10 For the Chairman Episode 25. June 16th, 2014

Well I think a lot of the feedback is what I was talking about at the top of this show which is that most feedback is about the flight model, which I went into depth with, so you hopefully have already had a really good explanation for that.But it sort of told us that we need to do a better job explaining why it's this way, and also in some ways do a better job of tweaking it. 'Cause it's IFCS, it's a complicated system, so it certainly can be more efficient, or be better, or maybe we give it some more modes that allow people a bit more flexibility. It's all things that we're tweaking.And then there's a fair amount of the other big sort of... I don't know whether it's debate on the forums, it's about control methods. So there's a certain amount of "it's Arcade Commander because you can just point and click the mouse and win." I would argue that that's not the case, I actually don't like flying with the mouse.Definitely the mouse does allow you a little more precision in aiming your gimbaled weapons, but there's a couple of modes and stuff that we have for the joystick and the HOTAS, which didn't get implemented for v0.8, that would cancel out some of that.So we're still playing with all that, but from our standpoint, controls and the flight model are all things that we're working on. I think the actual physics of the flight model is brilliant, I think that the IFCS of it all, we can be doing some more fine tuning, and the controls, we're working on.I mean we're gonna be allowing people to do custom key binding, and that's one of the big things we're working on. Hopefully that will be in people's hands in 2-3 weeks or so. And those, I think, are the biggest ones.There's obviously a few little balance things, but we're super early days, and it's great, it's positive with the negative. It's all great 'cause it's really helping us hone in.I know we're not gonna be able to please everybody, 'cause that's just the nature of the beast, especially with so many people, but ultimately I think it's gonna be something really special. And it's gonna be partially because of your guy's feedback.

We have TrackIR on the schedule, and we have an engineer who works on it when he has a chance.The Rift support's really, to be honest with you, it's sort of like a team passion. We've got a fair number of people who are VR, VR-heads, let's put it that way. And they were so excited by the Rift that in a lot of ways they spent extra time to try and get stuff working, because they just wanted to see what it was like on the Rift.So that's really why it was supported early, because for me, my focus is really to get the game out in the hands of everyone in the base model.The Rift's cool, but obviously there aren't that many people who have it, so that's not really the priority, but it ended up happening because we've got some people who are very passionate about it, and in some ways, maybe more passionate than they are about TrackIR.But TrackIR is absolutely on the schedule, and I actually think in some ways it can be, especially for aiming and looking around, it's great.And in some ways, if you don't want to have a headset on you, it's kind of nice. The headset can be pretty claustrophobic, and the rift itself has got loads of potential, but it's still got a ways to go. The resolution's too low, even on DK2, which is 1080p, because it's right next to your eyes, so you can see the pixels. You really need at least 1080p on each eye probably.I know the Oculus folks are working on trying to get more resolution. The Crystal Cove prototype, which actually has positional head tracking, will make it better. So it's got a huge amount of potential, but it's still got a ways to go.Anyway, those are the reasons, some passionate devs, not any sort of cunning marketing plan or anything.

I don't really have a good date for you. That is definitely on our dev schedule. There's some pretty cool cool stuff that's happening on the website that hopefully will be added by the end of this month if not the beginning of next month that involves some 3D stuff, which will be pretty cool. Then that's gonna form the basis of some stuff that we're gonna roll in to the Galactipedia.So after the 3D, which is all part of the shop, we're doing a revamp of the pledge store which will allow you to visualize and see some of the ships and all the rest of the stuff.Then that's gonna roll into the Galactipedia. So that will be something we're working on afterwards, but I don't have an exact date right now. I mean I'm hoping that we can have some stuff towards the later part of the year.

