Star Citizen Live: Actor Feature Team Q&A

Yeah, I mean, it's something we 100% want to do. We've benefited so far from a lot of the armor pieces and undersuits of basically having magnetic tech that's letting you just pop things on there, little mag plates and stuff, to justify why you've got a weapon on your back and why it's just stuck to you. But that's a lot more difficult with things like clothing. And we know long term that we want clothing to have more functionality. And what I mean by that is it's not just something that's cosmetic for you to run around in a landing zone in. We know that as more and more content gets put onto the planets, people want to spend more time there and potentially spend nearly all of their time there. A lot of the time, you don't want to spend, I mean, it's not much of a concern right now, but you don't want to spend the money. You don't want to buy an undersuit and upkeep it and the armor and all that stuff. And to be honest, some of the clothing looks cooler as well, that you might want to skew into that style. So you don't want to always be wearing that skin-tight undersuit. So we want to be able to have armor that potentially has additional protection. So I think none of the clothing right now actually has protection values on there. None of it is armored. We want clothing that is potentially going to be able to have and store weapons on it, like you say. So we want to have holsters and we want to be able to put weapons on our backs and things like that. So the one thing that has been holding us back a little bit is that it's a bit of a technical issue. So we've got so much clothing in the game. And obviously, as we expand the universe of Star Citizen, that's only going to get more and more varied. So having a strap around your leg, if we want to make that look good, then it's going to deform all of the individual parts that are on your leg. And that's going to be a shocking amount of work for the character team. So I know those guys are in discussions about what they want to do and how they want to handle it and how they can get a sustainable solution while still making it look pretty good. And I don't want to write any checks for them. So if you get a chance to talk to them in the future, that would be a good question for them as well. But from the design point of view, that's something that we really want to push on going forward.

So we always wanted to get a base set of FPS weapons out there that gave people a good variety of weapons to play with. And I feel like we've got most of the way there with that. We've filled out a lot of the Klaus & Werner, the Behring, Gemini weapons; I think there's only one or two that we still need to actually get out there. But because I've read Spectrum, I know there's a couple of questions about certain related things later that we might get to. But we've been working on things like FPS devices, and we've got weapons in the pipeline that have required a bit more engineering work because they have a bit more special functionality. So that's the reason. We're now skewing into more unique things rather than the more expected, more generic set of weapons that we've got out there at the moment.

And it's worth reminding folks that your team is one of the teams that have switched their focus to Squadron 42. Your work is still coming to the PU. It's just filtering through Squadron 42 first. So a lot of your priorities will be things that are must-haves for Squadron and stuff like that.

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.

That kind of ties in, I guess, a little bit to what I was talking about earlier with the more functional clothing. We've talked about the possibility of maybe having an undersuit backpack as well, which would be a little bit easier to do. But I think, again, it's that expectation of when you've got armor, you can justify attaching something to it without having lots of physical straps and things like that because it's a bit higher tech than regular clothing, right? It's a bit more difficult with clothing because you've got to factor in, I've got straps going over my shoulder. OK, what if I'm wearing a T-shirt? What if I'm wearing a hoodie? What if I'm wearing a jacket? What if I'm wearing a robe or something like that that you might see in somewhere like Pyro? We've got technical issues there that we need to resolve. So again, another problem that the character team are very diligently trying to solve for us, but we don't have any answers for it at the moment. It's just something that we know we want to do.

I think the CitizenCon demo had a backpack that was wearable in clothes and whatnot. A glimpse of the future.

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.

