10 for the Chairman: Episode 39 (2014.09.29)

No, when we do PG for the planet, we'll have different levels of this, so sometimes we'll have a fully designed and constructed environment, then other times we'll have pieces of this environment designed and maybe placed by PG, then even further down the road we might have areas planet-side that are completely PG'd but that's not going to be V1, but it's definitely in the pipeline. But yes, that map, that area of the planet will be the same for all players, while the procedural technique is building and creating it, it's not randomly generated for each player, it'll be based on one seed that would create something that would be the same for each player will visit. PG for us is just a technique to be able to generate a large area/content without us having to do a lot of design work, which allows for much more content in-game.

So yes you'll definitely be able to manage hired NPCs, not quite sure about exactly the level of fidelity in terms of micro management. Even back in the Wing Commander days you'd be able to have wingmen "Attack My Target" or "Form Up On My Wing" etc, so you'll definitely be able to issue commands to your wingmen. You'll also be able to issue higher level goals like, "Ok I'm hiring you, your mission is to protect my freelancer ship" so you can have a couple of mercenaries to fly on your wing to make sure you get from point A to point B and you could hire NPCs to say take a cargo from one place to another place and other various stuff like that. We're going to try to make it as high fidelity as possible, but at the very least you're going to be able to hired them to run missions for you, hired them to protect you, and you'll be able to give them more specific combat-influenced commands.

Well so, okay, the intention in the final game is that SQ42 is your training experience, which is designed to have a cool story, but there are definitely areas that are a bit like training or tutorials, introducing different flight techniques, or management of ship systems. Once you've gone through SQ42 you'll have a good background in it all. Of course there are some people that don't want to worry about the story etc, so might just jump into Arena Commander for practise, and on the website we'll have some tutorials/lessons/reading so you can have a look at, for example, advanced space manoeuvring 1, where it'll show more sophisticated techniques and so on. So yes the game will be friendly to new people, especially for those that don't play space or flight sims already. It's actually one of the best things about developing and releasing the game like we are, there is just so much feedback and so many suggestions for how to make the game as fun as possible for release. Right now we're working on targeting, especially for joysticks and gamepads. That'll all be in 13.2, which I'm pretty sure will make a lot of you happy, I used to be terrible with a gamepad and now I'm pretty good so a lot of you will be far better!

Yes we definitely want to do VOIP chat and location based sound effects. So we're actually moving from one sound system f-mod, to another, WY, which will allow us to do more dynamic real-time filtering on sounds. We haven't decided fully on a VOIP solution, but the goal would be to have a system where if I'm walking around talking on VOIP in the game you'd hear my voice coming from where my character was, and the voice would be processed according to what my character is wearing, so under a helmet will be different to if I didn't have anything in front of my mouth. That's definitely something we want to do. In terms of eavesdropping, with that mechanic you could overhear two of your friends talking about taking over your Constellation then I'd say if they were stupid enough to say it over VOIP IN THE SHIP you'd be able to hear it if you were close enough. I don't know about the big time trades and deals, but we'll definitely be adding things into the PU that'll allow your to be an info trader, like finding out where a deal is going down, or a killing to make on a certain commodity etc. So that might not be necessarily VOIP, but perhaps more eavesdropping on NPCs talking or that kind of stuff.

I would say in the mining stuff, you're going to refine the raw materials, at some point we'll likely enable players or organisations to own nodes down the chain, so maybe there'll be a specialist refinery ship, or a node in a factory on a planet. So if you owned that node you'd be able to refine and sell it on as a more finished resource or whatever that'll be. We definitely want to allow players to focus on engaging in the economic aspect of the PU if they want to, and not have to focus so much on the combat side of it. That's really one of the big things of SC, is being able to take multiple roles, and encourages people to play co-operatively together so yes, there'll definitely be head to head/pvp stuff, but one of the coolest things is that you've got a lot of opportunities for co-op play, like multicrewed ships, or a few different ships involved in a mining operation or something. It's all about who you want to be, mercenaries, explorers, traders, search and rescue, bounty hunters, pirates, all these things make the strength of SC, either by yourself or with your friends.