Calling All Devs - Persistence, Snub Craft and Landing Systems
Developers discuss docked ships keeping functions like drone control and shooting, with scanning likely impaired inside capital ships. They cover returning landing-assist aids, planet marker clutter, a client crash recovery system for persistence, and separate development of ships and their rovers.
So yes, depending on what exactly it does. I'm not going to say yes to everything. But for the examples there, controlling drones, there's nothing that's going to stop you there. Shooting out the door, nothing going to stop you there. In the instance of, say, a scanning ship that is docked inside a capital ship, that's probably not going to work as well as it would if it was out in open space because naturally it's inside a great big hulking lump of metal. So yes, within reason.
I imagine even if it does work during the first implementation, the early implementation, that does seem like something in a diegetic universe you'd want to impair somehow.
TL;DRThe developers want to bring back the assisted landing display that was lost in the cockpit UI conversion, hopefully, but are wary of external cameras because render-to-texture screens cost performance.
So for the people that remember pre-3.0, we actually had on the 3D radar, when you went into landing mode, you had sort of an assisted landing. That's something we're going to be looking to bring back. It was simply when the conversion to Item 2.0 happened and all the cockpits got changed from their old UI system to render to texture, that was just something that just didn't fit on the schedule at the time. So that's hopefully going to come back. External cameras, it's interesting. The graphics guys are sort of always pointing a gun to our head over render to texture on screens saying, please don't do stuff like this. So I don't want to do anything down that line. But it is an often talked about point.
Yes, obviously everything has a performance cost and the choice is one more camera or getting another player in your close field. We're always going to choose to have another player, of course.
TL;DRThe developers know that all location markers show when near a planet, are pursuing a not-yet-finalised fix such as a hierarchy of what is shown, and say it won't specifically be turning them orange.
Not to my knowledge they're not supposed to be changing a different color, but we do have a fun issue of where when you get into the planet we tend to show everything. And that's just an unfortunate side effect. We do have some plans to alleviate that with some sort of hierarchy of what should be shown when and where. Can't get too much into detail on that because the design is still getting fleshed out on that. But I know I saw, I think it was on Reddit, they're talking about some kind of planetary grid to show different points. And it's kind of a similar thing, but as we get closer, we'll show you more of what that is. As for what the color is, yeah, I think the community is trying to add a little backdoor suggestion.
Yeah, I think it's very safe to say we're aware. We're aware that when you approach a planet or when you're in the vicinity of a planet that all the points are showing up and it's very difficult to tell which ones are actually on the side that you're facing, which ones are on the other side. We're aware of that. I've talked to a couple people, not just you. We do have a couple ideas that we're pursuing. Basically, it's like an American Gladiators game. We throw a couple ideas into the pot and they all fight each other, and the one that we think will work best is the one that we pursue. You will hear more about this almost certainly in an ATV segment, either in a project update or a studio update segment on ATV when we have more. But we are aware of it. We have plans to work on it. We are pursuing a solution. It's just not specifically turning them orange. Although we say this now and six months from now, if they do turn orange, we could be like, hey, that was a good idea. Good job, person.
TL;DRA client crash recovery system that tracks ships better mid-flight is in PTU testing and should be in the next patch, may not be perfect at first, and will keep being iterated on.
I would say there's a couple of things there. Persistence is a really broad thing and so persistence has been in the game for some time and with 3.0 and 3.1 we've greatly increased the amount of features that are persistent. Ship persistence is something that is also greatly increasing its persistence, but I think here this question is really getting at persistence kind of mid-flight, and so what we've been working on is something called a client crash recovery system, to try to address the problems that happen when you've crashed or suddenly disconnected mid travel. So usually we have some kind of persistent saving that happens at key points during gameplay. So that'll be, for instance, whenever you land somewhere or sell cargo or claim insurance, things like that. But if you're just flying, previously we weren't really tracking the ship accurately. But with this new system, we're going to be doing that better. At the moment, the latest changes to that are in PTU testing right now and should be out in the 3.1.2 patch. And so hopefully that should help address a lot of these concerns.
We've spoken a little bit of this. This also relates to the insurance expediting fee. These two things were supposed to work hand in hand. And it got pushed from 3.1. It, unfortunately, didn't make the cut in time, and that caused a number of issues. I don't think I would have to tell the community. But it is in 3.1.2. It is in testing right now on the PTU, so hopefully that will be out into everybody's hands, maybe even by the time you see this episode.
And again, with everything, this is a hard problem, so maybe it doesn't work 100% this time or not, but the changes that we've made most recently to try to address this issue will be going in.
TL;DRRovers go through the same pipeline as other ships but are developed separately from their parent ships, and they are not on the roadmap because they aren't slated for development this year.
Well, they're not a separate pipeline. All ships and vehicles go through the same pipeline. But they are indeed separate vehicles. When we provide opportunities to pledge for these ships through a promotion program, you can pledge for the Phoenix and the Lynx. You can pledge for the Carrack and the Pisces. You can pledge for the Andromeda and the Merlin. But as far as our development, they are separate ships. Just like when you go to the ASOP terminal, you can spawn them as separate items. So they are developed separately. They are not developed one and the same. You'll know that the Merlin was developed separately from the Andromeda is your best example if you've been following the project for a while. So when the time comes, the rover will be developed, the Origin rover. What was the other one? I think they mentioned the Lynx rover and stuff. They are developed separately. So they are not currently on the roadmap right now because they are not currently slated to be developed within 2018. But rest assured, just like the Merlin before it and just like the Archimedes and the Pisces and the Lynx and everything else to go after, they will be developed just the same as any other ship. It's just a matter of resources and schedules and priorities and all that jazz.