Calling All Devs - Pipeline Delivery

Yes, just like reality, we want that to be a thing, but unlike reality, the chance of that happening is going to be incredibly small, like thousandths of a percent chance of that happening. It just simply needs to be there for that value to get bigger over time. Even if something started at zero percent, it's going to start ticking up as soon as you start using it. So there's always going to be a chance. It's going to be incredibly tiny. And if that incredibly tiny chance is still too much, then we'll adjust that. A lemon straight out of the box is not fun, but we want there to be that very small chance that occasionally happens realistically. Overpowering, overclocking, overheating your items is where those failures are going to come in reliably.

At the same time, you want that one in a, I'm using the phrase one in a million, that's not the actual ratio. We're still figuring that out and setting that stuff. But you want that infinitesimal chance for something to just go catastrophically wrong, like the best laid plans being undone by a component that will fail you. So yes, I think you said it very clearly. That's not something we anticipate happening a whole lot. Now, we say that and it will happen three times to me in a month because that's just the way my luck runs.

Yeah, it depends on the item you buy as well. If you go cheap and buy cheap items, that tiny percentage is a higher percentage than if you had spent much more money on something.

I'd be interested to find out how they worked that time scale out, because from the last time I looked at the schedule it is a significantly shorter time frame than that. It's not seven years' worth of stuff, even factoring in all the known future ships. It's nowhere near that. This year gives the idea that it's sort of slowed down. It's because we've had a lot of big ships going on in the background. There's only so many people, and when you put a lot of them on one big ship, there is a big lull in releases. So I think this year is probably one of the most productive years, certainly for a while. We're making a good effort to try and tackle those long-standing ships that have been kicking around that haven't had the love. They're moved up. Everything has priorities. The priorities change depending on the needs of the project at the time. So we had a big push this year for getting stuff for Squadron needs, which is why a lot of things like the Hammerhead fill up the schedule. And every ship is different in its scheduling. So whilst we do have blocks of X months for this size ship, X months for this size ship, within that, those can grow or shrink depending on: can it reuse a lot of assets from another ship, like the Hammerhead? So the Hammerhead, if it was a brand new ship, it would be this long, but because it's reusing a lot of the Idris stuff with material changes, it goes... if you put an extra artist on it, it goes... So you can't use the same thing across the board for them all.

The exponential growth is a thing that applies to all video game development, and it's the hardest thing to quantify and to demonstrate in those early days: every ship you build makes the next ship just that much faster and faster. So the progress compounds and your ability to turn these things around faster increases over time. Not just as our artists learn more and more about how to build these one-to-one spaceships to the scale and level of fidelity that we need here, but as our pool of shareable, reusable resources improves and we can start, for lack of a better term, kit-bashing these ships together. So while we're not going to sit here and put in a specific year or a date, guys, come on, who are you talking to? I'm not going to sit there and say, oh, the ships will be done by this point. And of course, we are still continuing to add new ships to the pipeline through our concept promotions. I think we're going to do a little bit better than 2025. We'll leave it at that.

Just a little bit.

Okay, so short answer is they'll be banked for future use. Long answer is, well, we've got two different types of magazines. We've got magazines for ballistic weapons and we've got magazines for energy weapons. So obviously those two are going to work differently, because we have typical ballistic ammo that you're putting into your magazines yourself, and you've also got the batteries, which are powering your energy weapons. So ballistic weapon-wise, yes, it'll be banked for later use. If you finish shooting and you have 21 bullets in your magazine, and you've got magazines with more on your person, you'll swap out as you do now, and that magazine will still have the 21 bullets inside it. They're not going anywhere. They're going to stay exactly where they are. Something that we don't have at the moment is a way to manage your ammunition. So currently there's nothing you can do about that. You might end up in a situation where you've got two magazines left with one bullet in, and you think you've got two magazines remaining, and you pull one out and you've basically got nothing to use in there. It's just like bang, click, click, click. You're kind of done. Down the line, we'd want to add a way for you to quickly strip the ammunition out of your remaining magazines and condense them down as best you can into the magazines that you've got. So if you've got a couple of half-full magazines, you can completely fill one of them and either get rid of the empty magazine you've got or save it for refilling later.

A QuickTime minigame where you pull bullets out of one magazine.

No. Don't know what the implementation's going to be yet, but people might get a bit sick of a minigame if they've got to do it every time they want to strip their magazine. And then energy magazines work a bit differently. Obviously, you can't really strip power out of one magazine and put it into another one. That'd be a little bit odd. But down the line, it's very similar to ships, I think we've talked about this before, we do want your suit to be powered. So when these magazines are placed on your suit, we would like them to very, very slowly start to recharge, which makes energy weapons a bit more versatile. There should be some other down points there, but they're kind of built for longevity in the field. But don't expect to go into a firefight, reload, put your empty mag on your suit, empty the other one, and that one to be ready. It might have only regenerated a couple of shots' worth in there. But those should be rechargeable and there'll be no stripping between those. But the ammunition on both should be banked for later use. It's not going to go missing.

In a certain way, yes. So short answer, yes, we can do it. The problem lies with making it look good. So right now, it depends on how steep it is. If it's very steep, then you will see a lot of stretching, because we're using a height map to offset the terrain up and down. It's basically pushing the triangles up and down. And if it's a very steep up or down, then it only has a few triangles to cover that space and it will stretch it out. You might have seen this before in other games or in some of our areas where we've gone a bit too bold: the textures will stretch out. And we need to find a way to cover that up. Ideally, we would add more assets in that area or dynamically increase the resolution of those steeper areas. But this is stuff that might come down in the future.

So that's not any limitation on the actual height, or whatever the inverse of height is?

No, from a tech point of view, there's already very high mountains and very deep areas. But the issue comes when you get this drop or you look down, like, whoa. Making that look good, that's still a challenge.