Well... if Valve send me it. I had an email exchange with a couple of the guys at Valve who I know quite well, Scott Lynch and Gabe, and they did promise to send me a Steam controller a while ago when they revealed it. So maybe I need to rattle their cage a little bit. But yeah if we got a Steam controller we would be happy to hook it up and make sure it works in Star Citizen. It looks really cool and we are into that and we like what Valve has done. I have a million games on Steam that I keep downloading but I never seem to find time to play because i'm always building this universe. But yeah we will try and do that.
So yes. Your hangar will have cargo storage capacity and you will be able to rent storage capacity on various planets. So you could be far away from your home where your hangar is and still go and rent space for storage on another planet, like renting storage in the real world. So yes that will definitely be available and you will also be able to have more than one hangar around the universe so if you want to have a couple of bases because you don't want to travel that distance then we will let you purchase hangars or rent additional hangars in the persistent universe long term.
Next week I think we are going to talk about some of the Vanguard variants, one of them which will be an Ewar version and will go into some of the basic high-level design that we are thinking about for electronic warfare, that you will also be using for the Hornet Ghost that sort of has the kind of Ewar component to it. It will be pretty good, I mean there's basically sort of a couple of different ways of going about it. One we have long-range intercept and blocking of signals and transmission so obviously not necessarily when you are talking to people because you can sort of sort of circumvent that with Teamspeak and Skype but if you are giving sort of direct commands to people to attack this target or do that and also the fidelity of the targets – being able to scan and do all that sort of stuff. You can intercept those, you can jam 'em, you can do all that stuff. Shorter range you can, we have concepted sort of these data missiles you can send out and that will allow a connection to your target and then if you get in there you can sort of hack the systems and shut down some of the critical systems on someone else's ship. So we have a combination of sort of blocking, spoofing and sort of disruption stuff and then obviously the defenses against that plus we sort of have a kind of like hacking control component and we will go into more detail next week but I think it'll be pretty cool. Again just be another sort of specialized role that if you're in a two seat ship, one person could be trying his best to disrupt the other people around and while the other guy/girl is flying and keeping you out of harms way. Pretty cool.
Well, it depends on what we're talking about. If you're talking about names that you give yourself or names you would give your ship versus sort of, you know an Aegis Retaliator for instance – then right now we don't necessarily have plans for that because that would be more speech synthesis. So at the moment most of the – whether it's the NPC dialog that we have in Squadron 42 or in the Persistent Universe, that's pre-recorded. So, I would say at the moment no.If we can ever make decent speech synthesis – because I've yet to hear something that's really great – then that potentially could change but right now I would say in V1.0 that's not on the board because there's a lot of other things that we have to do.But we do have a really talented sound group, we actually have – most of them are based in the UK – we actually have 3 sound engineers, besides the sound designers and all of the rest of the stuff. 3 sound programmers. We're planning to do a lot with our sound, a lot of situational environmental stuff. So, like – we're going to have an in-game VOIP solution – if someone's behind you and they're talking to you, you'll hear them behind you in your game, they'll be filtered if they're through a helmet and stuff like that.So, there's some longer term stuff – looking at speech recognition and other stuff to help with controls and ships. So, we'll do some very cool sound stuff. Don't know if it's pronouncing the names of your characters and ships but if the speech synth stuff gets good enough then it's definitely something we would consider.
So yes, the answer is that is our plan. The first stage is planets that you can land on will have one landing zone or multiple landing zones, and then you would go and land in them and most of the time you would deal with traffic control where you will request permission to land and then fly down to the planet where you can still move around your spaceship and look around, but you'll be on an autopilot mode when you fly down. That's to stop players from moving off the beaten path or crashing into the city, and doing other sorts of things that could be disruptive (laughs). As we move forward and work on new tech, which I've been hinting at, but we're not ready to share or really talk about, we'll probably open up some areas on the planet where we would have besides, say a populated environment like we're releasing with the social module, say Area 18 in Arc Corp, we would have some other areas you could explore. Nice, pretty landscapes where perhaps there are some minerals to be found or mined, or some ruins to be explored. So, we'd start to open up some stuff that way which would encompass some of the procedural stuff that we've been doing research on, and was one of the stretch goals that we had a while back. Long term, my dream is to have as much of a planet as we can, the caveat is that we do everything with such a high level of fidelity and detail that we can't have that more simplistic feel that you see in No Man's Sky, which is super cool, but if you have cities like we have with that detail, you'd expect there'd be more than one of them on a planet, and there'd be traffic moving between them. It would feel inhabited, and to build out worlds with that level of fidelity is a level above, but that will definitely be long term, after the base game is out and we're adding features, that would certainly be something we'd be questing after to try and deliver because I believe it would increase the believability of the universe we're trying to build.
