Speaking of Item 2.0, can you tell us more about how things are developing, changing or improving, something interesting that impacts ships?

Well, just one of the basic ones, because I also know from a lot of times just flipping through different community streamers while they're playing the game, they're like, oh, I wonder when this bug will get fixed on this ship, of getting out of your ship and having it just spin for no reason. And that's one of those sort of simple ones that we actually will be able to start really addressing and getting locked back down once we have Item 2.0. Because, like you were sort of saying, the current setup now: if you aren't piloting your ship, and not just, oh, I'm sitting in the co-pilot seat; it's like no, are you in the pilot seat of your ship? Okay, cool. Everything's powered on. Everything has some level of awareness. You get hit, the ship will counter-correct and stop its own movement. You get out of the ship, it has none of that communication. It has none of that awareness of self. So once we have Item 2.0, it's like, all right, cool. Now you're allowed to auto-stabilize again, because your ship's IFCS, even when you're not in the pilot seat, is going to say, hey, why am I spinning? I shouldn't be spinning. Thrusters, stop my spinning. And then you may come back and you've tilted from taking a hit or taking an impact, but it shouldn't just be spinning on its own and then pinball you out into nowhere if you approach the ship wrong.

The thing that excites me the most that's happening right now is the upgrade to the turrets. We've had a lot of problems with the gameplay of the turrets, and I'm excited. I just saw Mark Abent's new implementation. It's amazing. So I'm mostly excited about that. I've been helping him prototype a couple things. But beyond that, optimization is going to be... and the ships are going to actually look better when we do Item 2.0. And it may not be clear, but we optimize the ships by adding LODs to the ships. In a normal engine, LODs switch at a constant rate of distance. But in our engine, we have a switching rate based on the smallest average poly size of the LOD. So if you have a ship hull and it's got a little tiny poly in it, that LOD is going to switch to the next lowest LOD fast. So we spend a lot of time looking for these small polys. And then due to the old tech that we've been using, say to hook up the joysticks to a player and run IK, traditionally the joysticks have been part of the exterior of the ship. You haven't known that, but that's actually been a thing. So when we move the joysticks to cockpit 2.0, that means the little LODs that are on these joysticks won't be influencing the LOD switching of the entire ship, which means we get a better looking ship closer up and as it switches. So it's going to be great. I'm very excited.

And for anyone who might not know what LODs are, they're levels of detail. It's the difference between seeing every single poly of the ship when it's right up close and then watching smaller and progressively less detailed versions of it.

Yeah, modelers are ridiculous. They make these ships out of millions of polys, so LOD 1 will be 500,000 and LOD 2 will be 200,000.

And you're trying to find a balance between range and visual loss. We're trying to make it so you don't see any pop; you're not supposed to see the model change. That's the perfect world scenario of an LOD. But after a while, when you're really just supposed to hit a certain poly count versus certain pixel space, you're like...

Every time you see something just pop on the screen, that's an LOD.

Yeah, exactly. That's usually an LOD. Could be streaming, could be a model just appearing, whatever kind of issue, but definitely we try and make those as clean as possible.