What new technologies and parts will make up the new Aurora model? As far as new damage states, what have you done for the new Aurora?

Well, Elwin's still got it in his... but he'll be handing that off, and then it'll actually be ready for the new damage system. So everything you've seen with all the new melting, wearing, underlying stuff. He's working out some kinks in it to make sure that there's room for actual equipment that we're putting in, the physical space for it. So physically it's being modified to just sort of fit our new systems, and it'll be a total upgrade. So same ship, but it'll look much better all around.

In the near future, all ships are going to receive a lighting upgrade. Chad Zamzo has developed a thing called light groups. And if you imagine the Caterpillar, it's got a thousand lights inside of it. What these light groups do is they kind of record the place and the settings of each light and reduce it all down to one entity. And we have far more control over animation of lighting and light states. So we're going to be doing a pass. First off, for 3.0, we're going to do a pass where it's just optimizing and reducing the number of entities, which will increase performance. But post 3.0, we're going to be adding some really cool lighting effects like startup sequences and flickering of lights on the wings of ships. So I'm very excited about the lighting possibilities. Nathan Dearsley is working on a bit of that. He's been doing some prototype work.

It looks amazing. Some of that you can see on this week's Citizens of the Stars that aired on Monday, some of Nathan's current work on prototyping the internal light and stuff like that.