Will we have a PA-like system in our ships?

Actually, I remember that question last year. That is definitely something I personally feel pretty passionate about. Yes, there will be. And we've actually made progress on that tech. So last time we spoke about it, we were starting to get it to the point where we had some of these dynamic events with these mission-driven PAs being broadcast into multiple locations and off of speaker arrays and things like that. And that was taking the fundamental basics of how this would work, having a source being broadcast across to multiple receivers. And since then, with this last Fleet Week and Siege Wars, we've pushed that further and did some more robust work with it. There's still next steps after that, which would be to have a bit more finer detail on the types of PA and the speaker arrays, so we can have better detail between a hallway PA versus a room versus the bigger hangars and things like that. And then next after that is to take it to an actual ship. We've been doing these mostly in locations and whatnot. So now we need to take a ship as an example, as a prototype, and do it there. What would probably be the source would be the ship computer. So we'll look at warnings and crits, and we would like for that to actually, like this is suggesting, have the PA broadcast through the ship and tell the whole ship that you're about to blow up. But that's going to take that prototyping. And then, as you can probably imagine, taking that one markup for that one ship and putting it across our whole fleet of ships, that's going to be quite an undertaking. We'd like to do that the most efficient way as well. But one step further is to take it so it's not just the ship computer or any kind of system voice doing that, but to give the player interaction to actually speak into this PA, in a targeted room. For example, they've just rescued some guy and he's in their cargo bay. You can actually say, I'm talking directly to the cargo bay, and say, hey, welcome to my ship, blah, blah, blah, and have it come out of the PA speakers, and that person will go, oh, cool, thanks, and whatnot. So that kind of level of detail is really what we're after. And as you can see, it's going to take a few iterations of tech and steps to get there, but we're on our way and we're making progress.

And you're pretty clear on that all the way up until you get to the parts where players can speak over it. At that point, you run into the same considerations in-game radio has. Now, in-game radio we'd broadcast server-wide or whatever, but this is still the ability to change your virtual microphone to an MP3 out and blast music over your spaceship and stuff. So for folks who want it, you have a tremendous champion in Bob here.

Yeah, we'll have to see if it's something to be more client-side, or if it's a person in your group or something, and not to the full-on server. But yeah, you're right, though, that open mic can be abused.

I mean, it happens to some extent in voice over IP, too.

I was just going to say, this is taking that already existing voice over IP and making it in-game and in-world. So I would hope that still works.