point now where we feel like the F selection is very, very clear and easy to use. And the selection itself: if I was here right now and I had moved my focus to your laptop, but I was too far away to actually use the laptop, it would prioritize the closest thing that is still in the focus. It's actually a very smart system. So we don't get annoyed by it at all. And for the people who actually like to use it, the interaction system is still there. So you can still mouse over things and highlight them and interact with them. If you really need to do fine control, oh, I'm sifting through this guy's stuff that's on his armor, or I've got loads of clutter on my desk in my hub, I can still have a fine selection of what I want to interact with too.

Okay, so just as a bit of background, the distribution centers are these massive facilities that truly are really big, that are down on the surface of planets and moons and things like that, and they are what they sound like, right? It's a center of distribution. There are lots of landing pads, it should be a big hub of activity basically, and there are a lot of different areas of the distribution center that are different from each other. So you've got the exterior, typically where people will be landing their ship, unloading cargo, things like that. You've got the offices up top, which is generally more of a front for whatever business or corporation has ownership of this place. And then you've got more of the inner workings, which are where you would typically expect to see cargo being ferried. If there's machinery that are producing stuff down there, if they're making something, then that would be where that's all tucked down. So what we're trying to provide for 3.23 is some variety between the different locations, so slightly different layouts between the different distribution centers, so they all feel a little bit different from each other, and different factions at each of these places as well, which should give a very different feeling of what you're going to be doing there. So just as an example, and we talked about this recently: you might have a law-abiding faction there. And typically, you would be doing what you would expect to at a law-abiding place, where you would be trading, talking to people, things like that, all above board. If you're a pirate, you can obviously come and attack and cause trouble, but they might have security systems made to deal with you. You might also have a hostile faction that's taken over one of these things that a corporation maybe previously had, and they came in and took over. And that would be a very combat-focused area for you to go and play in. And then you might have something that's more of a mix. So you go in, the front is very professional and business-like, but underneath, if you go a little bit deeper, you might find that they're up to no good. So ultimately, for the content we want to provide, the distribution centers have a lot of possibility, and there's no way that we're going to provide all the content that we want to in one drop. But we definitely want you interacting there, doing cargo missions and potentially some basic combat missions and things like that, to interact with all of the different areas of the distribution centers we're going to provide. But the future is very exciting for them, and these are big and diverse.

And these are humongous. These are the biggest thing we've done short of a landing zone. They are massive. They are microcosms of the entire Star Citizen FPS experience. When I say FPS, I mean things not in a spaceship. You'll get missions that will take you to these places. You'll go to these places to get missions to take you out. Some of the missions are self-contained within the distribution center. They're that big that you can do the entire loop within the distribution center.

I mean, it's a big change, right? And people are always initially going to be resistant to it. And I think that's very, very natural, because you've been playing a game for such a long time and it's such a big change that you're going to have to relearn a lot of the things that you've already learned before. But ultimately, again, this was another thing that has come around from us playing the game, especially in combat-focused scenarios in Squadron, and going through and going, hey, we feel like change needs to be made. So just a very, very high level of what master modes are: essentially you have navigation and SCM, two modes that you switch between, and they have very defined purposes with how you fly your ship. And what this has allowed us to do is in SCM, which is essentially your combat mode, we've made it so the combat is able to be a little bit tighter, because we've got a bit more control over the ship speeds there. That combat is a lot more personal, a lot tighter, and we felt that it made for a much more visceral and a lot more personal experience with whoever you're fighting. And obviously that's translated to player-versus-player combat as well, which again, we've been testing internally quite a lot. And it's avoiding situations where you're able to essentially exploit the flight system to constantly play chase and not really have a proper one-on-one combat with someone, and you're constantly running away. So we felt that it was a positive change as we've been playing the game.

I think from my limited experience with it, it gets more exciting the more players that get involved. It's certainly fun 1v1, but when the furball starts... When I'm seeing the battles with like 15 people involved, 25 people involved, it keeps them all tight and compact. And literally the screen can be filled with ships this way. It's a much more visceral experience.

