Regarding cargo hauling, can you clarify how the loading and unload of ships will work at both the initial; launch of cargo system, and what the long-term vision of the cargo system will be?asked by Lethality

So I'm thinking Lethality wants to physically load and unload and this is sort of an extension or along the lines of what we're been talking about with the bigger Hull C class a little earlier on in 10 for the Chairman here.

So as we were saying, we are going to have both. So there is going to be physically loading and unloading and they'll also be, whether you want to call it automated or AI unloading/loading in sort of bigger space ports or bigger landing areas because that's generally what would happen in those cases, but there's definitely going to be gameplay that would involve you say flying out supplies to a remote outpost and there is no people there to help load or unload and you have to unload it. Or you come across some stuff you want to get that's floating in space, you have to load that in manually and do all the rest. So there's going to be both loading and unloading physically which we already have shown a small amount of like you looked at the Gamescom demo that we did of going to the moon after visiting Levski and Delmar and there were some crates, little containers and we picked it up and were taking it to the Freelancer we were flying at the time. That is an example of the more granular physical loading and unloading.

There will be equipment that will allow you to move bigger containers around. So we have some standard size, larger cargo containers and that will have sort of a grav lev jack stuff and potentially there will be other, whether we create some vehicles or things like the Argo to move smaller stuff around and then load it up onto bigger stuff.

So I think we're going to have both, I don't know if you want to elaborate on it because I know you already talked a bit about it.

Yeah that's basically it. To me personally, lik the most interesting stuff is actually when you're dealing with smaller quantities that you actually have to hand load because it just makes for more interesting mission scenarios when you don't want to just deliver it to the shop. Now I actually have to basically travel through space with this material that I procured, land and then I have to do that last leg and now i'm on foot and it's just a completely different type of experience, different types of challenges we can throw at a player.

What I would say that like, smuggling would be a case that you're not going to have a…

A supertanker full of fuel becomes hard to justify smuggling.

Yeah, well… and there's going to be all sizes of you know, there can be items that you can hold in your hand that you would potentially smuggle or carry it like diamonds or something, could be gems could be an example of that to a really massive containers that are just full of ore or liquids or whatever. So there's all kinds of it so there is, besides big bulk cargo because you have bulk cargo stuff and more bespoke like if I was collecting I don't know, sort of rare space truffles. So space truffles don't come in massive ton container things, they would be small containers, but they would be worth a lot of money so that would be something you would probably take personally around and of course you have smaller things like I was mentioning gems or perhaps contraband or you're smuggling drugs or things that you shouldn't smuggle and those particular ones you would have to put away in a hidden compartment, that was shielded, hope you don't get scanned or boarded by the Advocacy and then when you get on the planet you're going to have to Han Solo style sneak it off your ship.

That's the beauty of having it all based on essentially a kind of character level, first person level because it's not just about the ship, it's about also there's extra mechanics once you've landed and how do I get past the guards with this stuff and so I think that's going to add a whole bunch of like, fun gameplay for people.

Yeah to me, I've said before I tend to get bored fairly easily if I'm not constantly presented with different types of challenges and so I like the ability to take the high level concept of cargo transport and basically extend it as such that it doesn't just involve ships, but you've actually got, whether you're getting the stuff back to your ship and then do the space travel etc, or if you've landed with your ship and you need to actually get it to the guy in the back alley without security seeing you or whatever the case may be or you're carrying something really valuable and now since you're actually holding it, you're at a disadvantage because it takes you a couple seconds longer to actually drop that, pull your weapon so you're actually more vulnerable when you're running through the CD tunnels of Levski or something like that. So all of a sudden you can see players starting to do this mental calculus and thinking, "Well am I going to go on my own? Do I basically try to recruit a few friends, do I hire an NPC body guard as I'm doing this?" It's all that variety that to me, really makes it interesting.

Yeah, well..

Every player is going to go about it in a little bit different fashion.

Yeah, I mean.. Because obviously I read what people write out on our forums and elsewhere, but there's a lot, like people go, "I want to know more about game mechanics", but in reality there's a huge amount of, essentially what people would normally consider game mechanics or gameplay that comes out us building these core systems and we've really been pushing and it's been taking longer than obviously we were thinking it was going to take and partly it's because we're building it to work at a scale and across a huge universe and with millions of players, but our belief is that if we build these systems that are super flexible. So like we talked about item 2.0 and I think in the last studio update from L.A. we showed a little prototype of the interaction and if you take a look at the interaction, that's not an interaction system that you see in any FPS game. It's like you can pick things up and use them and plug them into something else and put a battery into something to turn it on or open up compartments and take. So you have this ability to manipulate items and use them and they have the ability to do what you would normally expect like a battery provides power and if this radio needed power, then you put it in and now suddenly the radio can work and maybe that will help you achieve something else.

So we're basically building this system and a good example of it is like when we're talking about the smuggling because all the stuff we're talking about in general falls out of the system of being able to physically own and manipulate, put stuff in areas and all the rest of the stuff so you know all we really have to do on top of that is just determine that these items are illegal and the AI logic for the law enforcement, the advocacy, whoever is that if they catch you with it, you're in trouble, but in general the manipulation, the hiding of it and all the rest, that all falls out of the scanning stuff that we've been working on, the item manipulation stuff that we've been working on.

So a lot of our professions we've talked at the base level of what we want to have for 3.0 kind of fall out of these core mechanics that we worked really, really hard on, but I think once they're done it's just going to provide a platform quite a ways beyond what you can currently do in 2.6.1. And that's when I get excited.

Yeah we've talked about this a number of times before to where basically you build the system and you get it setup properly, then it requires very little tweaking to affect a lot of gameplay, a lot of interesting gameplay potential and this is basically the route we've gone since the very beginning. We didn't want to go the route of having to custom code each one of these things and then yes the addition of new content becomes an enormously difficult task, and then you see this in a lot of other games to where the amount of content, the amount of new content that you can release always lags behind what the players can actually experience. They usually go out, they experience the new content and then they run in circles for the next 12 months until the next big update happens and in this case we wanted to eventually get to the point where we can put in place what I'd call a functional world and then basically we just give you entry points into that and everything else more or less falls out of that.

We're getting close. I think people will appreciate it when it's there.