10 For the Chairman Episode 30. July 21st, 2014

So that's actually a pretty cool idea. I mean I don't think we were necessarily planning on players actually contributing to the Synthworld project, because it was this thing that was built and then abandoned because they ran out of money, but one of the big things we want to do is have a lot of player generated initiatives. I know there's already the "Operation Pitchfork" that's going on, and so on some levels even though we were gonna have Vanduul raiders and Vanduul areas of space that was part of our plan in the universe to place where you have engagements, we may actually put some content in that allows people to sort of go and "fight the good fight" so to speak. And I think the Synthworld could be something along those lines too, so we will take that into consideration, because we're definitely looking for big-picture things that organisations can contribute to. So we have lots of different things you can do in the game, so either you can just do your solo stuff running around, or you and small groups, or there's gotta be sort of bigger objectives for larger groups of people. That's a pretty cool idea, so uhh, we'll think about it! That's something to definitely throw into the Persistent Universe pot, so to speak.

Well, we do shed a fair amount of light on the ship building process, especially in Jump Point, which I'm assuming that you would read because you're a subscriber asking a question. But, I mean, to be less flippant about it, there's a huge amount of work that goes into building the ships, so to actually give you a good example, like if everyone has watched The Next Great Starship, and you saw how the gunship that won, that was essentially about a 5-month process from design to building it. And even that ship, that may have looked great in the final of The Next Great Starship, requires a couple more months of work to actually get it in the hangar, and then it would be more work beyond that to get it into spaceflight.Because beyond just building the ship in 3D and modelling and texturing it, and getting it basically into the engine - it has to be setup in a certain technical way for the engine, so the hierarchy of the sub-objects of the ship... animations have to be hooked up - they have to be hooked up to your default character's animations so when you go in you sit into the seats, you go through doorways, and do all that. So there's a huge amount of technical setup that comes with that. I would say that our ships take, probably from concept to final, the quickest we could probably do is something like 3 months, and some will take 6 months or longer - the bigger ships definitely. We still haven't finished the Idris corvette - we've been working on that for quite a while. That one is taking maybe a bit longer than it would normally take because we're using it as our first cap ship prototype, and so we've been going through several rounds of R&D, and quite how we're going to organize, how we're going to lay out the interiors. As you notice as part of the updates on, say the Idris corvette, once we've gone into laying out the interior, and moving it around, and figuring out how all of it will function for what we need on Squadron 42, we determined that we needed more room and space, and the ship itself grew. So there's a fair amount of iterative development that goes on the ships once you get it in. It's sort of like, "oh, well this bit doesn't work. We have to change that," but it's by far the most complex thing that we build in all of the game. You can see it in the level of complexity and detail, animations, that you get into the ships.So that's sort of a high-level answer of why it takes so long, but believe me we're not holding back from putting them in the hangars if we can. We're trying to get them there as quickly as possible. There' just sooo many different items, and I would think that probably, maybe in a future "Inside CIG" or a Jump Point, we'll go into detail. We'll actually show you our multi steps of how ships are built from the concept, to the modelling, and all the rest of it. Because there's a lot more steps than was even shown on The Next Great Starship, and you'll see the love and passion that comes into them. So I know they're taking a while, but they'll worth it when they get there!

Ok, so I assume that question is about what kind of applications or interfaces we're looking to allow, for people to manage the logistics of their organisation. The answer is we're going to do a fair amount. We're going to do a lot on our Roberts Space Industries site - so we already have the very beginning of the organization stuff, but that's going to expand as game features come online in the Persistent Universe, in terms of managing the assets of the organization, the finances of it, being able to assign jobs or tasks to people, and we'll let you see a lot of that on the website.We're also planning on building some mobile apps, or you know, tablet apps, that will also allow you to do that and interface and manage the logistics, or check in on who's accepted missions, what missions are out there, what the current news it in the universe... So we're definitely going to have a fairly big suite of that. Obviously it's not going to be the stuff that's like... that won't be before the stuff that's actually happening in the Persistent Universe, but we do some of that in parallel, so Turbulent who do all our web stuff and do great stuff - they're building the organization system and then we're also going to be replicating that inside the Persistent Universe. So that's sort of lock-step there, and then at some point once we've got enough of a suite of that then we'll drop that down into specific applications that will be working on things like tablets and phones and stuff.The idea is that even if you're not sitting at a desktop, you'll be able to plug into the universe and sort of see what's happening, or maybe set up a mission for later, or manage some resources, or get notifications of stuff that's happening so when you get back onto your desktop (or powerful laptop) you'll be ready and prepared.

There will definitely be a fair number of cities and space stations, but we're gonna also have some areas that you land that aren't necessarily a big city. Potentially you can go a planet and there's nothing on it but there's, you know, an ancient ruin site, and that would be a landing area by itself. You could explore around that and it would have some ancient ruins and maybe you'd go down into some catacombs. There'll be occasionally out in space, a deserted alien ship, or a derelict wreck, or something that you could potentially explore, and longer-term we're sort of talking about more explorer mechanic stuff. So not short-term, but the longer-term -so this isn't gonna be v1.0 - but one of our long-term procedural goals is to be able to generate areas on new planets that maybe, once someone has found a jump point and going to a new system, then there would be areas that we would spawn that would allow people that are more explorer-inclined to go down and actually explore, and find and discover some stuff. And try not to be, sort of... you know, try and have some interest, and some cool stuff down there.So that's our sort of longer-term plan. So yeah, our goal is to try and create a variety of different landing environments, so it feels like there's a big, huge galaxy out there that you're exploring. Obviously we can't flesh it out to that level of detail that we're doing on our ships on every single centimeter, but if we have enough different locations that you go to that have different enough flavors, I think it will really give you this sense of a big, living, open universe.

Two questions there. I don't think the characters are going to become more resistant to g-forces over time, because we're not really going with the sense of stats or experience for a character, because when you're playing your avatar it's really you and it's really about your experience, and what you're doing. But having said that there will definitely be different equipment; g-suits, and that kind of stuff that you could buy or upgrade that would potentially increase your g-force limitation. So there's gonna be two levels - one which is the level you'll black out, and two, at a certain point there will be some stuff that ships can't handle because the space frame can't take that much force. So that would be an outer limit where, you know, the cliche version is you turn too fast and rip a wing off - that would be like a World War I example in an old biplane. But we're definitely gonna have some stuff, if you overloaded thrusters on a ship, and in a certain direction or whatever, it could potentially not be as strong as another direction and you could risk hurting your space frame. And then obviously you having a better g-suit could potentially allow you to ride the g's better than you could on the default. So there you go.