Well, there are more and more ships... It's kinda hard to say what my favorite is, and one of the ones that I'm really looking forward to, which we're working on right now, is getting the multi-crew stuff working. So we're sort of doing the early stuff on that. So for that the Constellation has kind of been my favorite, but there's some pretty awesome stuff. I mean I love the M50 which we just brought into the hangar a week or so ago, and there's some stuff coming down the pipe that I think you're all like. The Origin 890 Jump is, err, I'm not sure I want to be flying that around in combat, but I certainly would like to be cruising in style. And there's a couple of other ones that we haven't shown yet, that are sort of more role and specialty-based that I think are also going to be pretty awesome. So they're all kinda fun."What will in your in your opinion the most interesting thing you will be doing with the community?" ... I'm not sure if this is about ships, or about what I'LL be doing with the community, but in general the things that I think are fun are, you know, interacting with the community. So the opportunity go and hang out with everyone at Gamescom at the big 2000-full event and all the rest of the stuff - that's all great. We've got PAX Australia coming up a little later this year... so those are all kinda the fun things, and it's kinda fun to share and reveal stuff as we work on it, and get people excited by them.
Yeah, I think this is the EM Drive stuff that's just been making the rounds recently, that was invented by a UK scientist / engineer and then everyone said he was crazy, and now they've just sort of confirmed it with some independent tests (or with a similar device with those NASA tests).So I would say that we all kinda read and watch that stuff and think it's cool, and the more sort of things that sound like science fiction and turn out to be true, we probably will sort of borrow elements of it and weave it into our fiction for our sort of stuff. And, you know, potentially longer-term we may decide "oh yeah, well there's a new engine breakthrough" and you can buy that from, you know, whichever the engine manufacturer is, and perhaps it has some fiction. But we'll definitely have some areas where you'll be able to upgrade your engines, and maybe plug in a different device. We've been talking about some alien technology that you'll be able to potentially find out there in the Persistent Universe, and if you can bind that and blend that into your items it may be able to improve them. So that's the answer on that question!
Okay, so you should not be able to fight anyone at any moment on any location. There will definitely be areas planet-side that will allow you to get into some level of combat - sometimes against NPCs, sometimes against other players. We are going to have sort of a brawling melee mode, so potentially we may have areas where you're not allowed to whip out your gun, and if you do, you're in trouble and you'll get put in jail or kill by the local police. But you may be able to involve yourself in fisticuffs in a bar and that may not be so bad. It'll sort of all depend on the rules and laws of the different environments and locations. But generally we kinda want to make certain areas of the planets safe, so that was I think in an earlier part of the game - pardon, not the game! part of the questions! FatSoDa asked about like "well how's the single player area gonna be?" and when you're down on the environment there will definitely be areas that will be sort of designated just for you, where there will be NPCs and stuff but you wont run into other players, and there will be other areas that will be player areas. So you'll definitely always have some safe areas and safe zones normally when you're down on a planet. Maybe in the case of like a really risky, dangerous pirate outlaw place, you know... I wouldn't call anything "safe", but it would be safe from other players, but maybe there'll be a thief trying to jump out on you and hold you up at gunpoint to mug you or something.And then on planet-side, having a large-scale battle for conquering an outpost or a city... not, err, definitely not for v1.0. Longer-term it definitely would be something there could be a discussion about. But there certainly will be battles for persistent items or elements, actually out in space, so like an asteroid base, or a space station, or... definitely areas that players will be able to fight over themselves, in terms of trying to control their own and stuff. So that's it, and at some point we may shift some of that down to down on the planet and see how we go from there. But again, it's all going to be depended on the amount of players we have and so and so.
So I guess Vanduul Veronica is not part of Operation Pitchfork!But, umm, yah... you know, we're going to try and make it so generally the Vanduul are going to be hostile to you, but I think there will definitely be cases in the more shady parts of the universe that you could trade with some Vanduul, and maybe they want to have weapons - and that's kind of illegal! The UEE doesn't want you selling weapons to the Vanduul, but potentially, you know, someone wants to make a fast buck doing that and deal with the risks. So those are the kind of things we'll do. I'm not sure right now we're gonna have sort of nice, peaceful, pacifist Vanduul, because they're sort of our big Bogeyman in the universe. But there definitely I think will be the chance for people that aren't so UEE friendly, or aligned with the UEE, or care so much about the UEE, to maybe do some trading for profit with the Vanduul.
