10 for the Chairman Episode 19. May 5th, 2014

Yeah, I think when you buy another ship in game, you will have the option to trade it in or keep your current ship, so it would be up to you. I would say that in general, it depends on the kind of ships, but it's always good probably to have, if you can, store it and have more than one ship. Because the ships are very role specific, so if you want to be trading, that's a very different ship than you will need to be flying than if you want to be a mercenary and just doing dogfighting. Because there isn't really a ship that's the jack of all trades that does everything.Yes, there are some ships that you can take cargo and dogfight on, but if you want to really haul cargo, then you'd probably want to be flying things like the Freelancer or the Starfarer, and obviously they aren't necessarily the best dogfighting ships out there. But if you want to trade it in, say you were upgrading to a bigger cargo ship or a better dogfighter, then yeah, the game will allow you to trade it in just like you would normally now if you were getting a car.And we are going to have second hand ships that will probably be in the universe, in our Persistent Universe, on some of the planets, we already have the equivalent of a used car dealership in some places, and that would be a place to get ships that would be second hand, used, worn down a bit, maybe not quite as pristine or efficient as what you'd buy on a new show room floor, in game just like in the real world.And I would assume that some that get traded in get put down to scrap metal because there's only gonna be so much inventory we want to keep out in the persistent universe.

The simple answer is no, actually we don't have any sort of elements that would retard your speed, so once you're moving at a certain speed, as long as you don't want to change your direction, you're not really firing your thrusters or using energy or stuff.Really the flight control system limits your speed at the low velocity stuff, which is where you would be dogfighting, purely because of g-force and pilot safety issues.And that's when you step up to autopilot or warp, where you're gonna move quickly in system, then it accelerates much faster, but then obviously in a straight line, and that's also why it pulls you out of autopilot or warp before you get close to another ship or other celestial body because at those kind of speeds, even .2 the speed of light, you just can't deviate your course quickly enough to avoid a collision without doing significant damage or killing the occupants, because you'd have to... It would be a lot of forces to even deviate a small amount at that sort of speed.So we are energy efficient, if you were at the top low-velocity that the IFCS sets and you're just going straight, it's not firing any thrusters. You're just basically cruising. The thrusters are really only being used and the fuel's only being consumed when you are changing your velocity vector, or your orientation.

Yes, that is 100% yes, that will be the case in Squadron 42 as well as in the Persistent Universe.We're definitely gonna have some fun stuff that I think would add to the level of feeling like you're in a whole, complete world, so it's not just about flying around. For instance, if you went out and you found a derelict, ancient ship floating in an asteroid field somewhere and you go and explore it, you would explore it in first person.You would dock, you would go down, and you would explore it, and hey, we may even have some alien creatures that could attack you. And we'll have other situations where perhaps you would get attacked, like you're down on a more sketchy planet, and some people try to mug you in the cargo bay when you're unloading the cargo, so you have to whip out your laser pistol and defend yourself.There will definitely be elements that will have nice, PvE elements, that will play into the first person shooter side. Which would be separate from what we would be doing for the PvP first person shooter stuff which is more like fighting with other people and boarding their ships.I think it's really gonna add to the color. I mean one of the really nice things if you saw the dogfighting videos, just the fact that you can eject out of your Hornet and you're there in zero-g and looking around in space like this is really cool.It makes it feel much more tangible, instead of the abstract, I'm always in my ship or cockpit, you sort of feel like you're a person and you can get into ships, you can get out of ships, you can travel around. We're really gonna push that, 'cause that's one of the really big goals in the game.

So not really damage states, you're talking about I guess cleanliness states.There definitely by the way will be damage, we have limb damage already part of the system and it's already partially modeled in our first person shooter stuff. So when we show that and reveal it later this year, you'll see a lot of that. But we're also going to have some level of aging for the characters, so as you get older, we'll want them to feel like they get older. The same way that we want ships to have wear and tear.So we'll have that. I don't know about the cleaning, the grubby thing, but I kind of like it as an idea, it's kind of cool.It all would probably be based on the same system because we sort of have a blend system that you set up the pristine thing, and then you have the really dirty, worn thing, and then you just blend between them on a scale of 0 to 1. It actually would probably be not that difficult to do, it would be kind of along the same lines as the ships.I will take that under advisement, because we're already setting it up for the aging and some of the other stuff. you never know, you could be an unwashed pirate, or you could go and scrub yourself up in a shower.

