I would love to get what the thought process is throughout each stage in re-building or re-designing the older ships, for example the hornet or 300 series. Does a lot of talk between each department happen or is it just tossed back and forth till it's perfect and not something completely different from the original.asked by CC Corp

What I love about this question is, it's happening. We kind of talked about the pipeline a little bit but we didn't touch on older ships. We didn't talk about, we talked a little about the constellation. Do you go this ship isn't what we originally planned, hey guys let's talk about, or is it tech is the new thing? What normally happens?

Usually the first thing that we do is we look at the one of the legacy ships and there's some obvious fixes that we need to do, make it more modular right? standardize the parts that are inside the ship, that way we have an external library we can pull from so if you have a seat and a joystick, instead of building it unique to one ship, we keep that sort of separate and that's a thing now that we can potentially put in other ships.We also learned very early that we had to standardize all of our interface as you're sitting in the cockpit. Create templates and create kind of proxy examples of animation works because we can't have an unlimited amount of animations so it has to be fairly reusable from ship to ship and we kind of started targeting in on individual manufacturers so each manufacture has kind of a specific layout that's kind of consistent throughout the ships.The other thing is we obviously have switched a lot of our tech. we went from the traditional unwraps and doing textures from scratch to doing more of a tiling system. Obviously with physically based renderer came on we had to start converting the ships over to the new rendering system which required us to update all of our textures and all of our materials so that's still kind of a big challenge and were still porting over the ships from that system and we have stuff like the Argo system that's starting to get standardized which now we had to update all of our cargo holds to actually support the new designs, which you know the constellation is the best example of taking a legacy ship and now bringing it into our next gen pipeline.You know everything from the seats to the interface to the cargo system, to the materials, to our modeling techniques, and the reusability and to the modular aspects, and then the gameplay requirements so that was kind of a big chunk that was required and we decided to tackle that and it took some time but now that we have all these system in place, it ended up being a very good example for what we needed to do for some smaller ships.

Is it all generally system or have you guys gotten involved later to reimagine a ship?

I think while I've been here the biggest thing has been more about the components you use in the ship is that there is a really long list of components different manufacturers that have been created in lore that we realized there were a lot of double, triples, that maybe just for simplicity sake, if we kind of tried to pair those down so it was just easier for the designer, for the artists like oh it's going to be this one manufacturer that produces this one thing, we don't need 40 different company making shield generators., we can have the standard few that has their obvious pros and cons.That's been a big thing, sometimes there are ships that we've had ideas form that we want to be able to work on but maybe some of the thing stuff that you guys are doing kind of affects that, oh we're going to have to make sure that this one feels distinct enough and it's not just a copy of this to a certain degree.

Yeah it's really interesting and from the scheduling side, from the production side, were always looking at what's next, what makes sense because we have a limited amount of resources right? We're all a resource at this company so it's always like well, we'd love to get back and redo some of these older ships but we don't have bandwidth because we really want to get onto the new ships it's always kind of a balancing act, something that we just become passionate about because we've been really looking at it for 3 years and some were like we'll get back to it, it's really more important to get onto to these items.

It's also as features come online.

Yes exactly.

Like there's more thing to refactor, we can go back and make the aurora series up to current systems but the time it will take to do that, we will have another system up so we'll need to do it again. So to a certain extent we have to look at how of out of date things are versus how much we'd be able to bring them up to speed and how much were still building the game to be.

We want to minimize how much we, we don't want to rebuild the ship from complete scratch, there's some situations that we kind of have to but for the most part, for me the most important thing really is the efficiency and optimization of it and a lot of the reasons we've had to go back to older ships and we still need to go back to some older ships like the cutlass because when we originally built them, we build them like a game model and now we have all this tech that takes advantage of certain approaches, we need to go back and abide by those approaches to make it efficient for the game because obviously having these extremely expensive ships in the game hurts performance and after we kind of initially started getting stuff out there we were like we gotta make this game run well because people are going to be today and they aren't going to be playing when it theoretically come out you know years down the road.You actually you know, we had to decide a year or two years ago we need to figure out the most efficient way to make these ships because this is going to be important because this thing needs to sustain for a long period of time. and also you know I'm not real big in completely redesigning the old ships, i think it's kind of cool, it's kind of like a classic car, you know I'd rather see a new model of the ship, get it efficent, get it using all the systems work the design and not do too much to it right and then create a new version of the ship right that's a new model like a car you know what I mean and when you see someone flying around in that 2014 model, you know it's kind of special.[Everyone agrees in approval]

Because you could even break this down in a production standpoint, we just have a rebuilding team right? and then we have the team that's building the ships that we all want to see that we've have been talking about, then we have the live time. We have several different kinds of games happening all at the same place with the same resources and I think that always comes down to pros and cons, what do we want to see before other things and so on and so on.