10 for the Chairman: Episode 08 (2014.02.17)

That's a good question, I actually was thinking about this a lot at the beginning. I thought it would be really cool that you could be playing this game and making some real world money from toiling away virtually.But right now we don't have any plans for that. There are some legal issues to be dealt with. Then also I had some concerns about whether that would potentially bring something to the game that may make it less fun and be problematic.So right now we don't have any plans, we may assess it in the future, but I would really like to see how the Persistent Universe plays, how everything works, how people interact with each other, before making the decision about that because I think that potentially could be fairly unbalancing. I know that there were issues on Diablo with the real money auction house.So, interested intellectually, but not necessarily convinced I want to put it in the game just yet.So that will be a "put a pin in it" one.

Hmm, that's kind of a good question.We were sort of thinking that you would have one home base hangar and then if you wanted to have "forward bases" or whatever, you would rent hangar space on a planet.So I don't know, because currently the design would say no to that, although there could be an argument to say "well I'm got multiple packages so each one should have a hangar and therefore I should be able to place them in different places," but really the concept of the hangar was, we were just giving you a free place to have all your stuff, it wasn't that you would be buying multiple houses around the universe.So I would say, I don't know whether the two hangars... I mean it's a difficult question to ask on the asteroid hangar because that's a very distinct thing, and it's more in a different location than say a business or a deluxe hangar.So I guess my question would be, not my question, my answer would be:We haven't made the decision on that yet, but that is a good point.So I take that off and be thinking about how to make that equitable without having someone buying 20 packages and snapping up a bunch of real-estate that they can put all around the universe. Because that would sort of defeat part of the purpose of getting people to play because actually being able to get a hangar and all the rest of the stuff should take some work to achieve and I don't want everyone to suddenly be 100% fully set up.So it's a good question, I will think about that, but I don't have a good answer for you right now. But you brought it up, so that's already a victory.

Ok, so the dogfighting module itself is going to be staged in various releases.The first dogfighting release is going to focus on the single-seater ships. So the multi-crew ships won't be in the very first release of the dogfighting. That will be a later release, mainly because there's a whole extra level of network complexity with multiple people running around the ship, and we've got to simulate the physics separately.That's all stuff that's in development, we're working on it right now, but it won't be ready for prime time by the release. So our focus or dogfighting 1 is the single-seater ships which would be primarily our test case is the Hornet, but also the Aurora, the 300i, the Cutlass, and the Aurora--sorry, no, the Avenger, would all be the ships that we would be focusing to have out, ready for dogfight v1.Not all of them are going to make it 'cause there's a huge amount of assets that have to be built. Yes, you have them in the hangars right now, but you don't have all the damage states and all those bits. We are working on those, so we have quite a lot of people working on all the parts, but our approach is, on the dogfighting module, that when v1 is ready to go, we're not going to hold it up because we don't have every single one of those ships. But as soon as they're ready, they'll be patched in.So the likelyhood is the Aurora is probably going to be there for dogfighting v1, as will the Hornet and hopefully the 300i, because those are the three most common single-seater dogfighting ones. Then the other ones will be more about "will they make it in time," and if not, they will come in a few weeks later.So hopefully that answers the question. I think if you've got an Aurora, you're probably in luck so to speak.

That is a good question again.I don't really think the organizations necessarily have to declare war against each other because they're essentially private corporations, groups of people, or guilds, and there's always conflicts between them.Now of course depending on what happens or where the battles happen, the UEE may step in. So two organizations can not go toe-to-toe out in the orbital space of Earth. The UEE is going to say "conflict is not allowed in this safe area," whereas you could probably be fighting in the outer edge of the galaxy and that would be fine because there isn't any sort of UEE rule.So I kind of see that organizations fighting each other will mostly be fighting over areas of resources that are on the fringe of the UEE controlled space. And then there will be some clandestine activity happening inside UEE space, but there won't be all out war right in the middle of UEE space because that would be problematic.Just like if you had IBM and Apple had a bunch of mercenaries and started shooting each other in the streets for dominance of the tech industry. Probably the United States of America would frown upon such action.So it will be along those lines, I mean maybe we'll find a way to allow the organizations to bring conflict on a more limited stage into UEE controlled areas, but for me I feel like I would like to see competition via industry and business, and then back-door stealthy kind of stuff where people are going after each other. Then all out warfare is on the edges of the galaxy.

Well yeah, I mean we're going to make the Oculus Rift work for the Oculus Rift in the game, we're not just having the Oculus Rift be you look around and that's it.So the final implementation of the Oculus rift will—First of all the head of your avatar will be disconnected from the animations that you have typically. Like if you were normally running around when we get into a ship, the head position is controlled by the animation of the character climbing up to it, whereas when Oculus Rift is running, the head position is going to be controlled and tracked by the actual head position tracked off the Oculus Rift.Then we're going to use the Oculus Rift for, basically looking around and wherever you're looking will inform the things you can select and do.So playing it with the Oculus Rift will be fairly intuitive. So we're definitely, it's not just going to be tacked on. There are some specific changes in the code to work best with Oculus Rift or other head sets similar to Oculus Rift.