So to start off with, it's good to mention that it's going to be the same system we have now for ships. We have what we call a signature system that's driving radar and scanning. So the fundamentals are the same across both. And the idea there is that they absolutely cross-pollinate. So ships should be able to pick up actors, characters will be able to pick up ships, that kind of thing. It is somewhat different in terms of passive detection and what we describe as active detection. So if you're in a ship, you pick things up just passively by flying around: IR, EM. With the FPS side of things, it's going to be passive audio. So if people are firing weapons, you hear footsteps, that kind of thing gets picked up. But you're going to have to actively choose to ping to detect EM and IR. I think that's going to give quite a different cadence and feel to it. For actual scanning, though, for getting information on things, the idea is you can absolutely scan ships. So when you're scanning from a ship onto something else or another ship, you'll get a similar experience in the FPS, and that's going to be on the helmet. So you won't have a dedicated device or whatnot. It's going to be primarily based on the helmet and seeing that in your HUD. In terms of what you can actually see on, say, characters, the idea is similar to ships. You can see what weapons, what items and stuff are attached to it. Same with characters, you'll be able to see the weapons, grenades, ammo, et cetera, that are attached. If you've got a burrito in their pocket, you should be able to find that out as well. And obviously, actor status and whatnot, we want to provide information. So if someone's down or bleeding, you can maybe find it out from range. There's lots of cool things coming from it. We've got some quite big changes to radar and scanning in general as well that's going to be rolling out with FPS that we can't really talk about just yet, but that's all going to be using the same underlying system with the signatures. But the interface to it is getting a bit of an overhaul, and that's for both FPS and ships. So hopefully more of that soon, but not yet, unfortunately.

So bathrooms, so you're talking about toilets and stuff, then the idea is that yes, they're eventually going to be functional, but we've not talked about any associated gameplay surrounding them at all yet. So we're not trying to make Star Citizen into The Sims. You're not going to have to worry about your bladder meter or anything like that, or at least that's not the plan. But just because you say bathroom, and this is just the UK showing in me that you'll have to get used to, Jared, it makes me think of showers, because bathrooms in the UK have a shower or a bath.

I'm positive this question included using the shower.

OK. Oh, cool. Well, that's all right, then. So hygiene is going to be a part of one of the next iterations of the actor status system. And the way that is going to work basically is it's not going to get in the way of you doing any of your regular gameplay. If you're flying a ship, if you're out shooting people, if you're exploring, mining, whatever you're doing, it's not going to be a factor; you don't need to worry about it. It's going to have an effect in social spaces though. So the idea is that if you are very stinky and you've not showered in a long time and you turn up to a truck stop and turn up to a counter, you buy food or whatever, there will be NPCs in the area that will probably start saying, oh, what's that smell? What's that stench, that you smell like some horrible swamp monster that's just been rolling around on several different planets for the last few days? So yeah, the NPCs will react to you, and it might even get to the point where you might get refused service if you are particularly bad. So that also ties into, I think we talked about it last time I was on, the dirt and wear systems that are coming in as well. So that all feeds into an appearance of your character. So if I come into a truck stop and I smell, I'm sure there's probably no issue. There might be a couple of comments here and there. But they're not going to stop you from being served, getting food or whatever. But if you come into a fancy establishment on, say, microTech, and you walk in covered in mud, your clothes are full of holes, you absolutely reek, then they might just tell you to go away. So it's something to keep in mind. It's not something that you're going to have to really focus on, because if someone turns you away, obviously, you can go and get cleaned up. But it's something that you're going to have to keep in mind. And I think it adds to the immersive experience that we're creating.

There's not going to be a funk meter, if that's what you're asking. I think it will just be a case of things like dirt and wear are going to be a lot more visual, right? And they're going to be very noticeable. If you've gone and rolled around in mud, then you're going to be covered in mud. If you are out for a long time and your armor's worn, it will start to get maybe a couple of holes in it. Clothing especially will get holes in it, rips in it. It'll look filthy and faded and things like that. So that'll be super obvious. Hygiene, we're not going to have things like stink lines on. And like I say, hygiene isn't going to affect your gameplay. There'll just be comments here and there of, what's that smell? And at that point, you might be like, oh, yeah, I've not showered in the last 10 play sessions I've had. Maybe next time I'm on my ship, I should just quickly pop in there and have a wash. So, yeah, no plans for a stink meter or visual stink lines coming from your character, nothing like that. Maybe a few flies, depending on where you are.

Yes. Yeah, we feel the same way about dragging. It's obviously great to be able to drag a body out of fire. For us, that's the dream of close combat fighting and dragging someone away whilst pew-pewing back into cover. But long distances, and also, to be honest, when you're trying to pick them up to put them into the med bed, and further down the line, bounty hunting, shoving someone into a storage locker, sorry, cryopod, you're going to want to pick them up rather than be dragging them all over the place. So yeah, we really want that. I'm not sure when that's going to be, but it is something we want to do.

