Calling All Devs - Mr. Steal Yo Data

Yes, it's an option. We are looking into it. The only problem here is that we can't do everything at once. So right now we're focusing on asteroid mining, getting this out the door to you guys as soon as possible. And the next one on our list will be salvaging. And since that is a complete new thing that we're going to tackle, that will take a bit. And once that's done, as far as I know, we're scheduled to go back to some of the mining stuff. And we definitely want to look in FPS. There's two things that we would like to look in. FPS mining is an assistance to ship mining where you basically find a rock that is way too resistant to actually break on your own. And we're thinking right now that you can get devices that you have to EVA and mount onto the asteroid in various critical positions that will lower the resistance. They'll generate a field around the asteroid which will lower its resistance and you can now mine it on your own without having to call three, four friends to break that rock. So you get all of the stuff on your own. You're alone in that Prospector, you have to get out, you EVA out of your Prospector, you kind of have to leave it floating there. It's a risk.

So the other thing we're thinking of is actual FPS mining, as you'll be able to walk on the planet and find various valuables. We still don't know what the mechanics for this will be, we just know that eventually we will get to look into something like this, because everything we do we try to do ship side and FPS side, and there needs to be content for both types of gameplay.

Like maybe an attachment for the multi-tool or a specific tool? Some kind of drill.

It might be that it's rarer materials and maybe even more valuable with a lower yield, more precision work. A big laser would melt them down. So it might even be that we put them in the same rocks that you already can break with your mining laser. So if you break them with your ship, you lose those precise materials that you can get by FPS mining. So if you take your time to get out of your ship and go there and check if there's actually anything to FPS mine, you might get more goodies, more yield out of that entire rock. If you break it from the first thing and you just rush, you might just get the basic stuff.

All right, so not in the immediate future. Once we wrap up asteroid mining, get that to a place where we think it's playable. But after that, you start work on salvaging, and salvaging is currently scheduled for an early 2019 release, if I remember the roadmap right. I don't have it directly in front of me.

So definitely we want to go towards the hacking thing. It's something we've had our eye on for a while. It's just that there's so many things to do before we get to do that. It's one of these things that there's quite a few designs on this, different designs. Either of those will make great hacking gameplay. It's just a matter of getting the time and actually implementing, prototyping them a bit and seeing which one plays best. And once we get that, we go with one and we go into full production with it and then we can get this type of gameplay. But we want something like this. Again, since we're talking mining earlier, an example is a miner is sitting on a rock and trying to extract everything out of it. Then you can come in a stealthy ship and start hacking him and you find out that he has a database of whatever, 5,000 rocks that he knows the location of. He's just going through them and extracting all the goodies. So you can extract that data of 5,000 rocks and just go, yeah, I will sell this to the highest bidder. Who wants this new data? This miner might have worked or paid for that data like half of his fortune, because he knows then he's going to make so much money out of it. But now you stole that data, you can sell it to a highest bidder or to your friends in your organization who are also miners. And suddenly that guy, out of 5,000 rocks, might get 100 because you're faster and you have a bigger fleet and you're strip mining everything. It depends. And we also have to look into ways of protecting yourself against this type of thing. Because we don't want it to be just that I push a button and I win the game of hacking. It needs to be a balance.

And probably want to stay away from things like quick time events. Push B, push Y.

No. None of that stuff. Especially when it comes to hacking, we're kind of trying to stay as realistic as possible. Hacking is a mind game. It's a logic puzzle. It's always something you have to rack your brains to solve. So it's not going to be, whoever pushes the button faster wins the game. Definitely.

So I don't know exactly what indicated that it was going to be significantly larger, but strange enough, I was just looking at it in our game dev stream and it's actually not that much larger. So as far as the rear wing profile and the length and just its overall cross section size, it's only maybe a meter larger in each of those axes. So it should fulfill exactly the same role as it did. It'll still be one of our fastest ships that are in the game because of its twin engine setup. So nothing about it should change as far as racing is concerned. What I will say is that the perception of it being larger might be because the body itself has been tweaked in the horizontal range. So kind of like the TARDIS. It's a little bigger on the inside. So there's a lot more room to put components. There's a place to properly put a bed rather than the kind of camping fold-out accessory that it had before. But overall, it will not change as far as the spaces it'll fit in.

And as far as its racing role, which is primarily what the question was about, how it compares to the MISC Razor and the M50, we anticipate it'll have many of the same strengths and weaknesses that they do now.

Right. So while it is larger than those two ships, it will suffer a little bit from the maneuverability as compared to those ships, but it will still be the fastest ship in the fleet.

All I know is because it's a smaller scope vehicle, it does tend to get shuffled around a bit in the schedule. But looking here, it's currently scheduled for mid-2019. So that's where it is at the moment. Unfortunately, I really don't have a lot more info about it than that.

One of the things, this is a good chance to offer up that when you're talking about the smaller ships that maybe one or two artists can work on, usually just one artist, those are often used to fill in gaps between the bigger ships that take so many more resources. So it has the opportunity to move. They all have the opportunity to move, but maybe a little more subject to change than others. But it is currently on the roadmap for mid-2019. So you guys will probably see that show up on the roadmap as the roadmap continues to progress and push out further into 2019.