Calling All Devs - Market Tracking, Radar Display & E-War

Yeah, absolutely. If you recall, planning your trade routes is something that we've talked about for a long time, right? So what we ultimately want to get to is, I personally want to tie it into the star map so you can kind of plan your hops, but also click on a planet, dive down into it, be able to see the economic status of the commodities or things that are portrayed on that planet directly from the star map. So you can kind of go, okay, I'm going to go here, get that, go there, get that. And so on down the line. So you can plan a significant amount of gameplay just by looking at the star map. So yeah, that's something I'm really interested in getting in soon, but it's probably going to be a bit before we get to that. We've got a lot of foundational work to lay, but yes, star map is probably where I would look to see that. Although it's not confirmed quite yet where that's going to go, but it's absolutely in the plans.

So the boring part first is obviously this is not something we got planned for the immediate future, but it's not something that's going to be impossible either. From my point of view, I think there's a lot of things that would need to be done to EVA to make this a fun feature. And it usually starts with a reason, like you would need a reason to catch the pilotless ship. Once we have a reason to pursue this feature, then we could jump on it. But there's things like, I think you should be able to attach to the surface of a ship so you could hold on to it somehow, whether that's like a physical attachment or you've got some kind of tractor beam you can grab onto it with, or if you can sort of get into the ship's influence in some way so that your relative speed in EVA is always moving with that. So I think otherwise, small adjustments that ship makes and the power a ship has compared to your little EVA process will always make it very, very difficult to catch up to anyone else. There's always technical concerns, would be things like how well will the animation-driven ragdoll hold up when you're traveling at such insane speed inside the world grid, because while you're inside the ship, there's no problem because your relative speed to the physics grid is essentially zero, right? Even though the grid is traveling full pelt. So that would be a technical concern. Another thing is currently the EVA thrusters are like safe. So they say, this is how fast you're allowed to go. This is the maximum rate of acceleration you're allowed to achieve. So the moment you leave the ship, they would start to decelerate you to the safe operating speeds. So these are considerations we would have to get on. But like I said, I don't feel this is something that would be impossible. I always remember the Gamescom floor demo when the guys jumped out of a ship and then had someone free fall and then tried to catch him with the ship again, which is really, really cool, which makes me think of this feature.

So all of those features are still planned. Unfortunately, they're not in the super near-term planning trajectory, but we do still plan to have fun gameplay related to hacking. So you'd like to hack into the avionics of ships, being able to do things like override the ship computers so you can open the doors and breach it without doing physical harm or physical damage to the ships. Being able to take over the fire computer so you'd be able to control it remotely. Also, we want to do things like have security against that so you can be really good at being unhackable. Of course, the inverse is you could be a really good hacker and so you could develop that skill. We'd also want to do things like being able to jam signals so we could prevent communications from occurring. Maybe do things where when you have coordinated attacks, we could disrupt that communication or the communication between the ship computers so that you can have some defense against really good coordinated attacks, prevent just general communications from going on between ships or between stations. So you could just maybe become a little bit more stealthy when you're trying to attack one. And then we want to realize the feature that we created the Herald for, which was the physical transference of data. It's like, what's the point of transferring data physically when it's so much more convenient to do it over space, unless there's a reason for that. Physical transference of data is something that is ultra secure and has features in it like it could scramble the data in case you get in trouble or just eject it and destroy it, so that it is super secure and requires a human host to actually ensure the delivery of that, kind of like one of our delivery services here on Earth. That person becomes a protector of that information. That would be some gameplay that we'd want to implement so that we can utilize those features in ships we already have.

We've noted that the community has raised some issues with EMP and they're very valid issues. So the reason that EMP was such a problem when we released 3.0 is that when we converted the items to 2.0, EMP relies on a type of damage that we are calling distortion for now, but distortion damage wasn't properly set up on ship items. So the Warlock and the Raven were doing about 500,000 units of distortion damage on ships because we hadn't transferred the proper distortion damage pool onto items like the power plants, shield generators, and then the new controls we have for doing things like flight control and power control and whatnot. Those were set at default tiny levels, like I think 500. So you're doing these massive amounts of damage to ships that just were simply unable to cope with the previous values that we had before. So we did several things. We generally tuned both the Warlock and the Raven's EMP behavior so that it takes quite a bit more time to charge them and it requires more energy to do that. So in order to prep the EMP to fire, you're basically sacrificing some shield performance, as it'll drain the power to reduce your shield, and it will also disable your weapons for the most part. You can still do a little bit of energy triangle balancing to maybe get some of those systems online. But for the most part, you kind of have to really commit to discharge of the EMP. So there's a preparatory stage that you need to do to become an EMP bomb. And so we've balanced the EMP blast itself. We tuned the radius for that. So for the smaller ships, you can pretty much get them at a pretty good range, but you would have to get in close for ships that have larger size items in there, because those items can absorb more distortion damage. And finally, the other thing we did was we really, really toned down the time it takes, the cooldown time between blasts. So the cycle of being able to cripple a ship by performing an EMP blast and then having the time to restart the EMP cycle and shoot it again before the ship that you crippled is able to get out of the crippled state was tuned. So I think for the most part we settled on about three minutes between the EMP blasts. So really it's much less of an OP ship item. And now you will have to commit to doing it. Once you get it, you do get the reward of being able to just wail on them if you want. But at least it's more fair in that if you don't get a perfect shot, the ship that you're targeting at least has some chance of recovering. And then because your shields and weapons are down, either the ship that you haven't fully crippled or any of its comrades can come and take you out, because you've kind of sacrificed safety in order to blast the ship that you're targeting.

Is that going in 3.1?

Yes. It's actually in our build that we're having the testing public work on at the moment. Anybody that's able to participate in our playtest should be able to see all these changes.