10 For the Chairman Episode 20. May 12th, 2014

Yeah, the short answer is yes. I'm not sure whether a Caterpillar would be able to have it or a Starfarer, but we're already an infirmary in the Idris and there will be some other ships that will have medical facilities on them.I think I mentioned before in one of the previous 10 for the Chairman, one of the game mechanics we thought of is that when you're boarding, if you get wounded or injured, especially if you take a critical hit, if your friends manage to drag you back and get you patched up, you won't actually lose that life.It will take you a bit of time before you fully bleed out and lose a life or die, so one of the game mechanics will be taking your wounded comrades back and getting them fixed up. If you have either successfully captured a ship with a boarding action or unsuccessfully and you've got some shot up team mates or you're shot up yourself, then you have to go and find some medical facilities in a certain period of time before you will bleed out and lose a life.That could either happen aboard a ship, or depending if you're a pirate, maybe some sort of dodgy back alley doctor, but we thought it would be a pretty interesting mechanic, so the answer to that question is yes.

We were thinking in terms of the tablet support, it would be more an app that you could log into your account, manage your inventory, look for work, sort out future missions with friends, organize your business dealings, and personal stuff, but not fly, 'cause right now tablets aren't gonna be close to as powerful as we need to do Star Citizen.It's more like personal management. I guess you could consider it like your mobiGlas version, other than the fact that you won't be in augmented reality the same way that mobiGlas is in the game.And we have talked about having a second screen support, like you're in a ship potentially, some of the screen stuff can go from the cockpit on to a second screen, but we haven't really done much with that, and that's certainly, I don't think that's going to be a primary thing at the beginning. It will probably be something that we add later on, because we've got a lot of other things to do.So look for the app to be mostly about managing your possessions, jobs, missions, friends, setting yourself up for when you get on your desktop and start to fly around in space.

That's a great question, not off the bat on the Dogfighting module, but I wouldn't rule that out later on down the road in terms of allowing people to build their own encounter maps for Arena Commander, because that would be fairly easy to do.The only caveat is the modding side of the tools require a lot more polish than our internal dev tools, so in terms of those getting in people's hands, our current schedule is get the game out, and then get polished modding tools out after the game, because we make it work to a certain level, but then you've got to make the interface better, and a whole level of robustness.So I'm not so sure it would be easy to do that ahead of that sort of schedule, we'd be taking a significant chunk of the editor that you use in CryEngine and have it modified heavily for what we're doing.But I wouldn't necessarily rule it out, especially if we build some kind of mission builder separate, that could possibly happen. We'll think about that, it's a good suggestion. Can't promise it right away, but long term that would definitely be a goal.

That's a good question, we've actually gone back and forth on that one. Originally we were thinking "it's cool, but maybe it's too much of a pain," for instance to always have to navigate back, is the planet still there or not?So initially, we were leaning against it, but we're now moving to a full double precision system map, which means that we can essentially cover millions and millions of kilometers, and in that system each entity, whether it's a planet, or a sun, or asteroid field, will have their own location, and we probably will be able to, if we want, orbit them around, then you would travel locally.But we haven't made a full decision whether planets are static or they're actually running on some orbital path. Although doing the orbital thing may be pretty cool. That's definitely something we're considering, before we were thinking we weren't doing it when we had a more fixed system map set up, and now our system map is on one fixed scale and had the ability to be more dynamic, we're reconsidering that. So no decision made, yet, but potentially it could happen.

That's a good question, there's a couple of things to consider there. One, trying to make the universe and the system feel as realistic as possible, also protecting people from those abusing the system for outside reasons, like gold farmers and stuff.So we were thinking that there would be several levels. We'll probably let you trade between players. There will be some level in most of the cases of a tax in trade between players. Very similar to if I right now want to give my car to someone, I would have to sign my title over to them, so there's a cost in signing the title over, and we will have that type of mechanic in a lot of the trades.I don't know on the player to player sales, we definitely want players to be able to sell to other players, so we're going to allow that. Depending on where you sell it, you'll obviously have to pay the taxes to your local place for selling. Just like you would have to pay sales tax if you're selling to other people here like where I am right now in California.I do want players to go and collect really cool things in parts of the galaxy and take them to other parts and sell them to players for convenience. I think we'll use the same system that we're talking about for the mission ratings where both the seller and the buyer can rate each other, whether you're a good seller or whether you're a good buyer, and so obviously if someone has a good reseller rating, then you feel more comfortable than if they don't.And of course buying from NPCs will probably be the safest of all the things that you can do... So I do think to a certain extent, you may or may not have to be suspicious of other players, although when a player's selling to you it's not quite the same as it is in the real world here. If you were gonna buy and sell it in our game, you probably would have to be face to face with that character and once you sell it, the item's gonna transfer.It's not the same as purchase something, give someone my credit card online here, and then the goods never show up, because we handle the brokering of the system, so we'll make it so people can't scam each other as far as that stuff goes.So I think it's gonna be better than real life, but we do want to keep a little element of real life in there where there could be the potential of some players to be more dishonest or try and screw other players over, and there's a pro and con to that, just to make the game more interesting.Maybe that's the sort of stuff that can only happen in the unregulated border worlds, wherein you couldn't do that in the UEE say on Earth or on Terra because on Terra, you would have to go through an official broker, and then you can't cheat in that case. But maybe you don't need the broker out on an outlaw planet. You may do that transaction 'cause it's gonna cost you less, 'cause it doesn't have the same taxes and fees, but then the risk is, maybe someone screws you over.That's kind of the risk/reward that we're thinking about playing with, and we want to build that into the game, which I think will make it pretty interesting.