Can you tell us more about the tools you have developed internally and are in usage? For instance, a tool to balance the ships and weapons. If it doesn't exist yet, are you planning to do it and with what approach?asked by OverTurn

So, actually this is a good one like we talked about with John Pritchett before, the cool story. John's actually been working on something, goal based tuning so that way it helps the designers input information into like a database, like a spreadsheet or something. All right, this is what we want the ship to do, then the system will extrapolate everything... all the information, kind of make it work with IFCS and everything like that and also kind of help the big ships... the Idris, the Javelin, all those also kind of work into it.

Yes, that is huge because his system is physically based so you needed to have actual proper physics, bunch of params, so designers are like, 'what does this one do'...

Basically.

It's like John has it all in his head...

I know, it's scary.

He has all these valuables he knows of and it's like, I just want to do this thing so he's making a nice ingame tool to say, give me what you want and we'll output those values.

I remember sitting down with John and I was like, 'John, explain this to me' and he was like, 'Ok'. So, he explained it to me and I'm just like... jaw dropped, eyes glassed over and he was like, 'too much?', mhmm. I love talking to him, it's funny, I'm like, 'oh my god, all this stuff you're putting into this is crazy'. So, he's been in the UK for the past week or two, actually this is the second week he's been in the UK, and he's been working on the goal based tuning system before that... before he goes out there to train like Andrew Nicholson on how to basically tune it for balancing and everything like that.So, it's been good for him to be out there so he can just sit down with the guys and be like, 'all right, this is'... because tuning a ship used to take a week or two sometimes. Depending on how complicated things were and how thrusters were working, now they have it down to a few hours. So, it's like a really big notable difference in balancing the ships now.

That too and it's like, you hit different problems and because we've done it so many times, John knows which problems they're going to be so he's able to make these tools to help designers fix it and do it quickly. So, he's got it down to science.

Yeah I know, he's pretty good at just setting the designers up too and figuring out what they need. I remember on the like the first ship I was starting to work on, he was like, 'ok, let's get this thing flight ready'. I'm like, 'ok'. Then he was talking about all the math and algorithms and trying to get the thrusters set up and I was trying to do the balance on the thrusters and I was like, 'oh my god, so much stuff'.

He has a lot of hopeful things that just show the visual things.

Sometimes you want to just take a straw and suck the knowledge out.

His stuff is more, I guess, inengine debug screen stuff that outputs things but we do have other tools like DataForge or even the thing like Ariel's working on...

Yeah, DataForge is a big help actually cause it's going to start really cleaning up from doing like hand XML stuff and if anyone does like hand scripting, so that it's like, if you have a tool it makes it so much easier to read and cleaner so that you can see where the issues are.

No more editing raw XMLs.

Going to be so awesome when it's done.

We also have Ariel's tool, the item port editor, which helps immensely cause you can see on the screen in game, your character and the ships and you can move/remove stuff and you can see it right then and there, and errors like, 'hey this can't fit there cause the size is wrong'.EV: He just seriously got the previous stuff set up too this past week or so. So it's really good, like Sean Tracy, Mark McCall and the new guy, Linc... he's actually going to be working with that tool and stuff so they've been giving him a lot of feedback. He's been working side by side with them and all the tools are just... tools are awesome. People that can generate tools to be useful and stuff will just save time so we can develop more faster, better, a little better.

If we don't have tools you can always just be Calix and write your own Python GUI system to do heat balance and yes he did do that.

He did. He did.

He was like, 'hey look...'

I'm prototyping this.

Ok.

Ok, at least he's not flow graphing it.

He did.

I know but it's like...flow graph.

He flow graphed the entire system and then once he figured out how he wanted it, then he made the GUI so he could explain it better to other people.

Yeah, cause the flow graph looked like spaghetti half the time.

Yeah.

I remember one time when he'd first done like the little thing for the... when you're sitting in the cockpit and you can interact with things and then he like showed you guys the flow graph and you and Paul were like, 'how does that work?' and he was like, 'I don't know, it just works'.

He gets prototypes working great but they're prototypes.

Remember trying to get his grabby hands stuff working in one of my levels and I was trying to mess with some of the cargo and some of the salvage and yeah... no, I was like, 'Calix, I don't understand this'.

It's like, yeah that ain't going to work, it's a prototype.