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With regards to the $4.5 million stretch goal, will CIG build some sort of connectivity so that ship data like fuel left, landing gear up and down, lights on and off, speed, shield control, power allocation (basically all of the Star Citizen systems) can be exported to other devices like touch screens, tablets, even VoiceAttack? And will the responses from those things be fed back into Star Citizen?

TL;DRExternal device connectivity isn't a focus now because in-game core features like ship MFDs come first, but it isn't ruled out; a web-based Spectrum overlay might later make tablet-style controls easier.

Chad McKinneyLead Gameplay Engineer

Not so much the external apps. We're still really focused on core gameplay. So for 3.0, we're working hard to get Item 2.0 systems in with MFDs in game for the ships. And so that's where most of our focus is. And when we get that in a better place, I think we can start to look at some of these other more auxiliary inputs and see what we can do to bring those online. But right now it's just about in-game core behavior.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

So just to go on, definitely what Chad's talking about. We've got to work on the sundae, not just the cherry. And sometimes getting it out to things like a flight controller chair, for example, that I can think of maybe a small percentage of players actually have. And it is really easy to focus on the cherry. It is really easy to spend a lot of time on these minor things. Not minor, but maybe not as global as you would want them to be. It's like MFDs in the ships, for example. That's screens that are actually in the ship for all the players that are playing the game. So we've got to focus on that before we focus on these things. But having said that, implementing these kind of features or support for external stuff like flight controller chairs, various different flight stick setups and these kind of things is not a dramatically difficult thing to do. It's just where does it get prioritized into the grand scheme of the game.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

So not something that's off the table, just something that we're not ready to dive into yet.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

Sure, and maybe I can give a bit of a preview of stuff that's coming along and what's being worked on right now anyways on the Spectrum side. Look at our Spectrum overlay. There's a lot of work going on behind the scenes with the guys that develop Spectrum, as well as our audio engineers, as well as our UI engineers. And we have to get our Spectrum overlay implemented in the game. We've been talking about this for a little while. So the hope from that is that should we get some of the web-based Spectrum stuff overlaid, just sort of like a Steam overlay or something like that within the game, exposing web-based things like that to a tablet or something else is not as difficult as it would be just having the game talk directly to an external iPad or something like this, because all of a sudden you've got a Windows machine needing to talk to some sort of iPad interface and all this. So if we had a Spectrum web-based overlay, we could implement some sort of, not remote controls, but controls into Spectrum that could do things within the game as well as be controlled from the web. So that's kind of a cool thing too.

EpisodeUI & HUDShips