You mentioned that NPC AI will differ depending on the time of day. Do you think we will see different NPCs depending on the day of the week, say a weekday as opposed to a weekend?
TL;DRDay-of-week variation will be less common than the time-of-day schedules, but occasional periodic events, such as a ship that shows up only every so often, are likely on a case-by-case basis.
That's something we've actually talked about specifically. I think it'll be less frequently used. I think you're going to see the impact once we enable the 24-hour schedules. That you're going to see every single day, and you would expect to see it. You show up at night, you don't expect to see as many people at this landing zone. You show up in the day, you expect to see a different mix of people, et cetera, et cetera. When we've talked about this specific concept in the past, it's usually been along the lines of some sort of event that happens only periodically. Like Hurston, for example: we were talking about having a ship that... Because it's a commodity planet, you've got all these overworked, oppressed workers being exploited. It was only natural, when you're following a logical sequence of events, that some of these guys would be seeking to pilfer some of the valuable ores and stuff they're pulling out of the ground. What we wanted to have is a ship, and having it show up every night at 3 a.m. becomes a little bit too repetitive, too predictable. And so in that particular case, we were talking about how it'd be neat if this guy showed up every second Tuesday or something like that. Or maybe he only shows up on occasion, and it's always several days out once you actually talk to a particular guy in the bar, something like that. So I think we will absolutely have less regular types of scheduled events, but that'll be more on a case-by-case basis.