Calling All Devs - Ship Docking, Scanning and Cockpit Customization

Well, eventually we want to have the concept of shipping lanes being a more sure bet between places. So as you... We want to have a blind jump that allows you to go, "Oh, I see a nebula, so I can go and do gas mining out there." I can scan off in the distance and then find things and then jump to different locations. You're obviously limited by your quantum drive, and that's what's going to make larger ships actually able to travel further out into space. Large mining ships can go deeper into space and explore further out into the reaches of the outer rim. It's absolutely something that we want. I'm not sure exactly when that's on the schedule, but the next thing I know that we're working on is our feature team is going to be doing quantum linking coming up here, because that was a popular thing that people wanted next. So I would expect to see it sometime in the near future, but not exactly sure when.

I do want to add, you mentioned quantum linking, popular thing. We do have a feature survey up on the website right now. Quantum linking is not winning the vote at the moment, but remember, we are going to work on all of those features regardless. It was not a vote to tell us which features to work on. This was a vote just to inform us which ones were your highest priorities so that we can allocate resources to them as necessary. Maybe the one that wins the vote gets a couple more people on the feature team. But we are working on all those features, so quantum linking and all that stuff.

And the way we have our feature team set up, they're not always scheduled to release every single quarter. So sometimes we leapfrog with features, because some things are bigger than our three-month windows right now. So it's definitely what we're working towards. And that's the beginning of advancing the quantum travel feature moving forward here. So it's exciting, because quantum linking, at least for me, is being able to group up and travel places together and escort and do some really cool stuff. But free jumps are absolutely coming. We were literally talking about that the other day. So look forward to getting that info.

So what we're working on in the background is looking at introducing cockpit flair. So you'll be able to put stuff in your cockpit. They're all going to be items that go on item ports. So like we have with all our other items, there'll be sizes on it. So you can't stick a full Big Benny's machine in your dashboard because it won't fit, but you might have a scaled-down one, who knows. Certainly with bobbleheads, I believe that was one of the earlier stretch goals. We're aiming for the small cockpit flair items towards the end of the year, and then we'll look at expanding that for the rest of the flair items going in the rest of your ship.

So things like the Phoenix were sold with, I think it was a Hartwell piano at one point. So these are all things that will have to be addressed at some point later. Right now, our immediate focus, the first iteration, if you would, on ship customization is focused on cockpit flair.

Yes.

So in that particular case, it wasn't symbolic of that feature going away. Really, it was a re-evaluation of the design of the Cutlass itself. Having that docking collar on the floor meant that we lost a lot of valuable real estate for features that we actually have in the game. One of them is obviously the storage of cargo within that area. If we had that docking collar smack in the middle of the floor, we'd lose a lot of real estate for something useful. Also, as the Cutlass is more of a deployment vehicle, we felt that having the ability to store really important items for that deployment gameplay, and having the access to allow the players that are in the rear section of the Cutlass to exit the ship quickly, is a function that we already have in the game. So there's really a: what do we have now and what's useful for the ship?

So ship-to-ship docking and ship-to-station docking still on the docket, still planned for development, just later on down the line.

Yeah. At the time when we start implementing, we'll need to solve problems like, is it going to be weird to have two Connies with the top ends connected together, and what that's going to look like. It doesn't matter in zero G. These are all solutions that we'll need to solve and problems we'll see when we start investigating it, but it just hasn't happened yet.

Okay. So that prototype is pretty old. I can tell you right now that the US vehicle features team is currently working on scanning. And it is going to be more immersive. It's not going to be a mini-game. It's going to be more closely tied to radar. So we have our passive radar that we have in the game, and what we're going to allow the players to do is use a ping mechanic. And so you can do a 360 ping, or you can do more focused pings that can detect weaker signals and can also have a greater range. We'll also incorporate things like having the ambient signals. So you could have a star that has a really high EM signature that can obscure EM signatures, if that's what we're looking for. We'll also have the same thing for IR and then CS. So the CS feature will be interesting, because you could hide behind, say, a planet or an asteroid, so that would obscure that particular signature. So it's all going to be signature-based. We are going to get rid of the golf street mechanic that I heard about.

Well, that was a prototype for small ships anyway.

Right. So we improved that interface and made it a little bit nicer. And there's still going to be some more control using the radar MFD that we're going to incorporate, so that you can determine that cone and your strength. So our first iteration of this is going to be that you can do a ping and that'll give some really low-fidelity info back. So we'll have these kind of blobs that show up in radar that will hint at, "Hey, there's a couple of things over here that you might take a look at." As you get closer to them, or as you focus your ping and start to really hone in on that area of space that you want to do a more focused scan on, the stronger signals that you get back from that ping will result in greater resolution of those targets. So you can start flying toward them, and as you get closer to them and you get within scanning distance, you'll be able to do a really detailed scan, and the more time you spend on the scan, you'll be able to get more info about that target. So in the case of ships, we'll be able to tell things like owner, faction, ship type, maybe things like cargo, its armament, what state it's in, how damaged it is. We'll also be able to incorporate things like, I know that mining is coming online sometime soon, and so we'll be able to populate the universe with entities that are mining deposits, place them on planets, and then part of the ping info that you can get back is, "Hey, there's a deposit of this particular element that you might want to take a look at." So as you fly over to it, then you could do a detail scan. It's like, "Hey, there's uranium here. Do you want to go mine that?" And you can make deterministic decisions based on all the info you get back from that first stage of ping and then the second stage of scanning.

It should be fun. We're in the midst of working on it now, and we're hoping to get some tier of it in for two.

So the good news is we know all about that. We have it actually in our big gigantic backlog. And our backlog has a bunch of stuff, like how we want to give players control. Like if we have a pilot and I have a co-pilot, I want to give this guy the services and go, "Hey, you can have this now." And we have even more crazy stuff, like how power, heat and all that balance stuff could go. And it's just a gigantic thing in our backlog. But because it's in our backlog, it's going to take time to get to those things. The good news is we actually have a European vehicle team now run by a guy named Paul A. He is taking a lot of the pressure off of our end to look into those things, so that we cooperate and build these things so that we can get to them. So to go back to your question of when: soon™.

He's awesome. And we actually had him here for a week in LA to get him up to speed so that he could take over some of these things.

Yeah, this is one of those things happening. Remember, the feature survey that's up on the website now allowing you to vote: right now the frontrunner is the Item 2.0 feature improvements and stuff. And these are the kind of things that will go directly to the sort of thing that we're talking about right now. So we know it's coming. We're working on it. But it's just too early to say when. The question was essentially a when question, and we're not going to be able to give you a when just yet. But we're on it.