There's got to be some knock-ons to everybody having a very strong, powerful, focused forward light, though, right? It seems like the opportunities for trolling would be immense if you had this really super bright headlight that you could then just put into everybody's face.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's definitely performance concerns with some of the options that we can do with headlights. For example, if you had a shadow-casting headlight, which would make sense, because obviously if you're standing in a room or a landing zone, someone flies up and shines their headlight through the window, you want to see the nice shadows casting through. But unfortunately, it's very expensive to do that.

Four-kilometer shadow casting.

Yeah, for like a four-kilometer-long light with shadow casting, then you're going to suffer both performance and the quality of those shadows. So we need to come up with different kinds of solutions to do that. One is to obviously turn off the shadow casting, but then you have implications of, then the light will just shine through the ceiling and the walls, and it won't necessarily look good. So we'll have to find a real solution sometime in the future, but for now we're just trying to at least balance it so that it works for gameplay. There might be some rough edges, but ultimately it should be an improvement.

The four-kilometer shadow casting, it's easy to forget the scale of this game. In other games where you're looking at a jeep or whatever, the headlights only have to go X number of feet out in front of the jeep, but because of the scale of our game, if you're trying to see an asteroid with enough time so you can move and not hit it, we are talking quite a ways out that these lights have to go. And if they're casting shadows, that would be crazy.

Yeah, I mean, at the moment, I think most of the headlights were reaching a range of about 100 or 200 meters, which sounds kind of realistic as a car headlight or something. But then when you consider the speeds that you're traveling at, that's just not going to work if there's an asteroid like two kilometers in front of you. You just don't have the time to stop before you hit it or before you even see it.

So that's something that you're playing with right now, actually?

Yeah, exactly. So we'll increase the range as much as we can reasonably and give a certain amount of brightness and falloff so that it feels nice and realistic. And hopefully that will cover most of the cases where you'll need a headlight for gameplay.