It was Halloween last year when we first showed off the Aegis manufacturer-specific style guide for the ship HUDs, and since then we haven't seen a lot of information about it. What can you tell us about maybe not just the Aegis one, but any manufacturer-based ship HUDs?
TL;DRAn intermediate, non-final HUD is in the PU for now, while the proper manufacturer HUDs wait until the Gladius one is just right; Drake and RSI art is in progress, with no firm rollout timing.
One thing we decided to do was do a little bit of a halfway house, because initially we got this cool thing that we've been building. We've been trying to get it really good for Squadron 42. So that was the initial focus for the Aegis HUD. And we felt that with the amount of improvements that were going on there, the PU was missing out. So we've done this kind of intermediate version at the moment, which is what you can see. I think that's since the previous release. It doesn't look final. It's not intended to look final. It looks kind of cool, but it's not where we want to end up. So we've got that version that has all the features in. We can do simple things like change the colors and fonts if you want to. But in terms of rolling out the proper final HUDs, the way we want to do it is essentially get that initial Gladius HUD internally, get that 100% how we want it, so all the features on there. So we have missile mode how we want it, bombs how we want it, all the different lock-ons and that kind of thing. And we're getting pretty close now, I think. But Chris Roberts basically wants to wait till that's just right, and then we're going to decide how we're going to roll that out to the rest of the game. While we've been developing that, it's not so difficult for us to do artwork as well. So we've started visual development on the Drake HUD as well as RSI. So those are ticking along in the background. But when they'll get rolled out to everybody, I'm not totally sure yet.
We've shown folks some of the early concepts for the Drake HUD. We haven't shown anything for the RSI HUD just yet. But we do a show every week. It'll come.
One thing we've started to do is, it's not the ship HUDs, but we started to roll out some manufacturer styles for the other screens in the ships. So for Crusader ships, for example, I think in 3.15, you'll see on some of those, we've got some new door panels and we've got a style that we can apply to the elevators and so on. So that work is starting to creep in there, even if it's not in the HUDs that you see right now.