So, yeah, restraining is a system that we're definitely currently actually looking into. Obviously Chris mentioned bounty hunting, so bounty hunting is going to be pretty difficult if you can't tie someone up in some fashion. So we don't know what restraints are going to be yet in terms of, is it going to be zip ties, is it going to be handcuffs or anything like that, but you're going to want to be able to restrain someone's arms and legs so you can not let them escape. We had a quite funny moment in the office actually where I was like, oh, just bind the hands, and, obviously doubting myself, I'm a big guy, I'm not very fit, if I got on the floor and someone tied my hands together, I might struggle to get up. But Joes very kindly demonstrated how easy it was to just stand up no problem with your hands behind your back. But yeah, the idea is you're going to restrain them, arms, legs, so they can't escape. And then we'll tie that into body carry and into bounty hunting so you can put them, maybe not in storage lockers like Chris's school bully days, but into cryopods instead. And it'd be kind of rubbish if you're trying to bring someone in alive and you're on a bit of a rocky planet and you just bump, bump, bump all the way back to your ship. They might not survive the trip. It reminds me of the Wild West days where someone would get dragged by a rope behind someone's horse. We probably don't want that.

So we're not planning any sort of loadout editor. However, lockers. Lockers are the thing we want to deliver to you and hopefully provide you what you're after. The idea is, especially for armor lockers, you would go up to a locker fully attired and just be able to dump what you're wearing into it. And that would retain your sidearm, all your equipment, grenades, ammo, et cetera. So all the time you put in to equip yourself, you'll be able to save that and store it in a locker. And obviously, if you've got multiple lockers, then you can have multiple loadouts that you can return to every time. That gives you a great bonus if you've got a bigger ship or eventually larger hubs. We also do want to support the notion of outfits, but they're going to be more geared towards clothing, primarily because with armor lockers, the idea is one suit for the locker. What's in that locker is your loadout, so to speak. But with outfits for clothing, you could buy an outfit from a shop, come back, go up to your wardrobe locker, dump that into your locker. And when you return to it, you might say, oh, I want to equip that outfit again. And again, you might want to customize it. So maybe you bought two outfits, but you like the hat from one more or whatever. The idea there is that you'll be able to customize clothing outfits, and that should be within an interface that's tied into your locker. And just so you're aware, lockers are meant to be very tactile; the player interaction system, we want to use that for any time in game, but we also want to bring in elements of the inventory system so that you're able to, through that, customize outfits and whatnot. Again, it's very early days. This is on the horizon. I'm not sure when it's coming. But lockers, we've got designs, we know what we're doing for that. I'm looking forward to working on that.

Gotcha, so similar functionality, just approaching it from a more diegetic in-universe angle.

Exactly, yes.

Yeah, I mean, we don't have any plans at the moment, but I always say never say never, and that very much ties into the eventual plan we have for the player suit and player armor. Conversations we've had in the past, I think, again, mentioned it last time I was on here, was it almost is going to be like a mini spaceship by the time we're done. It's going to generate power and things like that. So potentially, as long as it doesn't just completely take away from the fact that you do need to find food and drink to survive and consume that, then we can maybe look into some sort of suit-integrated system, but it's something that we haven't talked about at all. So don't take that as me promising that's what you're going to get. But that's just an idea that we talked about a little bit here and there. So that's maybe something we could do in the future, but not right now. But again, obviously, I don't want to just completely nullify the fact that we have hunger and thirst. And something that we always say is that planning is part of the core game loop. You always need to make sure that you eat and drink before you go into these situations. So you're not just going out, oh, I'm a little bit hungry and thirsty, I'm going to go on a three-hour trip out somewhere into the volcano planet where I won't find any food or drink. Obviously that's very bad preparation. You're going to suffer for it. And what I wanted to say is there's obviously a bit of a difference between two different hostile environments. So if you're in zero G and there's no atmosphere, then taking off your helmet is just a big no-no in general. But say if you're on a planet that's super hot or super cold, and hopefully you're wearing the right gear for that anyway, again, part of the planning loop, if you take your helmet off for a few seconds while you just have a quick drink or a quick something to eat, it's not a big deal.