That's a pretty awesome scenario. I don't know, we're definitely going to have experiences in first person on planets that will allow you to do more than just walk around and buy stuff, sell stuff, and talk to people in a bar.We're actually going to add some PvE style stuff. Like you go down a dark alley, you'll potentially get mugged or someone tries to pull a gun on you in a bar. But they would all be NPCs 'cause we don't really want to have unauthorized PvP on planets, 'cause that wouldn't be that much fun for a lot of people. But we're gonna make it richer for people.In this particular example right now, I would say probably not. Because if it's a matter of paying attention to cargo or some other person gets on a ship unseen and goes onto another ship, I don't think we're gonna get to that level of fidelity at the beginning. But it's a pretty cool goal We're still debating the mechanics when we're on planet side.Like if you want to follow another person or you want to, like say you make a person of interest, how exactly is that gonna work? Can you follow them leaving from the bar and follow them over to the landing pad as they get into their ship, or do you just get a notification saying that they're about ready to leave for space and you'd better get to your ship to leave.So we're still going through a little bit of that, those mechanics and deign stuff, but we definitely want to make the environment, the first person stuff, cool.Like there's a whole environment of people going about and doing stuff. You can get into encounters. You can get into a fist fight in a bar and stuff like that, which would be pretty cool.I don't know about sneaking aboard a Bengal carrier, but I will keep it in the back of my mind.

Well, see this goes to the conversation and debate about the control schemes, which I think I was mentioning on a previous question.Like I said, everyone here flies on a whole bunch of different set-ups. Some people fly on keyboard and mouse, some people fly on HOTAS, some people fly on gamepad, some people fly on joystick. So there isn't any one, it's not like everyone says "this one control method is the best." Like I said, I myself don't like flying mouse at all, but some other people do like playing mouse. I guess it falls into are you a Freelancer player or a Wing Commander player? But we're still wanting to refine it.We're not happy with the mouse control, I don't actually like the fact that you sort of fly and look at the same time, but we do recognize that on small precision stuff, having the mouse is easier for some of the gimbaling weapons. So we're trying to balance it.We've got, like I said on the previous question, there's some stuff that's gonna come online for the joystick and HOTAS that will make that better for that side of it. Then there's also some stuff that we'll do on the mouse side that will maybe decouple the movement from the look.But it's still early days, we're still working on it, we're still thinking about different ways of doing it. That's kind of why I wanted to get it out there, to feel what worked and what didn't work for people.I know there are always camps, right. There's the keyboard & mouse FPS crowd verses the old school "get off my lawn, I've got a joystick and I've been playing that game since 1980" crowd, which would be pretty much me.But my goal is to balance it in a way that you have advantages with any one of the control interfaces so there won't be one that will be dominant. Anyway, we're not quite there yet, but we're definitely working on it.

I don't know about hunts of outlawed species, but we're definitely gonna have some space monsters. This sort of goes to what I was saying we're gonna try to have some PvE combat encounters that go beyond just flying your spaceship.Like if you come across a space wreck and are exploring it, maybe there's some NPC pirate, AI pirates that are there who are trying to jump you and jack your ship, or perhaps there's some alien creature scurrying around the ceiling.So we're gonna try and do that, we're gonna have some places you can land and do some exploring, and maybe there's some monsters and creatures down there.We want to add a lot of color to the persistent world that way, and that's the kind of stuff we can now do, because we've obviously had a lot more funding than we thought we would originally.So that's in the list, I'm not saying that's day 1, but that's definitely all stuff that we're planning on doing content wise, and really embracing the fact that we have a very powerful first person engine.We want to use it for more than just going into bars and talking to people and going into shops and buying or selling stuff.

Yes, we've had this debate on the design side, between "make it realistic because things don't change out instantly," to "we don't want to have someone sitting around for 2 days before their power plant's changed." I'm not sure we've made a full decision on it.Right now in the hangar you change out weapons pretty instantly. There may be a case on some bigger, definitely on repairs and modifications there will definitely be some timeline stuff.You'll land in the ship, and your ship's shot up, then you'll go and say "I need it repaired" and they'll say "Ok, it will get repaired, come back in 5 hours," or a day, which, when I say 5 hours or a day, I mean game time, so you can go out and then you can walk around the environments, do some stuff, maybe buy and sell some stuff, talk to people, and then go back to your ship and be ready to fly again.So we'll probably do it on some of the bigger things. Some of the simpler things like weapon loadout changing and stuff like that, maybe that's instant or very short.But we talked about having repairs and modifications. Like you're in the shop, and you can sort of see sparks and stuff happening in the distance while they're working on it, and then when it's finished, you could maybe get a notification on your mobiGlas.That's kind of how we're doing it, but like anything else, we're gonna fall on the side of what we think ultimately makes the game fun, so we definitely wouldn't want to make it too long doing that kind of stuff.