What can you tell us about the future of caves? What's next up development-wise for caves?
TL;DRCaves are due for new, larger entrances enabled by real-time lighting tech, more and bigger caves with server-side OCS, AI combat, and hopefully dangerous fauna later, as this was only a first step.
Next up development-wise, we have a couple of prototype new entrances. So we have big sinkholes that you can fly the ship into. We have larger, more cavernous entrances that you could drive a ground vehicle into. We had those a little while ago, but, talking about all of the different teams you need, we hit a little tech hitch where we needed real-time probes, because obviously our planets do rotate, and the time of day changes organically as they rotate. So we needed some tech to make sure that the entrance to the caves wasn't pitch black during the day, because we could only light it in one certain way at the time. But moving forward, we'll be able to have it dynamically change as the planet rotates, and we'll be able to introduce these much larger entrances. Then with server-side OCS coming online, we can have more of them, and we can have them much bigger and deeper. We've got these room archetypes that we already have that we want to expand upon. You might find some with some structures inside, some that are more lived in. Moving forward, we'll have AI combat inside there, which we're also working towards. Of course, that'd be really cool, because I've seen lots of videos online of people shooting their guns and really enjoying the reverb and all of this stuff. So I imagine it would be really chaotic having a nice big fight in a big central hub of a cave. And the VoIP as well, the way the VoIP reverbs inside. You're going to be working with your team, trying to fight the AI inside and everything like that. Just really expanding upon it. As Dan said a few times, it was a toe in the water for caves.
One of the things that I would love to see in caves, I would love to see them become more dangerous. I would love to see that every step you take, you have to be careful. You don't know what's behind the corner. I know we're far from that right now, but I want us to get to the point where we have critters in there, stuff that can bite you, stuff that can jump at you and stuff like this. And when you hear a sound, you don't know what's coming. You're like, oh, was that it? Or is it something else? That's where I want to get, where people are in the dark alone and the flashlight starts flickering.
Yeah, fauna. I'm super excited for fauna in caves.
One video I saw that I really enjoyed was speaking to the danger of caves. A group was mining the FPS harvestables, and I guess they didn't do a very good job, because there was a reaction, and it exploded, and then they ragdolled away. It was funny. I was like, wow, you've got to be careful, man. There's a skill here that you've got to master. It's kind of a combination of the two: caves and harvestables all coming together to make a really cool experience.