It's a game changer. We've got such beautiful ships. We've got amazing VFX that when you're shooting at someone, you typically in the past haven't really been able to see, hundreds of meters, if not kilometers away from people. It seems a real shame to not be able to see some of that stuff. You're basically just interacting with the UI. So this bringing you closer together is just a much better feeling experience, in our opinion.

So master modes on track for 3.23?

At the moment, yeah. And we want a lot of feedback. And we will get it, I'm sure.

So precision targeting at its very core is very similar to what you would do in a first-person shooter. You take time to aim and it almost helps you be more accurate. So what you can expect in the ships is an immediate zoom. So I know we've got a system where you can scroll in and zoom, and it's maybe a little bit awkward to try and use. This is more a toggle-in, toggle-out zoom. So again, you're going to be closer anyway through master modes coming in. This is more a case of: you're closer already and now you're zooming in on your target. You can see much more of the ship. So if you're in a combat scenario where you're flying around and having to maneuver a lot and you're dealing with multiple targets, you might not necessarily want to use it too much. But if I'm in a situation where you're flying a Cutlass and I'm trying to take one of your engines off, I can toggle into precision targeting mode and go straight for your engines if I wanted to just take out your engines, get on board and deal with you that way. So it, again, leans more into that closer-feeling experience. It also helps you with aiming at a target rather than trying to pixel hunt a little bit with your screen. And obviously it makes it more accessible than having to scroll in and out with the mouse wheel. It's just one click to toggle in and out. And then with the gimbal change, the big change there is all ships are basically now going to have gimbals. All weapons are going to have gimbals. Weapon slots of ships are going to have gimbals. So that's not entirely true. I'm going to contradict myself already. There are a few exceptions. You look at the Idris. It's got a massive railgun on it. It's not going to be rotating around everywhere.

The nose gun on the Vanguard.

Yeah, so there are a few that are going to be stuck as they are. But what we had thought about for a while that we weren't too keen on is the swap down and swap out for the different weapons and exchanging the gimbal out for that, basically, because new players come in and it's not immediately understandable what's going on there, and we didn't really feel like it was adding as much value. And just to touch on the turrets as well, turrets are now going to have gimballed weapons too, which is really, really good, because previously you were limited to the rotation speed of the turret. It gives you a little bit more look-ahead and a little bit more of a unified, pleasant experience that you can expect from the ships that you can then expect from the turrets as well.

With the gimbals, the size restriction is also going away with them.

As in, you're no longer trading...

...[down] one size. Yeah, exactly. So some ships will get bigger weapons for this. And of course, there are the exceptions. If you look at a ship and there's clearly a very impossibly fixed weapon on it, think Inferno, think Vanguard with the nose, think Idris with the railgun, those will not be gimballed. So we're not going through and remaking the ships to do that. So there are a very small amount of exceptions. I think it's like four or five.

Yeah, it will be an exception rather than a common thing.

Please stop me if I go too technical or go too deep on this, because obviously this is my jam. So, God, where do we start? So let's start with reloading. So the changes or improvements to reloading, as we've been calling it, again come through the necessity of change through playing combat in Squadron a lot, very focused combat areas where we're able to really hammer out some of the basic combat mechanics, where we were in situations that were getting frustrating. As most people probably know, engaging in FPS combat, if you reload, we save your ammo pool to your magazine, and that goes back on your suit, and you might then end up in a situation where if you want to put more magazines on your suit, your suit is now completely full, and you can't put more on unless you swap them out, and it's a very sticky, tedious process. So essentially we're trying to remove steps there. Rather than get rid of the realism that you have with basically having magazines that contain the ammunition, we want to keep that. And down the line we may still want to lean into doing the magazine stripping through a proper animated system. What we really want to lean into at the moment is just an ability to be able to condense the amount of ammunition down that you've got. So that's what we call ammo repooling. And that is an interaction either on the weapon or in your inventory that lets you essentially go, this weapon, I would like to condense all the magazines for that. Your character will play an animation while it's happening. It's quite a basic one. And then it will take a varying amount of time depending on how much ammunition you're shifting. So if I'm doing LMG mags, that will take longer than, say, if I'm doing pistol magazines that might have 10 bullets in or so.

