The original Mustang Beta's quarters were called the COM4T. Why is the rework anything but comfortable?
TL;DRJared says the name was just funny, and explains that one-to-one interiors and exteriors, tight spaces and still-developing metrics made the original concepts a constant battle, with fidelity not meant to get in the way of play.
I just thought it was funny. One of the challenges in those days, that's less so now, is that ships in science fiction, ships in any fiction, in video games, were not generally designed one-to-one, full interiors, full exteriors. I mean, you look at classic ships like the Millennium Falcon. Gorgeous ship. It's the favorite of many people. But if you look at the interior versus the exterior, it doesn't quite line up the way it's supposed to. Just take the exit ramp. From the exterior, the ramp connects into the center of the ship. You walk up and you should be in the center of the ship. But when the camera cuts inside, you are coming in through the exterior of the corridor. There have been many interviews with folks who have tried to draw all those creative cutaways, manuals, just pulling their hair out, trying to make the Millennium Falcon make sense and having to fudge a lot of things. And you can get away with that in movies and TV shows. Famously, just about every shuttlecraft in Star Trek, especially the runabouts. You see this little tiny thing and you get inside and it's this huge room. For our game, because of the fidelity that we're pursuing, all of our stuff has to be one-to-one. The interiors have to fit into the exteriors. And one of the big challenges of our concepts in those first couple of years was really wrapping our heads around that, because we were still developing metrics. We were still figuring out how much space a player character needs to get around and do things. Because there are a lot of influences in Star Citizen. One of them, I don't think it's any secret, is World War II. There's a lot of World War II influences, and you want those experiences that you see in battleships and in submarines with tight corridors and people running back and forth and having to squeeze in and go past people. But in video games, because player locomotion is almost always just straightforward, it's hard to have those tight spaces. So it's always a constant battle.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where we want to add as much fidelity as possible, but we also don't want the fidelity to get in the way of interacting with the game, right? Because at the end of the day, we want people to play the game. And so the fidelity needs to come in sort of additively. It shouldn't get in the way of your experience. And the original Mustang did that.