10 For the Chairman Episode 23. June 2nd, 2014

Well there already is, there are a whole bunch of different systems that run on the Intelligent Flight Control System which allow you to... We have something that we call "Nanny Mode" internally here, I think we'll call it G-Safe or something, where the flight control system will ensure that when you start to pull to many g's, it will back off on your velocity, so your turn rate will still be high, but your actual rate of speed will slow down so you don't pull to many g's.Then we've got a couple of the other modes which we have. Com-stab which we talked which is control stabilization, which is a little like traction control in space.They're all there, so it's up to you as a racer. If you put the safety modes on, you won't be able to push the edges as much, so I would expect that the harder core racers would really push the edge, maybe turn com-stab off and the g-safe off, then really push it and try to ride the edge of not quite blacking out, and also sliding around things.Like if you ever see a real professional racer on a road course, they're always using drift and everything as they're coming around turns. We're definitely gonna have that in out racing in space, and you can see that we did a video update a couple of weeks ago that showed some of the different modes and the drift, so I think that will actually be quite fun for racing, and make it cool.

I don't know about planet side to space, but there will definitely be the equivalent missions that will be ship-board to space.There'll be cases where you want to take over another ship and you'll have some friends out there in fighters, and they've got to clear out the enemy fighter cover then take out the AA guns which would be defending the bigger ship, then the other friends can go in on a boarding ship, breach the hull, and go in and start doing first person combat once the space has been secured.So that's a combined arms mission where you've got people sort of on the ground, but in this case on the ground is boarding it to take over, and people up in the air are doing air cover and suppression of the defense systems of the ship that you're going after.So that would be cool, but planet side I'm not so sure about because that's not necessarily going to be concurrent in an instance. You don't have an instance that runs at the same time as planet side in space.You never know what we may do in the future, currently that wouldn't be part of the plan, but it is a cool idea.

I think our opinion on it would be all to do with whether you are trying to cheat or circumvent the game.Anything that you're doing to give you an advantage against other players is unfair because you've modified the code, or anything like that, would definitely be a bannable offense, but if you just did something cosmetic that would only be clan side and it had no effect on the Persistent Universe, the gameplay, or anything like that, if we found it we probably would say ok, that's fine. It's really just what you're doing, what your intent is.Having said, that, we're also hoping or planning, we're working on the tech right now, to have some of the stuff like... to be able to change your look and view with various morphs and all the rest of the stuff. So I guess the answer would all depend on the situation and the use of the mod.

Ok, good question, and that does actually fall into what I was talking about with the morphs and that stuff with CinderZ's question. Specifically with the Warhorse stuff, they've got some very nice tech for how all their NPCs wear different outfits and clothes.They've got pre-computed morph stuff that takes the shirt and fits it to the body, then the chest plate if they have armor goes on top of that.So we're looking at using that to make our character modification pipeline smoother.I think we've talked to them, we've got some enhancements to the attachment system in CryEngine, which is a bit technical, but that's how you attach different things to a character or a body.We have a much more extendable and robust system than the default CryEngine, so we've talked about getting that, and then we're doing some information and idea swapping on AI, which is also really impressive with the Warhorse guys.We've been pretty busy with dogfighting, so this hasn't moved as quickly as I would have liked, because we had to sort out the legal documents to make sure we were protecting each other's IP, but we're ready to do that, and so we're in fact in meetings and talking about that stuff right now with Warhorse, I'll be going to one a little later on today.

That's a good question, the concept with Arena Commander is actually allowing us to balance these ships to a certain level.We're not expecting that every one of the ships is gonna be exactly equal, although we're gonna try and give them all their own quirks for Arena Commander.For instance, a good illustration is the Hornet, which is probably the most expensive and heavily armed of the ships that you can fly in the Dogfighting Module. It's a big weapons platform, it's strong, it takes a lot of damage.Comparatively to a 300i, the 300i is going to feel a little lighter, a little nimbler, maybe a little more maneuverable even, because it's not such a heavily armored weapons platform, but it can't take as much damage and can't dish out quite as much in its max stuff.So I think in some cases that will be just a personal play choice. We're gonna try and use Arena Commander to balance for the Persistent Universe. Obviously the Persistent Universe has a lot more issues, but the base balancing in terms of this weapon against that weapon and this ship against that ship will be kind of in Arena Commander.And don't forget, we handicap the ships, right, if you take out a Hornet with an Aurora, you're gonna get a lot more points than if you take out an Aurora with a Hornet basically. Think about it like golf, they handicap golf. So we're gonna try and use Arena Commander to help balance the PU or at least be the starting discussion for that.One last thing I'll say is, in Arena Commander, there are the loadouts for the base ships are a default dogfight loadout that we've got right now. Later in the process, v1.1 onwards, we're gonna allow you to customize your loadouts and put different weapons on, and I think that will be fun, it will be interesting to see what people use and then we can be tweaking the different weapons for different effects, and that's the whole point of having you guys do it, I think we'll get a really great sense of balancing and what's fun.