Calling All Devs - Dirty Ships, Modularity & UI Updates

Okay, so while there is a plan for them, there is no ETA. It's on our backlog, and unfortunately it's not on the upper tier of priorities at the moment, and so we're not precisely sure when we're going to get to them. But we do plan to still incorporate modularity in things like the Caterpillar, so you can have the deployment bays or the habitation modules instead of the cargo bays that are there now, and allow us to do things like the Retaliator. I'm sorry, no. Yes, the Retaliator. And the Endeavor. For the bomber sections and the Endeavor, yes. Another place where we probably use it is in the Pioneer, when you plop the ship down on a planet's surface and create the outposts. The modularity in being able to specify what parts of the outposts that you create and how you fabricate and position them will most likely incorporate that system. And so I imagine it'd be something almost like cartridges in a gun or like Lego pieces, where you swap out sections and put them in. Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as just slotting in one entity, because we do need to do things like hook up the interior of the object containers for them, hook up all the connections for all of our pipes, like for power, heat, and any type of damage, hook up the lighting system, anything like doing the portal for going in and out of that section. It's particularly going to be interesting for the Caterpillar, because those have huge side sections which are transitional portals from the exterior to the interior of the ship, which are two different zones, and solving that challenge. I think the most interesting thing is going to be when you have a section that you can put in and it looks different, not only just visually, but we should be able to change things like, in the Caterpillar, there's high walkways in the side. There's no reason why we can't completely change them into stairwells or ladders that go down, or have a different network of walkways in the top. Maybe make it one big section or three. Being able to accommodate all that connectivity, and really the way that you're going to be able to transition from one of the modules to the ship, or from one of the modules to another module, is going to be a challenge there.

We have the internal modularity. You hear us talk about that on Ship Shape all the time. It's how we build out the different variants. But the player-facing modularity is a whole other kit and caboodle. Also, I just want to reiterate, when you're talking about the Pioneer, before people start running off and saying the Pioneer's going to have modules, he did say probably, he did say most likely. We are still exploring that option.

Yeah, also, we're talking specifically about using the tech for that.

It's not the same way and not confirmed. We haven't started to build it out yet.

Yeah, no, that's definitely something that CR has talked about quite a bit. He wants to be able to get up and walk around and do other things while you're in quantum travel. He's talked about messing with your cargo, wants to fix items, like things break down maybe on your trip, or something starts to overheat, so you've got to go and deal with that. So it's definitely something that we want to do in the future. It's just not the current focus. But yeah, like I said, the distance between the planets are enormous compared to just the moons of Crusader. So we're doing things right now with quantum travel to try and reduce some of those times with the quantum splines or the planetary spline stuff and all that. It's still going to be substantial between planets, so we have to fill that gameplay with something a little more interesting than just sitting in your seat, and we understand that. So it's definitely coming. I'm not sure exactly when, but it'll be there at some point.

When I think about it, I always think of that scene in Star Wars, after the Millennium Falcon gets away at light speed and Han comes walking to the back, bragging that, I told him I'd lose him, stuff like that. Those moments. And then, of course, fixing things and all that stuff. It's integral to this kind of thing.

Yeah, it's like you've got to eat, you've got to sleep, you've got to do some of these other things to take care of your person as well, right? It's definitely not going to be just a static sit in your seat and kind of watch the stars go by. That's not interesting. But there is interdiction and stuff. People can pull you out.

Sure. So I'll take that as two different parts. Part one, why do they come dirty? So we're not intentionally attempting to make dirty-looking ships, but adding wear to them and sort of dust gives all of our vehicles a sense of it being lived in and used. But that also lends to making it more of a realistic experience. So it helps us make the asset as a whole feel a little bit more real, and it gives it a little bit more volume as well, because you get a lot more variation across the materials on the surface. So it just looks better. It's better to do it that way. But the way we're setting up the materials are in such a way that we have a slider that we can pull from zero all the way up to one, and that'll change how much wear you're actually seeing on the material surface. So right now I can actually go into CryEngine and go ahead and slide that back and forth and see the wear become worse and then sort of recede a little bit. And the intention is that in the future, when you use a ship over time, that slider will be programmatically moved in engine in order to sort of simulate that you've been using this ship for a long time, and so it's getting dirtier and dirtier. And you should be able to go clean that up and then bring it all the way back down. That way you have a cleaner ship. Now, there are some vehicles where it just simply doesn't really make sense from a visual standpoint to ever give you a perfectly pristine version. One of those examples would be something like the Caterpillar or the Reclaimer. Even a brand new version of those ships, it just probably wouldn't look perfectly right if it was completely clean. So there'll be some level of wear and dirt on that, even at its most clean version. But then you'll have ships like the Razor or the M50, where it makes absolute perfect sense to have a perfectly pristine paint job. And so once we've got those mechanics hooked into the actual gameplay, the goal is to allow that slider to move back and forth programmatically, and to allow players to get a cleaner ship if they want, and then see it deteriorate over time.

Go to a car wash, as it were.

Yeah, exactly.