10 for the Chairman: Episode 69

For us you know I think were not standard. We're not going to be doing the typical sort of you know big publisher, blanket the TV commercials, I mean first off. We've been pretty much taking all the money we have raised and putting it into development opposed to things like marketing. Essentially everything we have done in terms of marketing has been completely viral, it's been sort of PR driven and community driven and you guys have actually been the best marketeers for us we haven't been doing banner ads we haven't been doing anything.I would say for Squadron 42 especially at the beginning, we're showing the PC. I don't think we see a massive benefit of doing sort of TV advertising because we're hoping the games going to speak for itself and it will be great word of mouth and we'll kind of go from there and if it's doing well and making us money then maybe we would sort of doing some more traditional marketing to reach some of the audience that we don't normally reach through the typical sort of PR or viral channels that we have been doing. I think we'll certainly at the beginning anyway, Squadron 42 will be sort of much more kind of guerilla style marketing. Maybe there will be one or two things a banner ad or two, who knows.We're not really planning on doing it the full sort of EA treatment because we would much rather put the money into the game to be honest with you. Like I said if we sold a bazillion copies then maybe we'll double down a bit. Upfront it will be kind of what we have been doing now with probably some more of some of the events and publicity to raise the awareness, so there you go!

Yes, we've talked about having the ability beyond things like EMP like electronic warfare and hacking other ships, disabling systems or interfering with systems and so if you manage to bring the shields by doing something like that yes it would stop the ship from going to Quantum drive. Also the whole point of having the Quantum drive and Quantum Travel you can't have objects in your path because you're just going in a straight line and going very fast so if you are in the way of a ship going into Quantum Travel or there is something with mass like a probe or whatever in the way of the travel then yes it would pull that person out of Quantum Travel and that is the whole idea. So that will definitely be active in the PU, i'm not sure about the very first version of 2.0 we'll do that I would actually have to check thats a later stage PU but that is the whole idea of the design, so there you go!

Well, yes we'll definitely have NPCs, they'll be able to crew various stations so turrets, engineering, communications stations, all that kind of stuff. And if they are crewing a ballistic turret, part of the idea of sophisticated AI is for them to know their weapons. If they are using an energy weapon they know they can't use it too much or else it's overheating; a ballistic one they should maybe make their shots count, if they have not so much ammo then maybe they won't be as liberal with shooting as if they had lots of ammo. So that will all be part of the AI.Obviously AI is an ongoing quest; we'll constantly be working on it and improving and adding to it. So the early AI may not be as sophisticated as the stuff we'll have later on down the road but all those will be factors that should and will be considered in the AI.

I'm planning and wanting to have the ability to sort of name your ship and put details and name it. That's not necessarily going to be obviously in 2.0 but that is definitely something we want part of the PU and a persistence thing. You have your own kind of identity right? You want your Millennium Falcon but you've done all these things with and has a history.I think that you know we'll let you name it and do some other stuff and I don't know what necessarily they'll be other incentives to keep the hull but I think potentially longer term we can have aspects where you sort of wear it in and get to know sort of the boundaries or edges of your equipment and we're definitely going to do that on the components where you'll know which ones you can overclock or not overclock and stuff like that.You set it up a certain specific way and so turning and getting a new ship setup will take a little bit of time and investment so a lot of times when you got a ship you got it setup you want to keep it that way and won't necessarily want to lose it because you'll have to set a new one up the same way and it'll just take a bit of time to dial it in so to speak, so there you go on that one!

Yes, well, I mean there's going to be a vast amount of missions, many more than done here, but yes. I mean, there potentially could be things like prisoner transport missions, I mean obviously I"ve talked about things like trading missions, bounty hunter missions, mercenary missions, there's information running, so that's the Drake Herald which will be taking data from point A to point B. I'm not sure that the Drake Herald will latch onto a bigger ship, but it certainly will take an information burst and then it can carry it to a destination and broadcast it, or you could hand deliver a data drive, and stuff like that. But there's going to be a whole bunch, I mean the whole idea with the mission system that will run in the persistent universe is that we sort of have this bigger Universe simulation that happens, and that's sort of more a turn-based simulation, but it has 20 million AI and PC's running all around doing their stuff, and there's a whole set of rules of, these economic nodes need these kinds of products, so they request them from other areas and that will generate missions where people will take the goods and if pirates attack them then there'll be more missions for bounty hunters to go after the pirates and mercenaries to protect the convoys, and all those missions become available for AI or players.So players can take 'em or AI can take them if players don't take them, and then depending on the outcome of the missions, that either is simulated on the Universe side, if there's no players involved, which is more sort of high-end turn-based simulation, or, if players did get involved, or come across these missions, they get simulated on a high-fidelity basis, which is sort of the gameplay, running around, flying the ship, doing the actions, and the results of those get fed back into the universe simulation so if you kill some pirates, it gets told back to the Universe simulator, which says okay, these two pirates were killed in this system, so now there'll be two less pirates in that system, so you could have a whole bunch of bounty hunters, clean out the pirates in the system, and then all of a sudden there won't be pirates on the universe simulator in that system, so there won't be so much piracy, so there won't be so many missions then for mercenaries to do escorting, but of course, some pirates in another system may hear that there's no no pirates there, no competition, so they may move into it, so all of that happens, the universe system sort of runs this echo system that has a feedback loop from the game, and the game itself basically scrapes the state of the universe system periodically.We haven't quite determined whether it's every 30 minutes or every 5 minutes, but it sort of time-slices across all the systems and says, okay, who's in this system right now, what AI do we have, what are they doing, what locations they are, and then it uses that to sort of generate the local situations that you experience when you're flying around yourself. So it's kind of like the universe system is a dynamic mission generator for the game experience. You have, and so it's got a really cool feedback loop, it's going to feel really alive, even if there's only you in the game, there's still going to be loads of AI moving around. I've already said that I've got almost a 90% AI and PC's to 10% player base, even if we've got millions of players, so what that means is no matter what, the Universe will b e alive, things will be happening, there'll be reactions to what you do, and it can be with you and your friends, you can come across other players, so I think it will be a really really cool experience, and there will be lots of missions, so... not just the ones I've mentioned, or that was asked questions about.