I think I touched that on my opening sort of preamble to these questions, but from my standpoint, as long as you guys let me. Basically, we're not looking at Star Citizen to be a static one-off release, we're looking at once we have it out there, that we're constantly adding features and content, and improving. As long as there is an audience, as long as there are people playing it, we will be constantly be improving it, making it play better, making it look better, making it perform better. I view Star Citizen as a living product, and we're just trying to get to the basic functionality that we can consider as V1.0, and then at that point hopefully people like it, and then we'll continue to add to it and improve it. I think that's true of many big online games if you look at something like World of Warcraft or Eve Online, they do the same thing. So, that's our plan.
That is a pretty good question. I must say I'm guilty of it too. When I was showing the Social module I was always sprinting around to show stuff. I think – my sense is as much as I love immersion, as much as I love it to feel realistic, that we would probably let you sprint around. Although, we do have a stamina model so if you did look at some of the demos that were video recorded, you would see that my guy in his heavy armour after a little bit ran out of breath and wasn't really as quick. But, I think we would probably let you sprint around just to move around quickly if you wanted to. It's like the same issues we've got... we've got a lot of in-game/in-fiction stuff like in terms of being able to transfer credits and all the rest of the stuff that happen at sort of the speed of the game but there's some things like team communication that – as much as I would like it to be realistic and you really can't talk in real time to someone in another star system – we kind of acknowledge that we can't really stop that because people can have Teamspeak or Skype open while they're playing the game and talking to all of their organization mates. So, some elements of the game will take a slight departure of the absolute 100% full immersion and probably that will be... people running around. I guess everyone that is a player character is just in a hurry basically.
The Constellation Aquila came with sort of a rover exploration buggy and I think we can show you a nice little piece of concept art so check THIS out.And we will probably do other forms of transportation down on the ground. It's sort of early days yet so we are still working on some stuff. I don't really want to talk about it just yet, we got a lot of stuff we still gotta finish and show but we do have some stuff that's in R&D that long term people will be excited by and I think will enable some more sort of ground-based stuff. So i'll just leave it with that and i'm sure there will be lots of speculation. Longer term we are going to have some pretty cool stuff.
Well, we're working on, now, the Xi'An Scout, so that'll be something down the road here that we're aiming to get to you this year. And then, the Banu Merchantman is going to go into production after that, there's probably going to be some cases, longer term, that there can potentially be more Xi'An or Banu ships. We don't have them on the horizon right now but those would be the ones we would do. We probably wouldn't do the Vanduul ones because humanity is at war with the Vanduul, but can definitely see Xi'An and Banu ships in our Persistent Universe, so that would be sort of long term, but we have quite a few to finish up right now. We still have several concepts that we owe, we have the Endeavor, the sort of science ship, we have the Crucible which is a repair ship, both of which are coming along and looking very cool. We'll be sharing those in the near future and the Prowler, that's a boarding ship, I think it's Esperia but if not it would be Drake, but I think it's the Esperia Prowler and you know that's a boarding ship and we have to start working on the concept. One other one that we are working on that I think will be something that you guys will like, and we'll be sharing that at CitizenCon because that's more military themed. It's one that I'm excited by and it's looking pretty cool too. So, there will be stuff, but right now, no exact plans or dates, but I'd say probably next year once we've got past the backlog of ships. We're always looking to add new cool ships to flesh out the universe and make it feel alive and breathable.
Well, I'm sure we'll sneak some stuff in there. I haven't had an opportunity to do – I normally when I direct games I do a little cameo thing for the fun of it. If you go back and look at Wing Commander 3 or 4 you can spot where I was in those. So, we'll definitely – I'm going to do that in Squadron 42 and we'll probably put a few little things in for the fun of it. So, the answer is yes!