Are we going to get more door and light panels for all or most of the ships? (touches on the system itself and improvements made)?

Again, that is up to the particular ship whether or not they want that or the format that they want it in. But the tech and the implementation pipeline for achieving that is there now. So I expect that probably we'll begin to use that and other similar kinds of features moving forward. I don't know anything about retroactively going back through the ships to update those unless they specifically have an update scheduled.

Calix, you want to talk about how you worked on getting the system states to be more controllable by the player, so that design and art can go and do things like we can change light states? We can do things like actually control multiple doors. We can have the door control panels actually react to the state of the door that it's controlling rather than it being a one-way communication path.

I think Kirk just did. Well, the issue is we've been able to do this for a long time, with very few exceptions of maybe you couldn't specifically get the UI panel to show up quite so easily. But the engine has been capable of doing this for a long time, but it's been incredibly difficult to actually set something up to achieve it. And so the thing that I started all this working on was trying to make it so that it was less of a chore to set up a door with its control panel, setting it up so that you can either put it in the object container with the ship and link it or you put it on the loadout and have it link automatically. And the reason that we weren't able to have this behavior is that the only way that you would get it is by having someone who knew absolutely everything about the door, how it worked, where it was getting the sensor information from, how the lights were set up in the light states of the room, and knew all that stuff at every step of the process, and then do it at every step of the process, which is not really how we make things. We have people who are dedicated to making our environments and dedicated to making the ships and dedicated to making the tech. And it's not really feasible to have these shamans to just walk through and bless everything. So it's much more important to be able to make it so that you can use these things without needing deep arcane understanding of the under-the-hood things that it's doing in order to set it up to behave that way. So the actual fix isn't so much making it that the doors can be locked or unlocked or even that the proximity sensor can be turned on or off or that the lights can be on. Those were already behaviors that those things had for the most part. There are some additional ones that we're adding, with the sensor being able to tell you that someone is there. We're expanding from here, but the real problem was making it so that you could place down a control panel, you could place down a door, and then it could have a proximity sensor or not, and it could have a light in the room or not. And then you could link those things and be done. And being able to do that is what lets our environment team and our designers on the ship side be able to actually use these to create the content that is useful and player facing. Because otherwise, it ends up being such a dark path to follow that you never get out.

By the way, there was also a bug fixed quite some time ago. The bug was that multiple control panels set up in different ways didn't properly handle the door states. So I know for a long time, the rear Connie door, if you open it from the inside, only the inside control panel would know about the state, the external enter, exit [garbled]. So, I hope we don't, but if we do have issues with that, please inform the Issue Council.

Yeah, the Cutlass and the Caterpillar, because the ships will support these things in different ways. The Cutlass and the Caterpillar both have control panels which have buttons that light up to reflect the state of the doors, whereas obviously the Star Runner has the screen, and we want to expand even from there. The other thing is that adding in the light controls for the rooms is much more limited at the moment than where we want it to be. And that's because the rooms that we have in our ships and the lighting states that we use with those is actually very deeply hard-coded into the ships, the emergency states and the power states. Those are fundamental aspects of ships at the moment. And so, except for the small slice that we're branching in the Star Runner, it's not really set up in a way that lets us manipulate those states outside of the scope of the ship from the player perspective, as an example. So there's work to be done there to make it so that that's feasible.

I do like the direction that we went, though, with the Star Runner. Touchpad-like devices that you actually interact with to change the door states, and they can have as many buttons as you want. Very, I don't know if this was mentioned, but very LCARS-ish UI to be able to manipulate the states of all the things you can with the control panel. And it's much more useful as far as giving player feedback as far as what the state of the room is and what they can and can't do. I'm pretty sure we're going to be using that particular design language moving forward.

Personally, I want screens all over ships. I love it. But not every ship should have that, I guess.