No they don't all have the same speed in Quantum/Supercruise. Supercruise itself, I don't know if you're thinking Supercruise as in the definition of it in Elite: Dangerous, because we actually have our own version of cruise that's one of the new flight modes what will debut in 2.0 which is somewhere between SCM (Space Combat Maneuvering) and Quantum Travel and that will be based on mass and thrust and everything else, it will change depending and that number will even change dynamically for an individual ship depending on what you're doing in terms of power and thrust and fuel and all the rest of stuff. Quantum itself; we've talked about different Quantum Drives or different levels of mass of a ship affecting the rate of Quantum so we sort of discussed the best Quantum Drives in the galaxy right now in human hands anyway does 0.2 speed of light but that doesn't mean they all do that maybe a slow boat trading ship would be able to do maybe 0.1 but it just take them longer to get somewhere but they can haul a whole bunch more cargo and goods, so there you go!

In terms of the communication between two ships it's still early days on that, obviously there's a simple chat system that's in the game right now, but we're thinking that you'd open a channel; you'd target a ship; you'd request to talk to them and then you can make that a channel that you can talk on your frequency or you could have it public and broadcast. And then, potentially, if you're talking between someone on that frequency, depending on the ship and equipment, someone else could potentially snoop on it depending on what they've got. Not all the time but some people would. So we'll allow you to hail ships and open secure transmissions with them or just generally broadcast stuff and go from there. But it's still early days so they're all functionality and features that are yet to be properly implemented into the game but we have some pretty strong ideas on how it will work and hopefully you guys will like it too.

No, hangars will still exists. You can still load into your hangar; you can still mess around with your ships; you can still change the loadouts on your ships; and from the hangar you can access ArcCorp; you can access Port Olisar, which is the space station which you start on in 2.0; or you can go into the Simpod and access Electronic Access to play Arena Commander and, when we turn it on, Star Marine. So in some ways the hangar is still going to be the hub. We have some later stage stuff that we'll debut that will remove the loading screens and make it more seamless and streaming: it's not just there yet but it will be in the not too distant future.And longer term for the first version of 2.0 we probably won't have a holotable available or a MobiGlas UI available for you to customise your ship while you are at Port Olisar or a space station or pad but that is the long term plan. So that will be in 2.2 or somewhere around there. And ultimately we're just trying to bring this all together fairly, actually, fairly soon, but we'll be able to... Port Olisar will just be a space station orbiting in the Stanton system and you'll be able to fly down and visit Crusader; or fly down and visit ArcCorp; or fly down and visit MicroTech; or fly and go visit Nyx. So all the early stages of the PU are gestating with SC Alpha 2.0 and it's the first baby step. And we're really excited to see what you guys do with it because there is a lot of opportunity for fun; cooperative play with other players; or having head-to-head fights against other players; or just encountering AI.

It's too early to be definitive on this but yes obviously different ships will have the ability to have different ranges. Quantum fuel is a separate resource to the boost/afterburner fuel and obviously the amount of Quantum fuel you have combined with the efficiency of the drive you have which essentially is a modified Quantum Drive and the distance you're going to have to do in the jump through the wormhole will affect how far you can go. The smaller ships that have jump drives probably will not be able to go as far without having to re-fuel or collect some more fuel, bigger ones will be able to carry on going for much further distances. We're expecting a fair amount of gameplay long term for players that want to be flying their Starfarer around and selling fuel to people or there will be refuelling stations and all the rest of the stuff. But I would say the smaller ships have a much shorter range before they have to refuel versus the bigger ones, so there you go!