Kirk Tome · Ship Developer

Well, I guess I can talk about the history of why the seat positions are where they are and specifically why the geometry around the seat and your viewing area from your seat in the cockpit are where they are. So there's a big emphasis on being able to see four MFDs on the screen. That emphasis has been reduced slightly, but we still need at least two MFDs that show you pretty vital information at all times. I think we maybe pushed the limit quite a bit in ships like the Cutlass, where almost the entire dashboard does take quite a bit of room as far as your viewing screen space. And so that's why the viewing angles are where they are at the moment. Now, I know there's a request to push those seat angles up and ultimately we'd love to do that. The best way to do this would be to actually incorporate some actual height adjustment that is optional for the player. Let the player choose whatever height they want. Unfortunately, there's quite a few challenges in doing that. It's not as simple as simply adjusting the height of the seat itself.

Kirk Tome · Ship Developer

So there are some challenges with that. One of them is UI. The HUD in the ships is actually physically placed in the cockpit. So we need some way to actually transfer it so that the HUD, especially your flight HUD that's directly in front of you, corresponds to your actual height so that it's in the same position on the screen when you do change the heights. And that's tech that we need to implement in order to get that to happen, because right now it's a little plastered in the ship. So we need some way to make it dynamic and adjust to your lens. Another issue that we have is the things that would need to be adjusted along with the seat height, which is mainly your controls, right? So the IK, it's attached to the dashboard that's in the cockpit. And so we need to make some geo changes to accommodate for the IK, because you look ridiculous if your hands went so far down that you just look terrible driving the ship, right? The most major one is that animations would have to be changed, and that's a challenge because a lot of our ships do share a templated set of animations for getting in and out of the seats. This is especially useful for the single-seat fighters that we have, because typically the animation for getting in and out of the seat actually is tied to getting in and out of the ship itself. But we need to adjust those across the board, and that's kind of a tremendous undertaking. And because they're shared, it causes an issue: if we have ships that do share that template animation, it means we can't piecemeal this change across individual ships. If we break the animation and then fix the geo so it works in one ship, then any other ship that we have that shares that template also has to be done. And it has to be done before we ship a build, so that we don't have one nice ship and a completely broken one.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

One of the ways that we make a game of this size and scope possible is through the use of common elements. But the common elements at the same time make small changes into sweeping changes, because they have to now affect so much more than just an individual ship.

Kirk Tome · Ship Developer

Right. So I think these are issues that are all solvable. It just takes time. And I think the issue that is going to be the most challenging is getting the UI to settle correctly, because we can probably fudge the heights of the seats and the IK and the animations pretty well without any new tech. But transferring the ship HUD to be dynamic is going to be a pretty big tech debt.