How's it going with the new cockpit experience, the buttons and MFDs

So that's almost fully on vehicle experience team for obvious reasons, the cockpit experience, vehicle experience. These guys on the VTT side are absolutely supporting it, though, in terms of the MFD setups, the UI setups, the UI updates. A big part of what's coming, not a lot to do with the MFDs, but a big part of what's coming is the UI updates for the given ships and things like canvas slicing, scanning and radar, and that's what these guys are working on very specifically. So a lot of the UI is being updated, and we're really hoping to roll that out soon with the connection of scanning as well as potentially missile operator modes and these other things in the nearest future. I want to avoid dates.

Calix prepared a lot of the physical button actions on that dashboard. You want to talk about that for a second?

Yeah, so one of the things that we started with was just figuring out the technical side of how do we get an arbitrary feature, an arbitrary interaction on a ship, any ship, regardless of how we've connected to it, to be able to connect that to the physical state of a piece of geometry and being able to point at that specifically and update that, being able to animate that procedurally without having to export specific animations for every single button, being able to do that in fewer draw calls by having it still be part of the same mesh. And then once we had a basic pipeline for how this thing can connect to that thing to tell the other thing to do something, if you can even do that, which it needs to be able to affirm before it allows you to do things, because if you don't actually have control, the thing shouldn't respond. And if you don't have power, it shouldn't tell you that it's responded. And if it doesn't actually do the thing, it shouldn't. There's a lot of things going on in this one channel. But once we have that, then we need to go back through and decide, okay, well, what are the buttons that we have? Because there's a lot of things that the ships can do. Some ships have cargo, some ships have torpedoes, some ships don't even have real landing gear. So how do we set all this stuff up in a way that we can address each of those very different concerns? And made a template and a design sheet for how you figure out what buttons a ship has, how you figure out where they should be placed so that they get grouped up in a sensible way. And there's still some getting to know your ship, to know exactly where things are. But when you step into a new ship, it shouldn't just be madness. There should be some logic to it of, oh, all of my systems ended up over here. And maybe on this other ship, they're over here. But that's because everything is flowing in this direction. So systems, and then you've got your parameters, and then you've got the specific call and response type events or the comms type things. Having a format for determining that and then making it so that all of that was packaged in a way that artists can use it. And artists don't want to hear about any of the things I just said. So that's its own task of making all that make sense in just a purely aesthetic way: what does a button need to look like? How do the labels need to be? What are the sizes that that needs to be? What kind of distances do you need? Yeah, it's been a lot. It's been passed over to the vehicle content team to begin working on. We did the Gladius as the first implementation. There are improvements to be made to the system. But the foundational work is in a pretty solid place, and we have a lot of the general information that we need to move forward with it.

Yeah, Chris really wanted to make the player immersion experience when you're within a ship cockpit to be realistic and intuitive. So it should be like you're getting into the driver's seat of your car. All the buttons should be intuitive. They should read out the proper statuses of all the ship systems. When you press a button, it should physically move. There should be a light indicator that actually shows you not only what the status of that system is, but does light up you, the environment, the dashboard itself, and then making that a system that our developers can use in an easy way and also to not tax the system. These need to be optimized systems because we have hundreds of buttons that are going to be within the cockpit, is the challenge we have.

Mark set up the light linking tech, which we use for those, which is really, really strong because it lets us use a texture to create the emissive light effect, which lets us be a lot more specific and have text that lights up or doesn't or changes. It's much better than my early attempts with just putting a light there or making it glow brightly. That was a big improvement.

With those things, here's another fun thing when you're building out tech for other people. First part of it is, as Calix and Kirk mentioned, how do we go about making this? How can we make something optimal? We have hundreds of states. We don't want to bog down the network. We don't want to bog down rendering. We don't want to add tons of setup issues. So once we figured out how we could do this and get all the states that we want to show replicated to buttons and we had a working example, we have that kind of as our tier zero technology where we hook up a ship like a Gladius and we say, proof of concept, it works, it's great. The next phase of that for our team is how do we expand this to the rest of the ships? And that's where you start building tooling or improved workflows and getting engagement from how the community is reacting to those type of changes. So we have done the first part, which is here's the tech. Let's add some more. Now, how do we make it easier for someone else to just go in and plop it in and add it in?