Definitely, there are a lot of systems being put into place which will basically support everything the player will do. I can't remember the name we have for it internally right now but there is a whole system for players etc communicating while in space with regards to jobs. So let's say you want to send out a distress call. You can send that to just your friends or anybody, some people may come and help you, some may try and kill you, who knows. That entire system is basically the same system in which if you're out in your ship and you run out of fuel, you'd put out a tender to say "Hey, I'm at this location, please bring me fuel and I'll pay you X". This is all the system we're building out now and it's part of the whole new mission framework system. Let's say you're quantum travelling and you get interdicted by pirates and you communicate for help, it could be players or NPC's and it's basically a jobbing system.

The overall system is the same basic one whether it's for distress, asking people to do something, asking someone to join you and so forth. That system effectively gives a huge capacity for players to get together and do stuff in game. We need that system along with interdiction of course if you want to do cargo runs. There is going to be the "buy 500 tons of this" and we'll have to balance that and pricing and I'm sure it will be difficult to balance, but if you can just buy stuff, fly somewhere and then get your money, well there's no risk to that and that's no fun, there should be a well-balanced risk/reward.

When we put in mining, same thing, you're mining away and then get attacked, distress or need someone to come and haul stuff you've left nearby away etc and you'll pay them X. These are all jobbing type systems and of course there will be mechanics for mining and everything else, but these systems are much simpler to do than all the core tech stuff we've been working on like planets, making the game 64 bit etc. The main things we've got left now, the planetary stuff is there although we're continuing to refine it, the AI in terms of both the subsumption walkabout AI as well as the combat AI, although they work it's not to the level that we're happy with yet and also then the object container stuff.

Object containers, all they do is say "something is here" and then as you get closer to them, they say "OK, you're getting closer, now I need to load" and it could be layers like just external stuff you can see initially and then internal stuff. Right now what we're working on is the intelligence for when things stream in which is what we need for the next big release. Once we have that, core tech is basically done and then it's about layering on a bunch of very cool gameplay.

So with the next big release a lot of the underlying game is there and then we can look at transferring people between servers so we can have hundreds of thousands of people maybe in one instance, but that doesn't come online until later.

Planets are great but we need to generate the content there for the players to consume, like the homestead mission you saw, somebody perhaps takes a rescue mission to a planet and maybe it's a trap and you're ambushed, or maybe another time it's just a simple rescue mission, or we have ground vehicle racing on planets etc. We also don't want to have you coming to planet where you just use your ship and shoot everything easily, the balance should make it so that you have to physically land your ship and come out on the ground whether there are air defences or something else to force you down.