10 For the Chairman Episode 21. May 19th, 2014

Basically there's a full gravity system already in the CryEngine, and we've been enhancing it.You could set the gravity to Earth-like gravity, -9.8 m/s2, or you could set it to -1 or whatever you want to do, or 0 which is what is in space. There definitely could potentially be the ability to have gravity in between full Earth-like and zero-g, and we have things like magnetic boots that will allow you to lock down to floors when there's low gravity or zero gravity.So I guess the only question I would say is "walking with a heavier tread or a spring in your step." It would probably require different animation sets because really the actual gait is controlled by the animation. I don't know it depends on whether we're actually planning to have some low-g or heavy-g environments and then potentially we'd probably change out the animation set.But generally the physics of everything is supported, it's just the footstep bit that is more animation driven.

Yes, we're absolutely focused on having things that are not...Combat's obviously a large part, but we want experiences that are non-combat oriented so exploration experiences, flying into a dangerous nebula that could take down your radar or make your electronics a bit glitchy.In fact, in Squadron 42, the opening mission's around the Shubin mining base, which we've already shown, and there's a center to the asteroid base that's almost, think of it like the Bermuda Triangle, where all communications and stuff doesn't really work in there, your nav stuff doesn't work so you've got to manually navigate.We're actually looking at doing a fair amount of environmental situations and stuff that could be hazardous to your flight or dangerous. The same kind of stuff happens if you're trying to navigate a jump point. There will definitely be a whole bunch of stuff that is non-combat oriented. There'll be that and we want you to have to, maybe some of your equipment breaks down and you're flying and you have to go fix it up. The classic sci-fi scenes you've seen where Scotty's trying to make the engines work on the Enterprise.So yeah, we are focused on that. That will be part of some of the stuff that we do on the capital ship stuff that the Foundry 42 team is working on. They're gonna bring some of that, but environmental effects on your ship are definitely a core part of what we want to do to make the universe feel big and alive and rich.

Yeah, we actually want to figure out a way to get user generated content into the game. In the Persistent Universe, we have to curate it, because we don't want everybody just designing and building their own crazy, wild ships with unbalanced loadouts and all the rest of the stuff.But that was actually one of the core, driving factors of The Next Great Starship which is the competition we're running. The level of quality in that is pretty astounding, to be honest with you. It's... I'm actually not enjoying the final stages because I like so many of the ships and I think all the teams are so talented that it kind of sucks that there's only gonna be one winner.So there may be a way we'll try to find to get more of those ships into the game, but I definitely think there should be some way that we can have where people could potentially design ships or even items, maybe to specs that we publish and we say "we need this" kind of like the US government says "We need a new aircraft, well let's put it out to bid" and they put it out, then Boeing and Lockheed, and, well they used to compete, I guess they're all the same now. But they do their designs, and get them in, and the winning bid goes on to manufacturing stuff.Potentially I think definitely that, in terms of actually manufacturing it in the universe, I like the idea that you have to go and get the raw resources to make the stuff or make sure you're sourcing the CPU components from another factory. Potentially we'll allow you to acquire, say you've got a ship factory, then maybe you can acquire a license to manufacture a certain kind of ship, and then you could be the local provider of that ship. Or an NPC manufacturing center would be. So they're kind of split.I guess it's the difference between people doing user generated stuff and then actually stuff that you sell in game. But they're both things that we're looking at, and we long term want to put in the game, whether it be from the very beginning or not, that's another question. There's a lot of things or us to do, but that's definitely a long term thing.I think the community providing a lot of the content, both in terms of adventure and action, and also things in general is super good for the life of the game. That's one of the reasons why people still play Freelancer today even though it came out over 10 years ago. It's because of the modding side, and that's why we're supporting modding. So we are gonna find a way to do that, we're just gonna have to juggle it a bit, and of course on your own, if you're modding your own stuff to play around your own version of the universe, then you can do whatever you want.

That's a really good question.I actually wasn't thinking about a manual for the Dogfighting Module, but now you've just given me ideas of... Claw marks on the old Wing Commander. So maybe we could mark-up a little PDF from each one of the manufacturers done up as a Hornet manual or Aurora manual.I'm not promising that, but I may after this recording session, go out and have a discussion of how easy it would be to do that.But, outside of that, the general control functions across the ships will be more or less the same. So the interface and how you fly it with a joystick or a gamepad or a mouse or a keyboard will all be fairly consistent. It's just that some of the ships will have more functionality than other ships. So you just won't have as much on a more basic ship than on a more advanced ship.In general, the control functions operate more or less the same especially on the fighters. The IFCS, all that stuff, is similar. The difference is the ships themselves will handle differently depending on the thruster power, depending on their mass, depending on the placement of thrusters, depending on the energy drain, which is affected also by the weapon usage, all that kind of stuff.

