We've talked in the past about exploring the opportunity to have the on-screen HUD be a component that you can replace in a ship. [Is that still something we can explore later down the line?]
TL;DRReplaceable HUDs remain something to explore later; first they need to build the foundation, with ships established as designed and Item 2.0 seat work opening the door to swappable interiors.
Yeah, it's just a matter of building that foundation out first. Because one of the things that we've been using a lot more in the past year or so is this internal tool we have called DataForge, just for making authoring so much of this content a lot easier and a lot faster, and using something like that to then, okay, now we can much more easily make these different kinds of screen records to say this is what this ship's HUD is, this is what the interface is going to be. But just getting that foundation to say, okay, we could build any HUD for any ship on any panel setup in very little time. Once we get to that point, that's really when we can start saying, all right, what are some of the ways that we can play with this and make something really cool and make something different from that foundation set?
I know Chris is really interested in ship customization, but we think what we'll do is we'll probably establish the ships as designed first off and then allow for things like that later. One of the efforts going on right now is, you've heard of Item 2.0. Have we mentioned Item 2.0 at all? Is this news? Item 2.0 can be divided into several categories. There's seat 2.0, there's turret 2.0, there's landing gear 2.0. But what we're focusing on right now is the seats. And what that means for the cockpits is that the joysticks and the MFD monitors are going to start to become one object, or at least separate from the ship, that can be plugged in. And that's actually just starting right now. So it opens the door to customization and swappability of interiors down the road.
I saw a little bit of that in the ATV yesterday actually, when you saw the Cutlass cockpit completely removed.
And that's very much, even though it's still sort of one of those on-the-cusp ships, some of it will be set before all of Item 2.0 is in. There's still going to be other aspects of Item 2.0 that will be layered in over time. But just making sure that we're building it to take advantage of these new systems as soon as they come online. So like you mentioned, it's its own seat item. So on that infinite timeline, cool, we get to a point where now we could offer different seats. Now you can change that out much more easily and as a preset thing, as opposed to... like the Aurora LX had the leather.