Some ship designs have flaws with component swapping. How will this be addressed on legacy ships, especially where components won't fit past doors or airlocks and things like ladders?

A lot of that's what gold standard's for. So when we go through and do gold standards, using the Retaliator as an example, a lot of the components wouldn't fit through the doors of the Retaliator as you tractor beam them out and move them. So the doors and things have been widened so they would actually fit. Another thing is which components are actually meant to be taken out with a tractor beam. Size three and capitals obviously aren't meant to be tractor beamed out. You're supposed to go to a dry dock and someone else will take them out for you, because they're too large of components, because theoretically to get to them you need to cut parts of the hull out, because they're just too large for a person to lift. So size 0, 1 and 2, you should be able to tractor beam out. Doors that don't fit currently, gold standard will address that. But until we do gold standards on the interiors of a lot of the ships, there may be doors where you can't get them out, or places you can't get the components through.

There are a couple of random occasions where, as artists, we get, oh, can you jump on the ship for a half-an-hour fix to allow you to get your components out of your ship. We've got all of the ships divvied up amongst ourselves. So even though people leave and people join, there's the list of all of the ships, and it's like, okay, you're responsible for these. So if there's a component swapping issue on a particular ship, one of mine, I've forgotten which one it was, I had to remove a little bit of the room. Nothing players would really notice, but it's just enough to make the collision a bit more comfortable to move it out. So you get occasions like that where you'll get a random bug come through, and it's like, oh, if you've got a spare 10 minutes to do that, you quickly look at it, you're like, oh yeah, that's a really quick fix that will hopefully make your lives a lot easier. So we do try to. Even though I'm on this ship for X amount of time, I will disappear for an hour or two if it saves you guys the grief. It depends on the amount of work, right? If it's a massive overhaul, obviously that takes... But if I can sneak it in, I'll try.

Some of it's really quick wins, like when the ship was initially modelled, or when someone created the component base, they just forgot to cut a hole in the collision for the components. So it's literally impossible to remove it, because it's behind the collision of the exterior, for example.

I think a lot of our ships were made before there was any feature work that had been done on it, so we didn't know how we were going to tackle it. So we were just making the best decisions we could at the time, and now we know better. So that pipeline has evolved. Some of them are super quick; some of them are like, this door has no animation, it has no mechanics to do the animation, there's just a hole behind it, and they're the ones that take a bit more time. They need a proper art pass, proper design pass.

The Vanguard's a good example, right? It had that little railing, which from that point looked nice, having that little railing as you go up the stairs, where you just cut the railing off. It's a small little thing, easier to do, but at the time when we did it, looking from that standpoint, no one really thought, oh, that railing's going to get in the way of the components, because it wasn't something that people actively thought about.

Same with some of the component hatches that have doors that sort of clamshell open. So they open, it looks nice and cool, and like, yeah, it'll fit out there. And then when it comes to actually taking it out, they're a centimetre not far open enough. So there's all sorts of little things that you don't spot.

And this is the kind of stuff that happens with any video game. It's just usually they don't have a live environment in the middle of their development.

It's just tech debt, really. A feature comes online, it gets proven out, and then we have to reimplement that into a bunch of existing assets. We try our best to anticipate what kind of features will be coming, but we don't necessarily know how a feature will work. So part of the challenge of being a team that's affected by a feature is you have to then retroactively support it. So I think that's a big part of what gold standard is. It's: these are all the features we need to support in our vehicles, and it's basically making those vehicles comply with those features.

We had it with salvage as well, right? It was exactly the same thing, where it was like, oh, there's loads of quick fixes we can do, or, okay, we need to dedicate some time to this. And then when salvage first came online, we had quite a few of us working on it to really try and get that stuff sorted out. And other ships that were made maybe more recently, you go to fix it and you're like, this is fine.

It becomes a part of your validation. It becomes a part of the acceptance criteria for the ship, that it needs to support this feature. So we would bring those features into the review process and basically make sure, if we're making a new ship, it should have physicalized components, et cetera, that all of the features that exist for the ship will be validated as a part of the review process. So it's more the older content that was kind of... when we first started out, we were kind of discovering what a ship was.

The salvage thing was a really good example of how some things you just can't plan for ahead of time. Salvage is coming online. We know it's going to use the UV2 damage system. We've done all that for the ships already, because that's what damage does when you shoot ships. So we're good. And then when it came online, we're like, oh boy, we're not good.

We didn't realise quite how much the visuals would affect the actual data. So the parts of the ship that were slightly [hidden] wouldn't necessarily take as much damage, and it would look fine when you're blowing this thing up. But then it meant that you could never 100% salvage the ship, because you couldn't salvage certain panels. And obviously it just looks a bit weird that you'd be salvaging along and it would just stop.

When there was stuff behind it that would make you see through.

Or you salvage the left wing and then the rear right fin would just disappear, and you're like, what?