How has the Building Blocks technology developed in the last year, and where would you like to see it go in the future?

I'll start. There's plenty of things that Bone could say on this. But I think the important thing from my side is that we've rolled it out from something that the core UI team used to use, and we were working out how to use it as well. It's got to a point now where it's good enough for the rest of the team to use. So we rolled it out to game designers across the company, some of the artists, and that kind of thing. So it kind of makes our jobs easier, I suppose, because it's not just six people trying to get the UI done for the whole company. Now, those particular teams can take control and they can make their own kind of demos and functional versions of stuff. So that's a really big thing that it's brought to us. I'm sure Bone could go a lot into the technical things that have changed over the past year as well.

The past year, I think the major thing that we've been working on at the core tech level would be adding 3D. It's a big feature, and as soon as you jump from drawing some text and some images to, hey, I want to be able to draw models, I want to be able to draw characters, vehicles, and all these kind of things as part of the UI scene, things get pretty complicated. We've been working on that as part of the year. That involves lighting for those models, how the materials look, do you do holograms? How do they appear in the UI? Do they appear in a screen? Do they appear over a screen? Do they appear without a screen? If you can have hologram UIs of floating letters, ships and stuff like that. There's all kinds of exciting rendering tech that we've been involved in with that. I think the first thing we've seen it in is the inventory. That was really, really quite complicated. We show 50 models at a time, and each of those individual models has its own scene, its own camera, it has three lights. So there's just thousands and thousands of little objects we have to manage all the time. So that's what we've been doing over the past year. So as a core technology group, we develop that stuff ready for the gameplay teams to use. So I'm hoping that we're in a space that they start using it, and then they'll develop their UIs, and hopefully the players will get to see that in a couple of releases' time after that, because we're right at the start of that chain. So it's now in a state that the gameplay teams start to use it, and then they come back to me and say, hey, it's not quite working correctly yet, and then I fix a few things, and then they can start developing their features with those kind of things.

As well as the 3D, actually, we've put a lot more time into reusable pieces as well. So maybe when Bone did his talk before, I know Zane showed some restylable stuff, which is really cool. But the actual process to do that was pretty complicated. So if you wanted a button, you had to make it from a square object and put some text on and all that kind of thing. And we've got a system now which means we can package those things up. So if somebody wants a button, instead of having to build it from other pieces, they can just drag a button into their scene and change the name on it. So we've added quite a few bits like that. It doesn't make a massive difference to what people see at the end of the process, but for less technical people, game designers and artists, it's a lot easier for them to just build a screen out of pieces. And also, all those pieces are restylable as well. So for example, at the moment, we've just added a Crusader style to the game. So if someone's already set up a screen, we can just turn it to Crusader and it will change colors and some of the graphics will change and so on, which is kind of cool.