What has been the biggest technical challenge for you guys that you have not yet overcome? Map size, movement in multi crew ships or something completely different?asked by Mohoc

Well there's a lot of stuff that we're working on. One of the biggest things that we're working on is moving from single precision, which is 32-bit float, to double precision, which is 64-bit float. So we can have much larger scale maps and deal with much larger scale objects. In a first-person shooter which most 3D engines are built for (CryEngine, Unreal, etc...) everything is in 32-bit float, which is fine if you're in a limited space, say 4x4km or whatever. But we're obviously out in space with ships that, even though they're not flying at the speed of light, they're still pretty fast and can cover hundreds of thousands of km easily. So 64-bit just allows us to have a much bigger address space. It's a fairly big change because the whole engine is in 32-bit so it touches pretty much most of the engine, and we also have to work well with the rendering pipeline because the GPUs tend to be on 32-bit. So that's in progress, though I wouldn't say that it's something we don't know how to do but we're working on it. So we haven't overcome it yet but we're not worried about overcoming it - it just is a lot of work.Multi-crew ships sort of falls in a little bit with that, where we have our whole local physics simulation that happens inside the ships - which we're in the process of. So yours truly is doing some work on that, and a few other people including some talented folks at Crytek that are helping us out on that. But we've added functionality to the physics system that allows to have local physical worlds inside ships and now we're in the process of integrating that into the game. So that's also in progress, and later this year we're hoping to show you all that kind of working, which will be fun.And then I guess the other biggest technical challenge we have on the project is the overall sort of server structure. So right now we're playing multiplayer on Arena Commander but that's the local server that handles the frame-by-frame update between the ships in the area. But then there's a couple of other levels of server that we have above that. One is the system server which handles the matchmaking and co-ordination, and sort of runs what is happening in side the system in terms of which players will see each other when they go across a certain area. And the there's a universe server which keeps track of your status, your equipment, and where you are in the overall universe. So they're all in progress and we've made a lot of progress on the actual backbone, the technology, the communcation protocols... all of that. So we have "skeletons" of a bunch of that and some stuff is more fleshed out than other stuff.I would say those are the three big technical challenges that we're working on, and if there's any network programmers out there, we're hiring cos you can never have enough network and back-end guys. So give us a shout if you're out there!