10 For the Chairman Episode 29. July 14th, 2014

That's a pretty good question. I would say that we haven't really thought about that, so kind of a gut reaction to that is, that's an interesting concept. Normally I think we would... I mean, we were planning to have Arena Commander, well, two things:- To have a sort of competition inside our universe, and so that would actually be kind of cool, if people could compete but you'd have to travel to the system for the tournament, and play there... so that could be a possible cool game element, that sort of is a game within a game and also playing inside our universe.- But in general we were kinda thinking that Arena Commander would just allow you to play with your friends, against other people in general around the universe. And maybe sort of fudge the whole FTL side.But, uhh, I'll take this under consideration because does have some cool mechanics. It's just the downside is you don't really want to be stuck in a system when no one else is around who you can play around or train with, but these will all be things that we'll play with when we get the Persistent Universe up and running because I do like the idea of the game inside the game and then having it adhere to the rules of the universe.

So yes, that is absolutely 100% "yes". We're actually doing a pass right now to have the HUDs between the Hornet, and the 300i, and the Aurora be different. And the other ships we bring in will also have their own sort of look and difference of HUD, and we're also going to have different functionality that the ships' targeting computers, ships' systems, all bring in. So a more bare bones ship will have a lot less sort of heads-up features than, say, a dedicated dogfighter with state of the art technology.So not all of that's there right now - you pretty much get the whole package. But the idea would be for instance the Hornet could track multiple targets at once, whereas an Aurora can only track one target at once. And, you know, some of the targeting stuff on a base ship would be a simple set, and then you could buy extra add-ons to add features to make you track more targets, to do different firing solutions... all those kinda things. Because to let you customize the look and the functionality are two things that we have planned for the HUDs. So it's early days on that, and it should be pretty cool long-term.

We're pretty aware of the gold farmer, gold seller, and the "botting" side. It's one of the reasons why the one form of revenue that we were thinking the game would have, besides selling the initial package (because we're not gonna have subscriptions like you have typically on World of Warcraft or something) is that we would sell UEC credits within a certain limited amount to players. So you don't actually have to go and buy it from someone farming, because that's always going to happen. We're sort of thinking of different ways that allow money transfers to happen in the game, that hopefully potentially could curtail a certain amount of gold farming, and all that kind of stuff. I will say that in general it's pretty hard to clamp that down because people can always even sell an account if you prevent people from sending money to someone else inside the game. We haven't made all the full rules, but in our universe it will be like the real world, so you just can't willy nilly transfer money and transfer items and equipment to other people without having to pay some form of... you know, like in the real world, you have to transfer title and it costs you to transfer title on a car, and if you give people something they have to pay taxes... and so we have various things that are trying to be like the real world in the Persistent Universe design that will hopefully replicate some stuff that's in the real world. And some of that may or may not help to reduce some of the "botting" and the gold farming. I think the biggest thing is if they can get it from a trusted source, i.e us, and that's all guaranteed, then you'd tend to go for that unless someone is radically undercutting you on prices, and that's obviously something that we would try to go after because we don't want to have the game destroyed by someone saying "here, I'm gonna sell you my account and I've got 20 billion credits in it. I'll give it to you for 5 dollars!" ... Those are all sort of things that would be no-nos against our policies. But like I said it's early days, so we'll see. It's always a constant struggle, and I think no one has got a magic silver bullet for that, but we're aware and we've got quite a few people that have worked on some big MMOs and so they have some ideas and solutions, but I don't want to share too many of them because obviously you want to keep some of that in reserve.

Yeah, we have... It's kinda interesting because in the engine right now we allow you to switch between first and third person, mainly because we really think the ships look great and the characters look great, and we like to show off the cool graphics. The focus has been, you know, if you want to be in combat, doing action, you want to be in first person because you get all this extra information via your HUD and all the rest of the stuff you would get. And the same would go in first person combat, like if you're in a combat suit you will get a HUD in your visor, and of course if you were in third person you wouldn't get that and it would be much harder to aim, etc, etc.So I think I'm sort of leaning towards that direction so can admire you avatar and what clothes he's wearing and stuff like that. But we definitely want to make sure if you switch to third person you're not getting a tactical advantage. Really for aiming and shooting, both flying your ship and on foot, needs to be in first person.

Yes, we haven't... err... so, the Morpheus right now, from my understanding is just for the PS4. If they let it be used on a PC then we would definitely look at supporting that, and there's already been some work that has been done actually in CryEngine to support that, by Crytek.I don't know what the Avegant Glyph is, but if it's cool we probably would. I mean, we've looked at some other stuff like space glasses, which is sort of a cool glass you can wear that has an overlay on top, which may be something interesting for an overlaid HUD setup. But yeah, we kind of want to support a bunch of head-mounted displays and things also like TrackIR, so that's all on our list of stuff to do. So it all depends on what the tech is like, and is it cool, and also does it fit in with what we've done? So if we're already doing Oculus Rift support then things like Sony's Morpheus is an easier thing to support than doing it from scratch.So the answer is, yes, there has been some consideration - we're not quite sure exactly the extent of it.