Wow. That is actually something we're working on at the moment. So we've been playing around with this a little bit in game currently. So the idea is that you'll be able to remove your helmet as an actual action. So you can potentially either carry it under your arm, so it's tucked under your shoulder a little bit, or it will be attached to an actual clip or something on your suit that's basically a little item port. So like how we do with the weapons and stuff at the moment, which I think is currently located on the hip. We've been moving it around a little bit just to see where it best fits. But this just means that your helmet is still available, but you've still got your hands free to do everything that you want to do. So you can eat, drink, get into a fight in a bar or whatever, while you've still got your helmet handy. So again, that ties into what I just said, where you can quickly take your helmet off, put it on your belt or whatever, have something to eat and drink, quickly put it back on again without needing to go into the inventory and start moving things to and from your backpack or dropping it on the floor or anything awkward like that. And obviously, as well, actions to move this around. We're potentially going to try and find a key binding for it so it's nice and easy to use. And then if not, it will still be on the personal inner thought menu anyway. So it should be a nice and easy action to trigger.

So the first thing to mention is probably good news. It's very much in development. We've got quite a few people working on it right now. A big change coming for EVA is that it's going to be requiring fuel. So the idea is you haven't got indefinite thrust. And that heavily ties into the zero-G push-pull. We want to encourage you to use it. So you're actually thinking about where you're expending fuel, where it's best to clamber on the surface instead of zooming around like Iron Man. So going back to the decoupled part, it's very much a part of both zero G and EVA. If you imagine you're clambering slowly over a surface, that's going to be the general sort of traversal whilst you're in zero G, but you will be able to push off. And that's going to be whether you're moving between different objects or if you're on the surface of a ship, going from one ship to another, or, say, the ship's exploded, you want to go get the cargo boxes, or perhaps you want to get to an asteroid so you can start mining, et cetera. That will be decoupled in terms of: I move in a direction, I keep moving until something else occurs to prevent me from moving. But we're also going to be introducing skimming across surfaces. So the slow, ponderous clambering movement is going to be one part of the zero-G push-pull, but you're also going to be able to push yourself along the surface. And that's the equivalent of a sprint in zero G, but it's going to be using Newtonian decoupled physics to achieve that. The EVA itself, it's changing a little bit. So I'd say it's sort of decoupled light. And before you get sad, let me describe why I say that. So the idea is you will thrust in a direction. You can then release the input and stop that thrust. You will continue indefinitely in that direction. If you start to look around, again, you keep going in that direction. But if I turn and then I give another thrust input, I will start to thrust in that direction. And the way that differs from the decoupled mode: you could be traveling in one direction, you turn 90 degrees and then you start to thrust in that direction, you've still got that momentum in the original direction. We want EVA to have more of a sense of the Iron Man flying sensation. So you will have the equivalent of coupled flight whilst you're reorientating yourself and changing the thrust vector. But once you've released the thrust input, then you go back to the decoupled model. So it's kind of a halfway in between. We've got that working now and it feels fun. We found the fun there. Hopefully that answers the question.

Yeah, and as you said, that's currently in development for Squadron 42, and then when it gets all proven out there, it'll make its way to the PU.

Exactly.

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.

So yeah, there's no timeline on when we want to deliver the first weapon. I know we've got at least one in the pipeline that has the capability to knock people out. Again, like you mentioned earlier, we're trying to make things for Squadron 42 as a priority. And that's where the team's leaning at the moment. So there's nothing yet that's been PU-appropriate right now. And this is probably more something that when we start to do the PU bounty hunting stuff, this is probably when you're going to see this come along. And from a design point of view, we can make this right now. It's just a case of making sure that we've got the time to get the content ready to go in. And I think there were a few additions on the feedback side that you wouldn't have to worry about if you were shooting an AI with this thing. But from a player point of view, if someone was shooting me with this, I'd probably want some very obvious feedback that someone is firing this weapon at me. And I want the feedback to say, I need to do something about this, or I'm going to get knocked out and probably restrained and dragged away, like we mentioned earlier. We could do this when we released the Electron sniper rifle, if people remember that, the one that does chain lightning, the Atzkav. When we actually put Electron in, Electron is a wonderful damage type, actually, where we can pull a few different levers. So it's an electrical damage type, but the electromagnetic side will interrupt actual electrical systems. We've also got the stun capability as well, where it's actually almost like a taser where it's knocking your senses out. That's what we can utilize and potentially what this weapon will look like when it comes out.

