Are you happy with what we're seeing so far? Are you happy with the first iteration of mining? Are you happy with how people are using the tier zero implementation of groups?
TL;DRRoberts is happy with mining and groups as a foundation given the time available, but says much more is wanted, including more variety, refineries, and a more unified UI.
Well, yes, for what we have the time to do. So for instance, there's quite a bit more stuff that we want to do, have more variety, some more nuance, and obviously allow you to mine not just having the Prospector. But for what we've done, yeah, I think we've done a nice combination of... visually quite cool. And there is, I don't know whether you want to call it a mini game, but there is a certain amount of management you have to do as you're mining that makes it more than just holding a space bar for a certain period of time and uptick the resources. And I think as we sort of fill out, like we've got plans for refineries and stuff in 3.3 and beyond. So as we fill out the sort of whole supply chain that will happen with that and have more roles, I think there'll be some really cool stuff where people can be focusing on mining and their friends can be taking what they've mined off to the refinery to get it refined into the various materials that then could be sold on somewhere else. So I think it's a good foundation, but yeah, there's a lot more that we want to do, because we sort of want to build out pretty much all these professions we've talked about to a level of sophistication that perhaps you don't normally see.
For me, when I was jumping in, one of my favorite things to see, and maybe I'm just a weirdo, is flying over the surface and seeing the surface scattered with Prospectors all doing their thing. It's very, very frontier-like.
Well, I think there's some UI. The overall UI needs a better unification. We've just had all these different, like here's the mining UI, here's the scanning UI, here's the HUD stuff. So that's a longer term thing that we'll be fixing up and moving more to sort of 3D UI, which I kind of prefer. But our biggest problem is just pulling all these things together, even with the amount of people we have. It always seems to take longer and it's more difficult than anyone ever conceived or thought. I think the Agile method that we've been using is definitely helping out, where people are sort of having groups that feel like their own little team that can achieve stuff. We're still getting used to that. You can definitely see the benefit, like going from 3.0 to 3.1. And having a cadence is also good. I think 3.2, when we first went to PTU, it was in a lot better shape than, for instance, when 3.0 first went to PTU. And that was partly because we're not taking as long between releases. And so it has to be kept in a better state. And people are, like I said, getting used to the cadence. So I think as we go forward, you'll continue to sort of see benefits from that.