10 For the Chairman Episode 27. June 30th, 2014

Yeah, the short answer is yes.We're actually working on the whole racing aspect right now, that will be another part of the space flight, Arena Commander, where you will get to fly and race and have time trial stuff which I think will be pretty cool.We're also gonna allow the tuning, which we've talked about before, how you can overclock your different equipment, whether it's guns or thrusters or stuff like that. I think we've had an engine tuning kit as one of our recent stretch goals we just hit, so yeah. That's all, long term, meant to be part of the game, and we're actually gonna try and get some of that in earlier.One of the big goals for me anyway is to try and get more of the items, various equipment that you can use, along with more of the base ships, out there for people to fly around in. Especially when the multiplayer combat happens, and also when we have the racing part of Arena Commander, because then it will really allow people to understand the tradeoffs and balances that you get with your items and equipment and balancing your energy, and weight and all the rest of the stuff. Which is all there, it's all in the system, but you don't really appreciate it right now because it's one default set of equipment on the three dogfighting ships that you use.And actually some of the items weren't set up. The 300i currently, though that will be fixed, has way too much power in its power plant, so it's always got way more power than all the items can use, which doesn't make sense. I would say that's something left over from when people were testing stuff and they wanted to check all the things were working and it never got fixed.So that will get fixed, that's why we're doing the early testing. Anyway, I think that will be fun, and I'm hoping people will actually have a cool sort of mini-game tweaking things, and also balancing things on the fly.

That's a great question, we are definitely planning on having lore building, universe building things out there. So derelict ships, alien artifacts, all that kind of stuff.I think in some cases... There will be persistence with this stuff, so there'll be a limited amount of items. Maybe there will only be 1 of one thing, and maybe there'll be 10 of another thing, but there will definitely be these sort of things that we'll pepper around.Essentially, everybody won't have the "Ark of Truth" themselves if you know that I mean. We'll try to make it so there's a certain amount of artifacts and stuff that you can discover and use, and some will be unique, then some will not be one off, but they'll be a one of a set kind of thing. I think it should be pretty cool.We're gonna definitely try and have this sort of stuff for the salvage and the explorer gameplay mechanic down the road.

That's a good question, I'm not sure that we're gonna be salvaging wings and parts off other ships. I mean essentially if your ship is damaged, you'll bring it down to the repair shop on a planet, and then it will cost so much money to repair it.I think we discussed to a certain level that there potentially would be a case where you could take a loan out to fix things or do stuff on your ship if you don't have enough money for it, and then at some point you wouldn't be able to get any more, and if you still don't pay that off, people come after you to get it from you. Then at that point, you may not be able to fly your ship, but perhaps you can take a job being a pilot for someone else, or doing some mundane job for someone else to earn enough money to go and fix you ship, which is kind of what you would do in the real world.So that's our thinking as far as that goes.

Well that's a good question. I think that we want to balance between all this sort of stuff. So for instance on the missions, your mobiGlas will probably be your primary interface to do what we call a mission brokerage system.It's a little like a Craig's List or so, if you're in the US, I think they have Craig's List in other parts of the world too, which would list various jobs you can take and all the rest of the stuff, and that would be your mobiGlas, and that would be sent out over the spectrum in our universe.But then there will also be some missions that won't be available over that setup. You would potentially have to go to a bar or down a dark alley to get some more dubious or different missions, and that would be a reason to go and visit a bar.We sort of mix it up, so some stuff you have to go visit the place, forcing you to get out and go into a place where maybe you're not so comfortable, and some of the stuff can be done just like it is in the real world, online.That's kind of the approach. Cargo in general, most of it would be loaded and unloaded when you're off doing other stuff, I think in some cases we've been discussing points where maybe you have to oversee or supervise some of the stuff in case there's a PvE encounter.Like a scenario could be you're on a sketchy planet and you're unloading some stuff and a couple people are trying to mug you and you have to fight them off. That's all things that we're playing around with. But again, a fair number of it, you would go back and you would see the cargo going in or out, and things happening without you having to personally load it all up yourself.Although maybe there'll be some places where you're the only person who could load it or unload it. I guess it would depend on the location or the planet Like if you're in space and you're dumping cargo or you're putting cargo in that you've just "salvaged" let's say, off a "wreck," then you will have to actually get out of your ship and make sure that it actually gets into your cargo, or you'll have to have a tractor beam that can pull it in to your cargo hold.I hope that answers the question about the balance. We don't want to make it too tedious, but we do want it to feel like you actually have to do some stuff, so we strike a balance between both ways.

That's a good question. We haven't really been able to do a huge amount of testing between someone flying in Oculus Rift and someone not flying in Oculus Rift. We have sets in all the offices, but the Oculus Rift resolution, even on the high HD set isn't actually that great at the moment, so you are sort of handicapped with the resolution of the stuff comparatively to someone who's playing on a big monitor.But I will say, in the UK, one of our designers is a huge VR fan, so he plays with the Oculus Rift all the time against other people, and he's not the top guy. Now that may be, he may not be very good at flying, or the Oculus Rift may not be giving him an overwhelming advantage.Generally, the nice thing with the Oculus Rift is it frees your head look and you can look around, track targets, and also when you have guns that gimbal, then obviously they'll track to that. But don't forget, the gimbaling of the guns is only as fast as the guns will move and that's not instant.So far, it's not like anyone has put on Oculus Rift and completely dominated everyone else. It's generally been much more down to pilot skill, but I do think that the Oculus Rift gives you more immersion, and potentially could perhaps give two equal pilots an advantage. But we haven't gotten far enough in to have been able to balance all that properly.

I don't have a great answer for that because we still haven't really decided on whether you can actually own a planet or a land or a portion of land.You can definitely navigate a jump point, get to name it, get to name the system, and potentially, if there were an area like a derelict asteroid base, you could land on that and control it or claim it for yourself, but I'm not sure that we're currently gonna let people land on a barren planet and say "This is ChrisWorld" or something like that.So we do want to have a certain level of player controlled terrain, but right now that's kind of limited to the space station / asteroid bases, the stuff that you can find in space or big capital ships.But longer term, we are thinking about are there ways to do that on some land. I think that ultimately will get into the game, I'm not sure it will be in there in v1, if that makes sense.

That is a great suggestion, it's also something we're actually doing.I mean we did for the Aurora, in case you don't remember, the 2943 Aurora was the first Aurora that you backed for, then we launched the brochure last year which was the updated 2944, introducing the Legionnaire variant.We definitely plan to upgrade and change the ships as we go along.In fact if you actually take a look at the Hornet at the very beginning and the Hornet in the hangar that was released in August and look at the Hornet that you have now in dogfighting, they're fairly different. The Hornet has gone through quite a lot of changes, it looks a lot better, it has moved to PBR, it has higher res textures, more geometry added to it, and the same is also happening to the 300i, it has had a significant upgrade.And I think that we will be sort of following the car model where we will be occasionally upgrading the ships and also upgrading their performance and changing around the stuff, because I think it would be very cool to make it like cars where models change out and you can have a collector's edition or something like 1965 corvette was a classic and I love touring around in it.So yeah, I think that's very much in the spirit, and it's definitely something we're doing, so great question Traveling Matt.