We are definitely going to be doing a full 6 degrees of freedom control mode. So, and this will be in the release that's coming out very shortly you'll be able to do that (what we call internally "release 13"). But the way we're thinking, because there's two basic requests... 1) People want to be able to have the full control and they want to go forwards and backwards, left, right, up and down, and also roll, and have to sort of additive. So, right now if you went into decoupled mode you can strafe left or right but it always goes back to the neutral position. And so what we're gonna change it around to is that you can go into the decoupled mode, and basically that's putting you into the 6DOF mode, and in that mode you can either change your rotation OR you can do additive motion - so you can basically go left or right, forward or back, up and down, as well as doing the roll and everything else, but it's not taking you back to neutral. So if you thrust right 5 times, you keep going right until you thrust left 5 times to cancel it out - which is sort of true 6DOF. On top of that, we're also going to be adding the option in standard IFCS to be able to strafe left, right, up and down as you're flying around. So you'll basically have the best of both worlds. You'll have the full control of being able to spin, go left, right, up and down in your ship and not ever go neutral, so you can sort of do that... or when you're flying around on the IFCS doing a turn, you'll also have the ability to give you some side thrust or whatever. So like if you're going head-on-head and people want to strafe you can maybe burst out without having to leave the IFCS mode, and then that will bring you back to your path before. So it allows more maneuvering and more options than we had before, and for us that sort of felt like that was the best option how to get the 6DOF to work in our system, because it's not particularly viable to have IFCS and 6DOF working together because they basically fight against each other 'cause IFCS is trying to fly you a certain way. So it certainly can... you can tell the IFCS system, "oh I wanna go left, or I wanna go right for a bit," but then IFCS is always wanting to get you back to a certain heading and velocity.So the way we look at it is we're going to add strafe ability to the normal flight mode, and then when you go into decoupled mode that's really your 6DOF mode, and so the moving around laterally, your vector changes are all additive now so they won't be going back to neutral. And then obviously you can do your orientation changes. I think hopefully that will satisfy a lot of the people out there.And then longer-term, in terms of how we're gonna do it, I think it's too early to say, but the kinda concept was that on the more basic ships you had a basic IFCS system - maybe you don't even have all these functionality or features - it just sort of flies in a very simple manner. But then if you have a more complicated one then you can get more of these features enabled, and maybe the reaction times are better, and maybe there's more customization on the more expensive ones. Because it would be kind of nice to different flight modules you can program into, so, you know, there's a sort of expensive customize-able one that really allows you to tweak everything that you want to do. That's still in the process of figuring out exactly how we're going to do that. Not in terms of how technically we do it, because it's pretty easy 'cause the features are all there - it's just a matter of what you turn on and off. It's more about like how best to do it in the items and then provide the interface for the player.
Yes is the answer to that! So we're building in, from the beginning, all ships and all items sort of have wear and tear, and over time they will take wear and tear, and you will have to maintain them and fix them up. Some items will just sort of degrade and then eventually you'll have to replace them. Ships you can, as long as you keep the maintenance up, you'll probably be able to fly them for a long time. That's not to say that a manufacturer may not release a newer, better model. But essentially we're building in the idea of wear and tear to all the items to add realism. Like, we want you to go down to a landing area, and if this is sort of an old beaten up mining colony, you see it versus a brand new one that just was erected a year ago. And we've actually built into our ships, and items, and environments what we call "layer blending" on all the materials and textures. So literally, I could show you in the engine, I can move a slider and you can see something looking pretty into going really beaten up and nicked, and it's pretty cool! So that's a standard thing we're building into the game itself, and I think you should be able to see if someone's got a well-worn ship or it's a brand new ship. Those will all be the fun little visual, subtle cues that will, A) make the game feel a lot more alive, and also give a good idea of who you're coming up against.
So I think there definitely will be the opportunity to focus much more on FPS. Whether or not you will be able to entirely avoid flying in space, I probably doubt that would be the case. But you certainly could join crews and operate as a boarding party specialist and not be flying, say on a bigger multi-crew ship. There will definitely be some FPS encounters that will be down on planet-side that will allow it. So I would say that if you prefer to do FPS, there will be that available for you to do in the game. And we're also going to be creating a sort of FPS... you know, we have Arena Commander - there's gonna be some of the FPS extension to that to allow you to practice your FPS skills without having to risk getting killed for real in space. So watch and stay tuned for that down the road - that's something we'll be talking about later on this year.