That's a good question. To start with, I'd say no, we're not happy. Not just with the med gun, but in general with the medical gameplay, just to clarify that. And there's quite a complex ecosystem here, and the majority of the medical gameplay isn't there yet. We want a large loop that involves death of a spaceman, so that there's consequence to death, which then informs the consequence to being injured. There's armors. In fact, JJ can probably talk about that in a little bit, what we want to do with armor specialization and whatnot, additional items we can release. So, no, we're not happy with it. It is something that we're keeping a close eye on. We're absolutely listening to your feedback and we're aware that it's not something that people are necessarily happy with either. We have looked at making a few little tweaks here and there. So in 3.17, for example, we heard that and we could tell that the injury stuff just wasn't coming through enough. So we've made it more likely that you're going to start to see injuries. So hopefully the use of those med guns becomes more important. There are also other issues regarding just dying straight away, quite a few. I was really surprised at how many of those we had. We've knocked those on the head, thankfully. There is still an AI murdering you issue. They're all a bit overzealous at the moment. The AI guys are hammering that and trying to fix that right now. So to go back to the general question, sorry: no, we're not happy with it. Yes, we are going to try and change things, but we're not 100% sure yet because we really want to get a lot of other things in first before we can really determine what we're going to do about that.

Sure, so going back to that full loop we want to establish, I guess it's a little bit of a step away from the med gun, but just in general: costs for using medical beds. And that's for regen and also for healing injuries. And you might think, well, why is that so important? Well, it introduces the aspect of resources being required and also players being able to charge for the use of their medical beds. So if you wake up in hospital, you get charged. If you wake up in a player-owned ship, then you can get charged for that or for using the services. Make money out of these things. I think as well, again, this is a bit of a divergence, but it's within the same wheelhouse. At the moment, the drugs we've got are purely medicinal, but we want to basically expand those so that we've got utility drugs. So one of those would be sedatives. So it ties into the bounty hunting stuff and what JJ was saying before about the various different non-lethal weapons we're going to have eventually. But there's also performance-enhancing drugs we want to introduce, and those will start to leverage the drug level a lot more, introduce things like aftereffects, consequences for taking stuff, coming down from the high of being able to shoot people repeatedly and whatnot. And then obviously there's the whole death of a spaceman thing where, as I said, it gives you a reason not to die. You don't want to die because eventually you'll die forever and lose a lot of your stuff. You have to spool up a new character and then they'll inherit your stuff. So yeah, there's lots of consequence we want to introduce. That gives lots more weight to everything else within the system. JJ, do you want to talk a bit about the armor specializations?

Yeah, I guess this is a bit further down the line, but we are, and I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, essentially slowly trying to specialize the armor in different directions. So it's not just armor is armor, heavy is heavy, light is light. We're trying to push things in slightly different directions. We've talked about having a support line of armors where it's like, OK, these are still going to be good for most of the things that a regular suit will be, but it skews it into a slightly different direction. So it'll still have some inventory space, you'll still be able to put weapons on it, you'll still have some room for a couple of throwable devices or a multi-tool, things like that. But it will maybe have more consumable slots so you're able to go around and heal people more easily. We've talked about almost bespoke backpacks which might have special functionality for holding medical fluid for the med gun. And we even talked about a couple of ideas for what we can do, because we want to do a light support and a heavy support, and how they differ from each other. So a light support might be a bit more like a first responder. They've got lots of consumable storage. Obviously in a light suit, you'll be able to run a lot faster than heavy. And again, there's more iteration to do on that too. But then the heavy is a bit more like what we've been calling the battle medic, where you're wearing heavy armor for a reason, you want protection. Or it's the big heavy suit that you want to go and rescue someone in from, say, a really hostile environment as well. And that might have some special functionality, because, all of this is theoretical stuff at the moment, it's not going to be in game for a little while, but it might be the biggest power producer in the game, in terms of, it's a support suit, it's got a lot of systems on it, it's dedicated in that direction. And we've talked about things like, eventually we want to recharge energy mags, so that suit would be able to do it a lot faster as well. So someone wearing the big heavy suit might actually, from a support side, still be quite good in combat. So lots of ideas floating around there. And obviously it ties into how medical gameplay is pushed further in this more specialized direction, if that makes sense.

