How do you plan on building out the Persistent Universe? Are you planning on prioritizing the Stanton system and then work out from there or are you planning to finish building out systems that already have content for them for things like SQ42 or is there no real plan set for building out the PU at this time?asked by Lock Ostrie
TL;DRThe plan is to build one Stanton system to a gold standard with its four landing zones first, using the measured effort to estimate how long other systems will take.
Our midterm plan is to flesh out an entire system so almost like a vertical slice of what a system in the PU entails. I think we'll be focusing mostly on the Stanton system for the foreseeable future getting it to a gold standard quality we're focusing on the four landing zones in Stanton; ArcCorp's Area 18, Hurston, Microtech and Crusader. So getting all those landing zones fleshed out getting it so you can actually visit those landing zones, so we'll be working with other teams across the project who are fleshing out the space portion, the spaces in-between the landing zones starting with Crusader in 2.0. Basically getting a gold standard system is going to be our near to mid term priority.
When I first joined the team over a year ago now the idea was to be designing the first five star systems. What we did not know at that point was how long did it take us to make a single star system or even a single landing zone. Over the course of the year we really fleshed out a single landing zone and we've done most of the work needed for our second landing zone and just recently added points of interest around the Stanton star system itself. This is teaching us how long it's going to take us to do it. Even though I would say we are not one hundred percent complete with the landing zone yet once we have that, it will give us an idea how much more we need to do. So we shifted our focus from instead of the first five complete star systems to the first five landing zones.So we currently have four landing zones in Stanton. Those are landing zones, not like i'm going out to a space station to make a quick repair and getting back on. That's not a landing zone that's more like a mission. We're adding those as well. This tell us what we need to do. Then from here we'll move on to the next one which is Nyx, the Levski landing zone. A much less populated system. That's going to need a lot of activity in it as well, cause you don't want a single star system with one landing zone and that's it, how are those going to work out? This will tell us what a medium sized system takes to build, what a very small size system takes to build. Then we can look at our processes and see how we need to tweak those processes and see how we can go forward making a lot of content.
It will give us actual metrics which is something we don't have for some of the areas of our project. So once we get those metrics we can actually calculate ok this takes this long. If we want twenty systems by this time we know it will take this long to make. That will give us information like do we need to ramp up more resources or outsource a little bit moreJH: And how we can make changes to the system to make it better or faster or more procedural or what have you.