The hangar patch that came out yesterday isn't a big visual patch, but it's pretty big as far as client-side persistence goes. Can you explain to people what that means?
TL;DRThe patch adds client-side persistence as a first step: changes to the ship or hangar are saved locally, with more use planned and a step toward full persistence.
It's the first part of persistence overall in the game. On the game engine part, we've added basically the interface that the game engine will use for persisting things when we have the persistent universe later. And it will interface with the rest of the universe cluster. But for now, we actually have it running on the client. Paul Reindell, the lead engine programmer in LA, implemented this where basically, when you change things on your ship or change things in the hangar, it will save some data locally on your system to remember where you moved the weapons or things. And we're going to make more use of this in the near future.
That's step one, right? A lot of the things people wanted to do, there's a couple of reasons. One is they want to be able to customize or make things their own, and this will allow them to do that. We've got some stuff coming up next week, which we won't talk about, that we'll be able to test this with. And we're going to need your help to test it. And then also, it is, as you said, the first step into the big persistence.