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.

So, happier. Not satisfied, I'd say, is accurate. There's a lot of quality of life things we want to introduce. Unfortunately, we didn't quite get to them with the last release. Some stuff we are actually working on. I've seen some improvements I'm quite happy about. I will delve into a few things that I would like to see, I guess. Before I talk about quality of life stuff, I think it's pretty good to say that where we are now with inventory is just the first step. The overall design is that everything's physicalized. So at the moment, you've got the location inventory and you've got the ship inventory. They're a step up from what we had previously, but they're like a magic bag of holding that you can magically access from anywhere within those volumes. We definitely want to move away from that. So with ships, you've got a point of access where you go to, so you're rummaging around your glove compartment or your large storage bin or something that's built into the wall. The idea is that we will eventually swap out all ship interior inventories to have that. And same for ship exteriors as well. We absolutely want an access point where you can go in and access inventories. At the moment, there's only a couple of ships, three ships, I think, the Aegis Gladius, Sabre, and I think the Starfarer, that have external inventories. We want all the ships to have that. So yeah, there's lots of work to be done there. So big long-term steps: we want everything to be physicalized, and physicalized cargo as well. That's the PU guys tackling that at some point, and that ties in heavily. With 3.17, we're allowing you to move ship items, weapons and whatnot within the inventory. That is absolutely a stopgap. When physicalized cargo comes along, we're going to strip that away, because what you have in your ships at the moment is meant to be representative of the lockers you have on board, the storage bins, the storage compartments that are separate from your cargo. So the idea there is that we start to introduce those lockers, the ship interiors, because that's important. We start introducing the external inventory interfaces, and the ship interiors effectively replace those magic bag of holding things. And longer term, with hubs and hangars at some point, that then replaces the need for the magic bag of holding we have for the location inventories. So am I happy with where we've reached? Yes. We've got a long way to go, though. In the shorter term, we've got a lot of quality of life things we want to introduce. So I know some people have mentioned the idea of the stuff around your feet, dragging and dropping directly from what's on the floor around you, not just what's in your inventory and what's attached to you. So we definitely want to introduce that. I think move all is quite a happy one; everyone wants that. So we definitely want to introduce that. And also a quick move. So just to give an idea there, move all would be move everything from one inventory, from one pane to another. So if I'm in my location, I can click move all and drag a bunch of stuff immediately into my ship inventory. That's living the dream. Looting as well. But quick move, we want to do the same thing for one item. So you can quickly just move that without having to drag. Stacking. We're aware that people want stacking. We're really sorry we didn't get that in the first implementation. It was a host of back-end problems that really got in the way, but we've got lots of back-end upgrades coming, and that's going to make that a lot easier. At some point, we will do client-side stacking as well, so those two combined will allow us to stack a lot of things, but I don't know when that's coming, I'm sorry, but it's definitely something we want to do. Mission items: at the moment, they're still put in your magic pocket. There's another less nice word I could use for that pocket, but we want it to be tied into the inventory. So you're putting those mission items in, you see them in your personal inventory as a result, and those missions are tracking the fact that they're in the inventory now, not in an invisible item port on your body. Oh yeah, search is another one we would definitely want to do. Again, I don't know when that's going to come along, but it is definitely on our roadmap. There's a few nice-to-haves as well. For example, if you're stood next to a wall and you open the inventory right now, the camera's in the wall, which is great. We have a plan for that. We know what we want to do about it, but we just don't have time to implement it yet. Same with if you're in a really dark, low-light environment, it can be difficult to see what you're doing on your character. We've got a plan to make that a bit better. So there's a whole bunch of quality of life things we want to improve and introduce to you. But yeah, work in progress for some of them, some of them further down the line.