Okay, dynamic crosshair. So again, this came through necessity from playing combat so much. It was essentially a situation where you don't always have time to aim. Sometimes you want to just shoot your gun in a desperate situation, and it's really nice to have an indicator there of where it is you're going to shoot. We came up with a dynamic crosshair; it essentially gives you an idea of what sort of spread you can expect from your weapon. We essentially simulate spread through a spread cone on our guns, just because we don't want the gun shaking all over the place to generate it, so we do add some spread on there. And essentially, the more you fire, obviously it changes, the more unstable it is. The dynamic crosshair basically tells you where you're going to be shooting. Now what we've done, and this leans into some down-the-line armor gameplay that we're going to be leaning into, where we want to make the armor sets feel different and give them a unique purpose, is this dynamic crosshair is meant as a combat feature that you get on combat helmets. So if I'm, say, an engineer or something like that, I don't necessarily need a dynamic crosshair for my gun, because I'm not really going out and doing combat. You might get other benefits from wearing engineering gear or medical gear or whatever, but this is something that we're obviously leaning into long term, and this is one of the first features that we're bringing out for combat suits.

Yeah. So basically the visor HUD is going to be a big restyle. So I think the big task at the moment is restyling it for the Persistent Universe. Just a few features essentially. We have the existing hint system that we've got in game. That's all being tidied away into the new notification system that we've got with high and low priority notifications, where we've got some really nice visuals for those. We've obviously got the newly reworked, I'm going to call it the combat stack. That's what I quite like calling it. No one else calls it that, but basically it shows you where all your ammo is, gives you all your feedback for your weapons, changing items, things like that. Shows you what's in your hands. Then on the left-hand side, we've obviously got all the widgets for things like your health, the environment, all that sort of stuff. We've got the compass that's going in too. It's in the video. You can already see it.

Wait. An actual compass? Like, I can tell what direction I'm going? I can go, that's north?

Yeah. Well, not north in space, but you've got a bearing. And then obviously one of the biggest ones is the minimap, and the minimap is amazing. It really is. And it links into what we're doing, which we can talk about in a little bit, with the star map on the mobiGlas 2, which is basically the area map. I'll make very clear now, we're not doing all locations with the minimap, because obviously there is a lot of space and areas to mark up.

Yes, I was going to say, let's talk about that. The minimap does not just exist in a vacuum. Every single location in the Persistent Universe has to be marked up in order to feed that information into the minimap. I'll go ahead and say, because I talked to John Crewe about this just yesterday, the ship team is working diligently to get as many of the ships as possible marked up for 3.23. You can at least explore your ships with the minimap, and then maybe a couple locations here and there. And then that will just continue. Patch after patch after patch, we'll just continue to mark up more and more locations until eventually all of the PU reaches parity.

Yep, so it's going to be really easy to find your way around everywhere once it's done. So you can basically just get a view of where you are, where you want to go, set a route, all that good stuff.

So, big, big quality-of-life improvement from where we're at right now. And again, we're changing it because the current star map is difficult to use. It's not clear, you don't get enough feedback, some things are broken. But we've spent a lot of time on styling it, making it very clear, making it very easy to use, done a lot of testing ourselves of just playing around with it. We've added some new features to it too. So essentially an estimated travel time if you set a route somewhere. Search functionality, which is all fairly basic to start with. We'll obviously come back more on that later down the line. But essentially, if I want to go to Hurston, I type in Hurston, it takes me to Hurston on the map, and I click set route, and then I go. Yeah, it's been a long time coming, and we're obviously very, very excited about it.