Is the development of social tools progressing?asked by Kusanagi Batu

Yes, social tools are progressing. While it's not going as fast as we would like, because we did have to divert resources to the efforts we talked about at the beginning of the show, there's still a lot of work actually being done on social tools in general. So back-end work has been moving along quite a bit, because there's a lot of back-end changes to be able to provide that. Social tools are inherently real time, and so there's a lot of communication messages, asynchronous messages that need to go out, and so that back end needs to support that really well. That's actually on track and is going really well. What we are still planning to do here, and where we're slowed down, is implementation in the game itself. Our first drop for social tools that we have planned is a revamp of the chat systems, which includes regional chat or location-based chat, meaning that we split the main chat into multiple depending on the location that you are at. This is in preparation for larger player count support per shard, so that we don't have a massive chat at the top of the list there. More presence, rich presence updates, the chat widget, a complete revamp of the chat widget, and a new application called the Social App that replaces the Comlink app, which, as we discussed, is an old Scaleform element that we want to get rid of.

I guess that's the other big part of this. There's a lot of UI work involved in screens like this.

Absolutely. The chat widget is a very complicated piece of UI. Even though it's simple in its appearance, the functionality behind it is very in-depth. We want you to be able to have different channels that you can manage, manage tabs the way you want, maybe have a bit more flexibility on where the UI is positioned, how it works, can you expand it? So we have a lot of functionality for that that's being done. The design is completed, implementation on the game side is about to start, UI is already on it, so it's progressing really well. That said, there are still features being worked on in the current version of the game. So there are improvements to VoIP and FoIP that are coming into every patch.

What are VoIP and FoIP, for those who don't know?

Voice over IP and face over IP. It's basically being able to transmit your voice over the network to other players.

And your face.

And your face, in our case, yes. So far, I think since 4.8, 4.9 and 4.10, there have been incremental changes to the VoIP back end, which transmits all of this. In 4.10 too, actually, there are changes to the synchronization code that synchronizes the face across the network, which is a lot more robust. And so unfortunately, for this feature, one of the big things we think is holding it up is supporting the UI in the game itself. Receiving calls right now is a bit hard to find; you don't get proper notifications for it. And so obviously, to be able to really feel these improvements, you need the UI changes. It's actually moving forward and we're trying to bring any improvements that we have into the game right now.

The question was, is the development of social tools progressing? The answer is yes, very much. It's coming to a start as a new year.