All right, thank you very much for that. No, the Planet Side Module is essentially, we'll be opening up a bunch of the interactions that would happen down on the planet to everyone in the community to play with.The idea is, when you're in your hangar, there's a door in all the hangars to the outside world, you can go through that door, you would step out, and you would be in a planet side environment. We may debut with just one, or we may debut with a couple, and you can wander around in the environment, there would be shops where you could buy stuff. You could go to a bar where you could talk to people and ultimately in the game that's where you would look for missions or meet other players in the bar.The idea of the Planet Side Module is to test out and work on the functionality of all that which would happen once you land from space. So you will definitely have the ability to wander around and have some in depth interactions and do all that. Then as we go along, we would be adding more functionality and action to it, and then as the Persistent Universe is rolling out, there will be more areas to explore.The planet side stuff is one of our biggest tasks because there's a lot of them. We've got something like 450 different landing locations right now that we're talking about, and then you've got to build all the environments and the contents. So we're really working pretty hard on how to do that in a way that matches up to our quality of fidelity, but won't take 400 years to build.I think we've got a pretty good solution that uses a combination of unique stuff, some more modular stuff, and we are longer term researching some kind of procedural stuff to help build out and flesh out some environments based on criteria the economy system feeds in. And the Planet Side Module will all be testing grounds for that. Eventually it will just roll into the Persistent Universe.Think of the hangar as the hub, the hangar will get you to the dogfight, it will get you to the planet side, and then ultimately, it will get you into the Persistent Universe.

Well we're definitely planning on having a in-fiction news show that you would see in bars and stuff, and we would let players watch it from the RSI website. And that's actually part of the post launch content plan in terms of, we would actually have people whose job would be to watch the game and see what events were happening, make sure that we capture in-game footage of some of the events, and make news reports from around the world.So if two big organizations get into a battle over an asteroid base, that potentially could make front line news. And that's part of the idea of trying to put in news that we're constructing for the universe, you know, there's a famine in this sector, or whatever as well as player actions and blend it all into one, into our world, so it feels like the players are just as much part of the world as all our designed NPCs, and they feel like their actions have consequence.Personally, that's what I want in a game, I think that would greatly increase the immersion into this world. We're planning on that, and it will be really great I think when it happens.So I'm excited by that, and then the possibility of player run broadcasts, I wasn't thinking about this, but I think it's actually a really good idea, and it's probably pretty easy for us to provide channels, just like you can on internet radio. We probably could have our channels, just like you can in GTA, you can listen to different channels as you wander around, and then maybe we have some player channels that people can have their own streams on, and then you can tell people, and you could tune into it.That could be pretty cool. I like that idea, so I will see what we can do about that. I'm not promising, again, that it's gonna be in right away, but I think that's a very, very cool idea.

We were thinking of making the general areas, like asteroids and stuff, pretty close to finite, so there would be a lot of minerals there, but if you mine out a whole asteroid field, then it gets mined out.Potentially we would play with some level of regeneration, I don't know, it's kind of a balancing issue. But in general, we want it to have finite pools. So if someone gets to an asteroid field and it's got a really rich seam of minerals that are very valuable, they are a limited quantity, so people would mine them out, then maybe they would have to go off to find some other field or yield for that.So that's kind of the plan. The regeneration question's really just about, we're gonna be adding new systems, so there will be new places for people to find and explore, and obviously new minerals to harvest, so that probably should handle it, but if we run into a problem where everything's mined out right away and we've got nothing to mine, then of course we'd probably start regenerating some elements of it. But I'm hoping we can balance it.One of our goals is to actually run this full economy simulation or universe simulation with no players, with meta-AI that we've talked about, and with all these big macro elements like "Here's an asteroid field and it has this kind of minerals," "Here's a planet that produces this sort of stuff," and then just see how that works, runs, progresses. I will say that it won't be... Mining out an asteroid will not be something someone can do in an hour, it will take a long time and a lot of concerted effort from other people.