Let's talk about failing to spawn ships correctly [and hangar] platforms getting stuck.

So let's talk about hangars first, right? So, people that play more in the PTU know how the system works, but it's actually a bit special in that, first of all, the hangars are instanced. So they're instanced on your shard. You have access to your hangar based on your ownership of it. But all the hangars on a given ATC gateway, so these are the actual hangar doors on the stations, are all stacked on top of each other. So that's why there's been bugs in the past during the PTU cycles for 4.0 where you would hear, oh yeah, and that bug took a while to fix because it required a technology change. But that was also crazy. The sound was just incredible. And so what that means is that when you're in the station and you want to go to your hangar, you have two options. One of them is use the lift. Now we're just talking about the lift, right? When you call the lift, it will actually unstow your hangar, create your hangar, and then give you permission to go there, right? Right the moment you hit that button. So there's a lot of things that need to happen in quick succession. Then you go through to your hangar. There's render culling that comes into play that will make sure that you only see your hangar, even though everybody's on top of each other, that physics only affects... Now, one of the big problems that we're dealing with right now, and we've been diving into it for a while, is that the ship elevator has a couple of issues. I've seen an Avenger rising from the grave through it. I've seen ships spawning on top of each other. So there's two problems behind it. The first one is that the platform itself is moved, right? It's not a physical movement. So it's not physics driving the movement. The ship is physics enabled.

That is a recipe for disaster.

Correct. When you see flapping like that, it's the combination of things, right? And so we're currently discussing a solution, because there are limitations. The way it's made is the way that they were limited to make it, but we need to fix it. Both elements are statically moved or they're both physically driven. You can't have this combination. That's what causes all these things. So that's why sometimes server FPS is good, performance is good, all your ships are going to go up that platform, everything's great. And some other times, half the ship is in the platform and that's an issue. So currently we're rejigging, rechanging the layout and the setup of the hangars to set this up properly so that it never happens again. The unstow issue is actually, we think at the moment, a bug in the timing of how, when you leave your hangar, we need to stow back this hangar, right? Because if you go to another shard, we want you to have access to your hangar. In the timing of this, if there's a ship on the pad when you leave, there's a possibility in the timing where the ship will be stowed with the hangar instead of being stowed on its own and then the hangar is clean. And that condition is not properly detected when you unstow the hangar again. And so for you as a player, you're not going to see a difference in the case where you leave with the ship on the pad, you leave your hangar, you come back on another shard and you just go to your hangar, your ship's going to be on it. But if you call a ship from the station, and the ship was carried with your hangar up and down, then ATC is not going to know that there's a ship on the pad and it will attempt to spawn it there, and that's where crazy happens. And so currently we're looking at that complete cycle to make sure that the timing is correct. There's also a couple of other issues related to this. Some corruption of data can happen in this case. And so we have an entire team dedicated to the hangars right now, just making sure these issues get solved because they're affecting everybody. I'm happy to report though that one other issue that we had with the hangars got solved, related to how you exit the hangar.

Usually in a ball of flaming wreckage.

Or after 25 minutes of queuing, where the system tells you in 100 seconds you'll be able to leave. We did hotfix a change to the way that what I call the hangar queues are managed. Again, the ATC manages the queues. It's managing how you exit your hangar, which doors open, stuff like that. At concurrency, so when a lot of players are in the same location, leaving and entering, this queue and those timers would get completely out of whack. And so it would either grant too much time to someone to leave or enter, we're talking 10x the time, or give you literally three seconds to leave. And then players would get stuck in the doors, where the doors would go, and then they would try to squeeze in, and the doors would squeeze them out. And then the rest is a little bit of a party. So we hopefully have something on Live already alleviating this, but we're still tracking to confirm completely that it doesn't happen again.