Well we're trying hard, we obviously want to make it a good experience for everyone. I can't promise you that we'll be any more successful than some other people have been, but we definitely have a nice system that... Essentially you have to have server authorative to make sure that you're always watching everybody so they're not cheating.So we're a server authoriative model, which helps, but we have limited client trust. What happens is we let the client simulate, and the server also simulates, and as long as the client's close to where the server is, it's ok, and if it starts to deviate too much, we lose trust in the client, and the server starts to say "No, you're here, you're here in this position."The nice thing about that is that the actual simulation locally, as long as you're not cheating, is generally really smooth, it feels like you're playing a single player game, because we don't wait for the server to tell us where we are, we just simulate locally, and as long as you're close enough by the time the server has looked at what your state is, then it's ok.So on a hack basis, since the server is really authorative and it's always checking stuff, we've got some other checks that are going on, it hopefully will help prevent some of the cheating that you can see, where people have their aimbots and all the rest of the stuff, but it's in the early days yet, and actually one of the interesting things about having the community and testing the stuff so early is. I'm assuming that we'll be able to see a lot of this stuff and address it and work on it before the full game is done and it's a full general public release. So hopefully we'll be in a better state, but it's early days, yeah, so who knows and that's a battle that I think will be waged for a long time.

I don't think you choose, because I think the model of the space ship came with all the packages that have the Constellation as the base ship, so I believe the model is actually of the Constellation. I know we've been seeing some early prototypes of the models, and they look very cool, so I think your model of the space ship will be just the Constellation.We are talking about the potential of maybe making some physical model versions of other space ships, and we're researching that as a possibility, although that requires a lot of work and isn't actually necessarily very cost effective, so if we did something like that, they probably would be...They'd cost some money and they would require a lot of work from our side, and not necessarily really have any profit in it. Which, for us the profit's all extra money we put towards the game, so we like to have some things that, if we even sell physical goods, there's a bit of a profit in it so we can make a bigger, better game.We try to avoid to do physical items that are basically break even, because that requires a lot of man power and a lot of thought and a lot of juggling, and also customer service headaches 'cause, you know, did you get your package, did it get through customs, all the rest of the stuff.We have staff that do just deal with that, and obviously that's stuff that we could be spending money working on the game instead. So I don't know, but we're all geeks, and we all like the idea of cool spaceships, so we're kind of partial to potentially may trying to make some.So we'll see what happens there, but no promises yet.

The idea of the command and control, I think maybe you've seen the dogfight footage.We have this holo-radar sphere, so a lot of time the command and control's just gonna be a much bigger, more detailed version of that were you can see all the different ships, their holograms, the actual ships themselves flying around, and you can click on them and get information on them.You can click here and say you attack here, or you defend this person, and essentially you'll be tasking instructions and orders out to the ships. If they're NPC runned, then obviously the NPCs will obey you, and if they're player run, you're getting instructions from the commander that has a full battle tactical view, and telling you what to do. Hopefully if your organization plays as a team, then you'll listen to those controls and commands.Essentially the idea would be that on some of the bigger ships you would have someone who would run the battle log so to speak and they would be directing the fighter air cover or assigning different ships to attack this other ship over here. What I'm kind of hoping we get down later, this is probably the dogfight v2 or v3, more like v3, we have a couple of big capital ships, and it would be kind of fun to see two groups of players come in with corvettes and launch their fighters and go at each other.There will be a mixed command and control. It's gonna be like a whole other game, a lot of co-op and I think it would be pretty fun. There's a lot of stuff that's going on besides just command and control on the big ships. We're gonna do a more in depth piece about that in the near future. Foundry 42, our studio in the UK that's taken lead on Squadron 42 is gonna take lead on the big ship systems, because they need it for Squadron 42, and they're also gonna do it for the Persistent Universe.There's some really great stuff I've seen going back and forth, 'cause it's not just command and control, there's engineering, there's helm, there's life support, there's a whole bunch of different things, communication, radar, and the idea is a lot of different players, if they work together optimally, can maybe run the ship really efficiently, and well, and have a big edge against someone who isn't doing the same kind of thing. And certainly if the players are doing it, they're gonna have an edge over the NPCs.So we'll make it so the NPCs are good, but they're not as good as an efficiently run player group running a ship. Which is great, 'cause I really want to have this sense of co-operative play in the game, so you fly by yourself, or your fly with your friends to achieve things.I think the co-operative side is as much fun as anything else that you can do. That's generally when I've played other games, even when you're playing against other players, the fun thing is when you are cooperatively working with other people against other players or other NPCs.So that's a big focus for us, and command and control will be kind of like that.Like if you've seen any of these, like the big holotables, like you see in Ender's Game or you saw in Prometheus, it would be that kind of interface, where you're standing by it and you can click and rotate around and see stuff. So it should be very cool.