Are alien races treated as 'one' manufacturer each, or are there different brans of Xi'an/Banu/Vanduul ships? What is specific signature of Xi'an Scout manufacturer?asked by Andy Goodstar
TL;DRXi'an, Banu and Vanduul are each currently a single species-wide manufacturer, though more alien manufacturers may come later, with care that alien designs fit human ergonomics and the story.
I figure we would just tack this one on since we were just discussing the Scout. So right now Xi'an, Banu and Vanduul are kind of their own, I don't want to say brand, but I guess species brand in themselves.
Sure.
We may in the future look to expand those but at this moment we are looking at just a single manufacturer. That's correct?
Correct. The Vanduul components were implemented as Vanduul components. The Xi'an components will not, they'll actually be ... as we're doing a component refactor, the Xi'an components will be actual manufacture components. So we'll have "human" components that are on the ships so that you can upgrade them, exchange them them out, etc. In the future I think we will work with the writers and then come up with the alien manufacturers, each with their own components and capabilities. So that we can do things like have Xi'an specific components or whatnot. For now we are currently going with the human componentsDV: One of the things, if you guys actually watched the 10 for the Developers with Sean Tracy and Steve Bender, one of the things they talked about was human-to-alien analog components. For example if a Vanduul is how X feet taller than a human you don't want a human wearing a Vanduul t-shirt because it's going to be a lot bigger. So we also have to take that into consideration as far as when we create these alien manufacturers. We can't just take an alien t-shirt and throw it on a human and say "hey we're done". We have to take into consideration if the humans' size are; that their dimensions are; whether it is compatible with human ergonomics at all. So rather than just creating a bunch of alien manufacturers we want to make sure it is something that is realistic; that fits into the story; and actually fits into the game mechanically as well.
Right and that's a conversation for the Khartu-Al: the control scheme are these two spherical control components that humans will put their hands on. It's just a prototype at the moment we'll refine how that actually works but the early example of that was on the ... what are the Vanduul ships ... the Scythe ...
And the Glaive.
... and the Glavie. They had their own custom UI that had an alien flavour to it.
Right.
The same thing would be true for the Xi'an type of ships.
That's why Zane, our UI guy, he put static across the UI as if trying to show that we are trying to translate alien technology into human use. So it's still a little buggy in game, so it was a little flavour to that.
Yeah.
But in the future we may expand it. So you never know.