Could you confirm that the 'Full 6DOF' control / IFCS mode will be implemented, and outline how the various IFCS modes are likely to be implemented (IFCS upgrades, programmable IFCS options, specific IFCS modules limited to certain ships, etc).asked by Logical Chimp

We are definitely going to be doing a full 6 degrees of freedom control mode. So, and this will be in the release that's coming out very shortly you'll be able to do that (what we call internally "release 13"). But the way we're thinking, because there's two basic requests... 1) People want to be able to have the full control and they want to go forwards and backwards, left, right, up and down, and also roll, and have to sort of additive. So, right now if you went into decoupled mode you can strafe left or right but it always goes back to the neutral position. And so what we're gonna change it around to is that you can go into the decoupled mode, and basically that's putting you into the 6DOF mode, and in that mode you can either change your rotation OR you can do additive motion - so you can basically go left or right, forward or back, up and down, as well as doing the roll and everything else, but it's not taking you back to neutral. So if you thrust right 5 times, you keep going right until you thrust left 5 times to cancel it out - which is sort of true 6DOF. On top of that, we're also going to be adding the option in standard IFCS to be able to strafe left, right, up and down as you're flying around. So you'll basically have the best of both worlds. You'll have the full control of being able to spin, go left, right, up and down in your ship and not ever go neutral, so you can sort of do that... or when you're flying around on the IFCS doing a turn, you'll also have the ability to give you some side thrust or whatever. So like if you're going head-on-head and people want to strafe you can maybe burst out without having to leave the IFCS mode, and then that will bring you back to your path before. So it allows more maneuvering and more options than we had before, and for us that sort of felt like that was the best option how to get the 6DOF to work in our system, because it's not particularly viable to have IFCS and 6DOF working together because they basically fight against each other 'cause IFCS is trying to fly you a certain way. So it certainly can... you can tell the IFCS system, "oh I wanna go left, or I wanna go right for a bit," but then IFCS is always wanting to get you back to a certain heading and velocity.So the way we look at it is we're going to add strafe ability to the normal flight mode, and then when you go into decoupled mode that's really your 6DOF mode, and so the moving around laterally, your vector changes are all additive now so they won't be going back to neutral. And then obviously you can do your orientation changes. I think hopefully that will satisfy a lot of the people out there.And then longer-term, in terms of how we're gonna do it, I think it's too early to say, but the kinda concept was that on the more basic ships you had a basic IFCS system - maybe you don't even have all these functionality or features - it just sort of flies in a very simple manner. But then if you have a more complicated one then you can get more of these features enabled, and maybe the reaction times are better, and maybe there's more customization on the more expensive ones. Because it would be kind of nice to different flight modules you can program into, so, you know, there's a sort of expensive customize-able one that really allows you to tweak everything that you want to do. That's still in the process of figuring out exactly how we're going to do that. Not in terms of how technically we do it, because it's pretty easy 'cause the features are all there - it's just a matter of what you turn on and off. It's more about like how best to do it in the items and then provide the interface for the player.