David Colson · Gameplay Programmer, Product Owner of the Vehicle Feature Team

Yeah, there's a lot of technical obstacles to that. Some of them we're actually making progress on, like you need docking and stuff for the Hull C to be useful. And John can speak to all of the other stuff. There's just so many technical hurdles to get that ship out.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, so docking is obviously a big one, which we're handling on the vehicle side. Then the other things really are having multiple physics grids in a ship and having vis areas and area shapes scale dynamically at runtime. Area shapes are basically just a markup that we can use to define a room's volume, or how large a room is, so you can have the audio tied to it, the air tied to it, and vis areas control the visibility in those areas. The engine assumes they are always static and they never change. All you can do is you can turn on and off a portal to look in or move in and out of them. Obviously, the Hull C has this big section that expands in the middle, so these rooms have to dynamically scale at runtime, which is something the engine was never designed to do, and it needs adjusting to do that. It's the same for physics grids. At the moment, we have one physics grid per ship. Having multiple ones for the front and the back is a relatively easy change, but having that third one that then dynamically scales at runtime is the other big issue. So docking and those core engine problems are the big first hurdles, and then we move into performance and optimization. At the moment, SCU is a one-to-one match, so the Hull C is like 4,000-odd SCU of cargo. At the moment, that would be 4,000 boxes stuck to the outside of the ship, which is not going to be great for performance. So we need to have the cargo system, which is another team outside the vehicle team completely, work on using the different sized boxes. So if I buy 32 SCU of stuff, don't fill my ship with 32 individual boxes. Fill it with one 32 SCU box. And then that just scales for the Hull C. So instead of having 4,000 boxes on, you might only have 100 boxes. And that pretty much touches on them all. So a lot of those, they've been in limbo for a while. I'd say the vast majority of those are either in progress now or going to be imminently in progress.