Calling All Devs - Weapons at Rest

Obviously we are developing ArcCorp. We're running to a schedule for all locations. They are being treated as separate locations. We're currently planning to do all the planetary bodies in the system first. So the Aaron Halo does come secondary to that. So I think for the first release of ArcCorp as a planet, you will not be seeing the Aaron Halo in just yet. One of the big challenges we have with the asteroids in particular from a visual point of view is making them look good when the sun is directly behind you, because at the moment we don't have any kind of atmospherics inside the asteroid fields, and that's a bit of tech we're waiting on being developed from the graphics side of things. Without that you kind of get a very flat read when the sun is directly behind you. It's something you can already see around Yela with its rings. So it's been treated as a separate location. There are these huge, cool gateways. I'm sure you've seen the concept art. Something we're very excited to develop. It's just not being developed at the same time as the ArcCorp release due to the schedule that we're running to, basically.

So we've talked about this quite a few times, but the maneuvering thrusters on ships are more powerful than we want them to be, for various reasons. It sort of falls out of the tuning process that we have at the moment, in that when you want a specific performance, it just dictates the maneuvering thruster capability. So they're all too high. So that's partly the reason why they do that. But also the VFX for when you're in atmosphere, they're the same VFX on the thrusters you have in space. So in space where it's all dark and you've got a black background, you can see these thrusters firing away, keeping you up. Whereas in atmosphere where you're in bright daylight, you sort of lose them against the ship. So it does seem like they're hovering, but in fact, if you look at them closely, the thrusters are on full tilt, trying to keep you up. So we've got plans to sort the maneuvering thrusters out, which will help that. Some ships do behave, like the Retaliator and Reclaimer, as people found out, especially when the Reclaimer came in, that you had to orientate yourself correctly coming in and out of atmosphere because you would just plummet down. And that's the sort of thing we're going for with those bigger ships, which if they have VTOL thrusters, you're going to need them on planets or moons with gravity.

And I'm going to recommend that folks check out Reverse the Verse Live from, I think it was about two weeks ago by the time this airs, maybe three weeks ago. It had Chris Roberts on it. One of the first questions right out the gate is, what is your vision for combat flight and atmospheric flight and stuff like that? And one of the things he talks about leads directly to this, wanting to redefine how ships perform not just in space but in atmosphere, and for ships to have their own character and personality in the way that they handle. So it's not just, we have 120-some-odd ships currently in the pipeline at various points, and you don't want them all to just be like skin swaps on the same ship.

They're all going to have character.

So I highly recommend you check that out if you haven't, because that's going to give you a lot more information than just this, because Chris has a lot more time to talk about it than we do today.

If I may, I think that means when you pull out a rifle, instead of constantly having to hold it like this, trigger discipline, holding it down in a resting position, but still having it out and brandished.

So the actual pointing of your gun and kind of bringing it down slightly, that's something we can definitely do. Though if we're talking about a more neutral position, like if you see armed guards somewhere, if you go to an airport or something like that, especially in the UK, they all have the MP5 just kind of tucked on the chest here. This nice little rest. So it's like, I'm armed, but I'm not about to shoot you. I'm not threatening you yet. So yeah, that's something we want to put in for players as well. So if you want to walk around a zone with your weapon out, but you don't want to look threatening to anyone, it's kind of a bit of a role-play option. So you've just got your new swanky weapon resting on your chest here. That's definitely something we can do. It'll just be like it being holstered, but it's not on your back, it's on your front instead, and you've still got your arms on it. Something that's also quite important is we want to get this in for AI, especially because down the line we want to move away from having straight-up green zones where you can't equip any of your weapons or anything at all. So you really need to know how the guards in the area are acting around you. Are they considering you a threat? Are they relaxed? And this kind of "I'm armed but relaxed" pose gives you a real good indication of, okay, these guys are here, they might mess me up if I cause any trouble, but right now, I'm not in the bad books.

But if you want to loop back around to the original question again, if people are talking about actually aiming at a friendly and dipping the weapon rather than it being dipped down on your front, that's also something we would potentially look at, maybe for Squadron, because there will be people in there that will be definitely marked as friendly. You don't want to shoot them. Whereas in the PU, you can make anyone your enemy. So we probably wouldn't want to enforce it anywhere like that, because if you want to go and make trouble with someone you're considering good or a friend, you can totally turn your back on them at any moment if you want to. We're not going to stop you from doing that.