John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So it is still planned. I say this every time that people ask me. It's still planned. It's not something that we want to get rid of or just not doing it and hoping people forget it exists, which is what I see a lot on Spectrum. The big thing is there's a core tech blocker on it, which is the item port system needs to work within object containers, which it does at the moment, like ships have or stations have item ports inside them. The problem it has at the moment is object containers assume some sort of level of they are static, they're not dynamic. Object containers themselves can't move and they really don't like being deleted and undeleted at runtime. And the item port system within those would have to dynamically attach and detach. So we use the Retaliator, it's the really good example for this. And when we have this in, it will be the first ship that gets the modularity in game. The Retaliator bomber modules need the item ports for the torpedoes to be placed within the object containers, which the object container itself will be in an item attached to the ship. And we need the game to be able to read those detached and undetached events and link all the power and missile controllers to the items within those object containers. Because at the moment, torpedo items are actually part of the exterior ship CGA to make them work. So whilst we could do the modularity right now, you would never be able to get rid of those torpedoes in the ship. So you would swap out the room and have the drop seat room, be able to swap in, could do that right now. You'd just have these four size nine torpedoes shoved in the room at the same time as well. So what we're waiting on is the vehicle tech team to work on that dynamic detachment of item ports in object containers in items attached to ships. It's just a horrible nesting problem. And when we have that, the world's our oyster. That's the only thing stopping us from rolling it out.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And that's going to bring us lots of options to, rather than every new feature requiring an entire new ship, it's going to allow us to support the features, but still be able to spend the time making the ships that everyone wants us to make and not just being bottlenecked by, OK, well, we need to do this particular feature support, so it has to be a new ship. It just opens up loads and loads of new options, which is super cool. Because at the end of the day, some of our ships are quite large, and they could definitely benefit from having some more variation to them in their functionality.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Systems Designer

Personally, I'm really looking forward to being able to actually go back and do the module containers for the Carrack, to actually go a bit further with them. But like John's saying, at the moment, if we were to do them, the problem would be you'd still have whatever module was in the place of the cargo holds, the cargo hold would be there and the item ports inside them would be there and it would just layer on top of each other again and again and again.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Is this the same stuff that would allow us to do all the animations on the items within the ships as well?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

To some extent, yeah. So the Avengers, although the Avengers, I can never remember if they were officially true variants or modules.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Some were variants and some were modules.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It would allow us to have that be done properly rather than all being hard-baked variants.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So basically, it sounds like it's something we know what's necessary. We know what's involved in making it happen. It requires a pretty sizable chunk of time and resources in order to do it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, it's a lot of low-level engineering people. And the people that are best suited to doing it, unfortunately, are the people that are looking at server meshing. Because they're ironically the people that made the object containers and a lot of the original pipe system code.