Which upcoming feature gives you the biggest headache so far? Which will probably be the hardest nut to crack, except the new item system.asked by Drugh

Are you serious?

Except the new item system.

He put that in there, the guy new, the guy new, he's like they're gonna answer item port system.

Of course it's the new item system.

So I wonder is the guy's name Drew or Drug? Or Droogah?

Druh, Drew, Druff.

Druff.

I don't know, I can barely read.

Awful. Okay so which feature beyond Item Port because the Item Port one is really tricky and yeah I'm trying to answer with the Item port.

Well I'm just gonna go ahead and do it. It's the Item Port system and we can go into other things, but I'm gonna talk about it anyways because it is the biggest headache so far because we're working on it all the time and you're working on it constantly.

Mhm.

So the biggest thing that we're dealing with right is all the characters for example are going through a major transitional phase. They're going from what, CryTek uses CDF's which is a type of XML where you tie all your items together, into a sophisticated item port system.

Yup.

And you've currently been working with Engineers on building this tool and so now we're going to be able to build characters as items with this new item port system which is super helpful, but at the same time it's difficult because you're trying to support everything that's previously existed because you don't want to break everything for design.

Exactly.

Cinematics, but yet you want to push forward and use the new tech so like it's difficult to support both, but you do have to make the transition.

Yeah, it's one of those infamous problems where you've done everything right when you have exactly what you started with.

Right.

Which seems to make no sense. So visually right and Forrest hits the nail on the head with this one. Again the CDF setup was great for Crytek, it's really hard to maintain hundreds of characters with that sort of system. The other thing that didn't work for us on a coding... programming side is every independent piece of the character, actually needs some component code to go with it.

And it needs persistence, right?

And it needs persistence, exactly. So because of the new item layout we can actually have different code running, different functions running on different pieces of the character itself rather than you being one character as a whole, you're actually a collection of a lot of different gameplay components that are being updated differently than other things. We kind of didn't really answer is question except the new item system.

Yeah and..

Beyond the new item system, what else hurts us? Like the character one is a hard one.I would honestly say just the full scale because we're' doing the full scale solar systems now and that's something that I really think is gonna end up out to the community sooner rather than later, is the full size solar system itself. I think that's gonna be the hardest nut to crack. We've already got all the support in it, but it's all the extraneous stuff that we haven't thought of yet or haven't even seen. So we've got QA starting to run it through these full scale tests and then not only will we have full scale, but likely at some... I don't know if it's gonna be at the same time, I'd like to see this happen all to together, is we put one of the "procedural" planets within there.

Right.

Now I call it "Procedural", it's gonna be the designer controlled planet. So we put one of the planets into the full solar system scale and then we see all the problem that, that brings.

Yup.

Right and then we've got to start fixing these..

We're combining these fulls systems or full solar systems with procedural planets,ST: Exactly.

With the player customization and the backend.

Yup.

The persistence so your character is your character going forward and all these things come together which are all 100% necessary for this project.

But how awesome will that be because that is the last piece.

But how great is it gonna be because that's really.. We've done so much of the development for art and the content and figuring this stuff out.

Sure we're always doing a smaller scale version right, smaller scale and this is finally everything.

And this is what brings it together right? It takes all these things we've been working on these past couple years and finally puts these final pieces together.

Exactly. So it's Large world, item port, planets working.

It's super exciting, but like anything we know it won't be easy, it will be a headache and it will be difficult, but we will achieve it and it will be conquered and it will be awesome, but you know there will be problems.

But yeah you guys will see this sooner rather than later.

Oh for sure yeah.

Because we're doing the testing now.

We're doing the testing now, Awesome. Any chance.. How did they know about that new item system, I wanna ask, I'm gonna ask you first.

I bet you Chris talks about it all the time.

You think this is one of our internal employees asking this question just to mess with us?

Oh you think so?

Maybe? I would think so.

Probably... except the new people.