What ships have gold-standard passes on their way, and what should we expect from them?

So the gold standard work is any of our release ships that we're working on will get that incorporated in them. And a lot of it comes down to supporting features that have come online since that ship was released. That's probably the best way of describing what gold standard is really. It's going back in and making sure that the items are interactive that should be interactive. It's going back and making sure that things adhere to metrics correctly. If you take the Retaliator as an example, unfortunately, some of the corridor spaces were just a little bit too small to allow our AI to navigate comfortably through it. So we had to just go in and massage things around a little bit. It's quite delicate with our approach so that we're not changing the ships too much where possible. So things like making corridors a little bit wider or moving items around to make them more accessible for players and AI, that's relatively straightforward. Things that are a little bit more, I guess, is things like adding big airlocks to the side of ships that didn't necessarily have airlocks in the right position. And that's something that we've started doing on the Retaliator as well. We've taken it as far as doing all the interior changes. We just haven't got around to doing the exterior changes yet. And that's why we haven't really seen much from it. But the main part is just making sure the interactions work, bringing it all up to the experience level that we want. So dashboards and things like that work. And the items. Have I forgotten anything? One of the designers will jump in and tell me I've probably forgotten something.

Components is the big thing.

It's also an opportunity for us to go back and change anything that we've decided needs to change as a result. As the game's evolved and progressed and new features and things have come online, the gold standard is the perfect opportunity for us to go in and correct things or improve things or just get things more where we want them to be. Something like the Sabre one, for example, there wasn't much needed to be changed from the interior point of view, but the 600i's on the opposite end of the spectrum and it's an opportunity to completely change what we have learned from this experience. And the Starfarer will be very much a similar sort of situation where we can take everything we've learned and move it forward.

And it's ever evolving as well because as new features come online, a gold standard two years ago might not have had the refueling ports in it or... I can't think of anything else. But as features come online, they get added to the gold standard list of things to do. The door screens that have all the lighting controls, they're all additional features that as they come online, we're like, oh, yeah, cool, let's add that to the gold standard list. And so we always joke about, oh, we've done gold standard, do we go onto platinum standard? How far do we go? But it's just that, I guess, ever moving line of where we want the game to be.

It's probably also worth, Ben touched on it briefly, that gold standard doesn't necessarily mean full rework. Some ships will need that. The 600i's gold standard will be pretty close to a full rework. I mean, the exterior shape isn't really going to change. The exterior visuals beyond supporting docking collars and maybe any knock-ons from interior changes, but it's not like, put it all in the bin, start again fresh. And then you have the other end of the scale, like Mark mentioned with the Sabre, where pretty much the exterior work was just putting in the component hatches and doing a bit of material optimization. And it's everything in between that. We have a list of everything we want to do for gold standard, but that is not a time-boxed amount of time per ship to do it. It varies per ship.

I think all in all, it's important that folks remember that a gold standard is not a guaranteed rework. It's essentially a review process of the ship to bring it up to whatever today's current Star Citizen standard is, as you said, as more features come online. Adding fuel ports is a great one. Going back to the ships and going, oh, all of these need fuel ports that we didn't know where to add or how, because we didn't know how fueling was going to work when we were building those ships, but now it's going back and adding those. So when folks see something like the Cutlass Black gold standard, that's not another full rework of the Cutlass. They shouldn't expect massive changes to the hull of the ship or anything like that.

Correct. The Cutlass one off the top of my head will be, again, making sure the components have space, adjusting the cockpit so it's less wall of screens and you're actually sat in it properly.