So generally the rule of thumb is that we tend to do variants on the more common ships. So the idea is, just like a 3-series BMW is pretty common, and it has (it used to have anyway) the 315, and the 325, and the 330, and a diesel version... and they've probably got a hybrid version now, or an electric version... So, for the common ships, so things like the Aurora obviously, the Hornet, the 300i, the Freelancer, the Constellation, the Cutlass, will all have variants. And then a couple of other ones the Mustang, which is meant to be a starter ship, would probably have some variants. And then some of the bigger ships - the more unique ships - won't necessarily have variants, or if they do have a variant it may be, "here's the military version, here's the civilian version". So that's kind of our rule of thumb, but it's not set in stone but we do think the more common ships would probably have different variants for different roles. And then of course on top of that, you can take the base hull and then add on different equipment and items to sort of further customize it towards the role you want to play when you're flying around in space.

The way we're building the system is, you're not really... you hopefully with not be able to perceive the loading times per se, because we're basically going to be streaming the data in and out. So right now we don't. Right now when you go into Arena Commander it loads a level and loads up the stuff in a very traditional manner, but one of the tech things that we have on our plate that's part of the package that we're moving to full double precision is also the streaming of objects into the world. So the way it's meant to work is that when you're flying around in space in your world view things just stream in and out all the time, so you have no perception of loading screens or loading time. And what we do is we sort of take advantage of, say, going into the equivalent of warp space when we're in autopilot or landing on a planet, where in those cases you're in an automated flight and you can still move around your ship or look around, but everything outside... the stars are blurring by, and we're basically dumping the old objects from the area that you're leaving and streaming the new objects into your local client machine. And then once that's happened, and after the predetermined time in "warp space" you'll come out. So it won't feel as much... it hopefully will not feel like a loading screen. It should all feel fairly seamless. That's the way I think it will work.I will recommend SSD. They're super cheap now. It makes all game experiences and OS much better, so I would go for that no matter what. But uhh, we'll generally try to stream everything instead of actually have separate loading screens and times.

The in-game rationale, well there's two, right...So there's a practical rationale for the speed limit, as in physics engines break down when you get very large numbers, which would include large speeds, because they just don't have the precision to handle it. Now, we're going to move CryPhysics over to 64-bit as part of our move to double precision, so that'll help a little bit. And then there's fun play-wise. When you're going so fast, you know, it's not that much fun dogfighting. Someone will just flash past you and they'll be gone, and you have to turn around and get on them again, and that would take a long, long time. In the future, real warfare I think in space would mostly revolve completely around computers calculating everything, and whoever has the best computer and targeting solution would probably win the battle.But the in-game rationale for the speed limit, and this also could apply to the real world now, is that if we assume that the ships are flow by humans, and we assume that there isn't really any way of absorbing or counteracting the g-forces that a human body experiences under extreme accelerations... and yes I know that in space, you know, everything's relative so I'm just carrying on going at even the speed of light it's not going to affect me, but the acceleration to get up to a high speed or the acceleration if you're going this way and then you want to go exactly the opposite way back, and if you do that in a short period of time, that's a lot of acceleration. So the concept is if you're going to have real human beings fly, and you don't have anything like gravity absorption technologies, then you probably would want to limit your dogfighting range speed down to a reasonable range. Maybe it wouldn't be as low as what we have, but to a range that's small enough that would not allow the pilot to make radical maneuvers, i.e. going in this direction and then quickly flip the other way in a very short period of time without hurting or killing themselves. So that's kind of the in-fictional stuff is that the way the ships systems work is that when it knows that you're close to other ships and dogfighting, or potentially just trying to avoid them on a collision basis, it keeps your speeds low because obviously at fast speeds you can't also avoid collisions, because to move the distance you would have to do to avoid a collision when you're travelling really fast would create a huge amount of acceleration over a short period of time, which would probably kill the crew or the pilot on board. So the idea is the IFCS would limit the speeds to reasonable amounts when you're doing extreme maneuvers or you're close to other ships where you could have collisions, and then when you're not it allows you to go up to, I think our top warp speed is meant to be 0.2 speed of light, which is pretty damn fast. And then as you get close to other ships and you wouldn't have to ability to avoid them it would bring you back down to maneuvering / dogfighting speed.So that's kind of the in-game fiction. It makes sense also in the practicality of the physics. Would it be limited to the speeds we have? Probably not quite as low, but the other thing we want to do is have it low enough that you can get up close and really appreciate the ships and get that close dogfighting feel. And it's really not that slow, because I'm pretty sure if any of you play multiplayer, or even in the Vanduul Swarm mode, you can collide with things pretty easily coming toward you, because the speed is deceptive. So we're actually doing some other stuff to get across the sense of speed, because you are travelling faster than I think a lot of people realize. We just need to have more of the space dust, a bit more shake as you're going faster, narrow the field of view, a bit louder sound, and I think you'll get a much better sensation or feeling of speed even though you'll be travelling more or less the same distance.