Clive Johnson · Lead Network Programmer, Foundry 42

I'm not too familiar. I think feature-wise, there's issues with the sheer size of the ships, and there aren't landing pads big enough for them. So there's some docking collars or docking technology that's required. Performance-wise, we've had the Idris in. We demoed it at, I believe it was Gamescom last year. So the performance technology is there, it just needs improving. I don't think it's a million miles away. On the network side of things, I think we're probably okay, because we don't really treat these big ships any differently than we do a player or anything else. It's all the same. It's all just entities to us. I don't think there's any big blockers on the gameplay side.

Rob Johnson · Lead Gameplay Programmer, Foundry 42 Wilmslow

No, for us, game code-wise, it's really just a push towards object container streaming, and also the ability to stream ships on background threads, which should come in as part of the object container streaming work. That will eliminate the stalls that you see when you spawn a few ships at a time. We're aware of those issues. QA here tell us about those issues. As engineers, we just have to go, it's going to be fixed in 3.3. So obviously, from a gameplay perspective, the bigger the ship, the bigger the stall when it loads in, because there's more entities that make up the ship. So whilst it's maybe not a blocker in the sense of, we can spawn big ships at the moment, to get them to a point where it's good enough to get them actually in the game for the releases, we just need to get that spawning on the background and a few more of these optimizations in. We're just building up to it. We've already got ships in the game like the Starfarer, which is pretty massive.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And the Reclaimer in 3.1.

Rob Johnson · Lead Gameplay Programmer, Foundry 42 Wilmslow

Yeah. So we're going pretty big already. But yeah, the Idris is pretty massive.