Yeah, I mean I think we want to create a setup where there is variation between the different systems. So it sort of encourages people to go around and explore, and take advantage of economic disparity between one system and another system. So one of the ways would be potentially in one area of the galaxy it would be more expensive to borrow money than another area. And those are all sort of ways that we can dynamically affect where players want to go, because some if some area raises it's tax... like if an area is overcrowded and overpopulated, if the taxes are raised in that area then players will probably tend to go to other areas where it will be cheaper to operate. So things like interest rates, loans, all those kind of things are all things that will probably fluctuate and have a certain level of fluctuation on areas, and that will have some impact on the Persistent Universe.
Well actually the way that our freight units work, is they're actually volume units. So originally we were talking about how many tons of cargo you could carry, but we sort of quickly realized that at a certain level, the tonnage is much less important than the volume, in terms of us building the ships and what they can fit inside. So we came up with a standardized container system at different levels, and so when it's 148, or 20, or 40, or whatever... that's actually talking about the units that can fit in the cargo hold. And so if the DUR Freelancer can fit 148, it won't be able to fit more than 148 - that's the most you can fit. Now of course, how much each one of those units weigh will be an issue, right? So if you're trying to fly with solid gold instead of, I dunno, 148 pieces of... err... whatever would be light - your ship would fly differently in space. And I don't know if we'd have a maximum takeoff load criteria that would prevent you, saying "oh no, you can't actually take that much mass," but basically the freight units is all about the volume and whether you can fit those pieces of volume in there. But in terms of the mass, maximum takeoff, all that stuff, we haven't really figured that out yet. So I don't know - there probably won't, but if there was that's where they would sort of, "hey, you can't take off with that level of mass." I mean we could probably just have you take off with whatever the mass stuff is, and then you're just a really slow ship, which is probably what the solution is as the moment, and we'll make it more sophisticated going down the way.
Hmm, so that's a pretty open-ended question because are we talking about single player elements of story in Squadron 42 (which is our sort of single player narrative that's very much like Wing Commander in terms of it's straight-ahead narrative, and then we'll drop you out in the Persistent Universe), or are you talking about single player elements that would exist potentially in the Persistent Universe where you come across someone and they say "oh, I've heard about this legendary artifact off in 'so-and-so' but you'll have to fly over and talk to 'so-and-so' and he'll tell you a bit more about it" ?So, in terms of the single player elements of Squadron 42, we're very much going with the Wing Commander narrative. Sort of almost like a war film... war picture setup. We've got a pretty cool story. I don't really want to share too much of it, because unlike Star Citizen in the Persistent Universe, part of the fun is sort of taking the journey. But it definitely will involve a mission that goes deep into Vanduul space, and things get weirder and weirder. So if I was gonna pitch it to you, I would say it would be... take the opening of Gladiator, mix it with the Ninth Legion, and Heart of Darkness Apocalypse Now... all set in space. I think it's gonna be pretty cool and you guys are going to quite like it.On the Persistent Universe side, we are going to have small story mission pieces of characters that you can meet. And we're sort of setting it up in the Persistent Universe where obviously there's going to be stuff that we base with other players and organizations, and general stuff that you can do, and then some of the story stuff will allow you to go and do missions that would feel more specific to you. So there are parts of the game where if you're off and you're doing a specific kind of mission, or you're going down a back alley to talk to someone in a sort of disreputable speakeasy, once you enter that speakeasy you're in your own private instance and the NPCs and everything there are all sort of there, so you're not going to have 30 other people all stream into your private conversation with someone that's going to give you a tidbit of information or a mission. So it's not going to feel like some theme park that there's all of these people streaming around you, which is one of the things I sort of hate with a traditional MMO. So we're mixing, in the Persistent Universe, areas where you'll interact with other players and talk to them where it makes sense, and then other areas where it'll be much more about your personal situation. So, you know, going down a dark alley, maybe you'll get some criminals that will try and mug you. Now that won't necessarily be players, but it will be some NPCs because you're on a shady out-world and basically that's where you go to do black market buying and selling, and therefore it's pretty dangerous, so take your sidearm pistol!So those are kinda the elements we want to do down in the Persistent Universe and the planets, to make them feel alive just like it feels alive in space. I think Tony Zurovec who's leading the Persistent Universe side has got some really great and fun stuff there. But we definitely want to make you feel like it's not generic templated missions in some places. Some stuff is obviously going to have to be templated, but some stuff will be specifically built and scripted for us, and we'll sort of have a nice combination. And that combined with what the players are also doing out there hopefully will create enough challenge and variation for people for quite a while.