In a previous show they mentioned that they were moving away from the Flash and Scaleform stuff for HUD UI, in favour of a homegrown solution. What progress have they made with this?

They used Flash and are still using it now, but they're trying to transition away from it by baking their assets into a much more data-driven system. Previously in Flash, you set things up in a static way where you can't see how it looks in-game until you export it and reload the editor. With the data-driven system, the interface with the game code is much more simplified, and they have a standard API so that a task such as creating UI for an ammo counter is really simple and updates live. This means that they can be in-game and have an editor open and work on the UI at the same time, to see what it looks like as they work on it. It's still using Scaleform as a renderer, meaning that they've cut out the process of authoring the UI in Flash, but they're still using Scaleform to draw the vectors but only for that rendering task, and the rest of the work is done by their own code instead. At some point though, they'll build their own render to replace Scaleform. Jared jokingly asks Zane how long he's been waiting to kill Flash, who says he's been waiting since he started working at the company, 6+ years ago (for those who many not know, Zane was an early hire straight out of college and originally worked in the Austin office, which back then was just a house, and this was also during the days of Wingman's Hangar). Simon adds to the discussion by explaining that Flash was originally designed as an animation system for web stuff, so it can be used for things like UI but it's hard to do iterative work with it where things change based upon feedback, which is because it's time extensive. Conversely, with the building blocks stuff it's quick and simple and they have a lot of control. Zane goes on to say that that's also true because it's a fully data-driven system, so the UI is programmatically drawn and driven from data so they don't worry about artists stepping on each others toes, because the changes the artists make can be merged together.