David, you're here as representative of the former vehicle experience, the current vehicle feature team. Where do you come in and out of this pipeline?

We actually are largely independent of the pipeline. The first reason is that we tend to try our best to not have to do code work for every single ship, just because there's loads of ships and it would be unfeasible to do so. So we sort of live adjacent to the pipeline, doing things to support it every so often. So that could be making tools to help designers, or a new piece of tech that you can integrate into the ship to make the doors open differently, something like that. And so we interact with the pipeline in the sense that we're trying to support it functioning. Most recently, for example, we made this tool that shows the designers why certain thrusters are being used in a certain way, which was received pretty positively, so that was good. So for example, the way the flight system works is it'll take the positioning of the thrusters that the artists have done and it'll try and automatically put them into groups to use them for certain things. So when you fly left, it has a list of thrusters where it's like, oh, I need to fire these thrusters when you go left. And that process is automatic. And the designers very often found that the thrusters were in odd groups and they didn't know why. So now there's a tool that shows them these thrusters are in this group and these are the reasons. And it's usually because, oh, you've rotated this thing in the model incorrectly or something like that.

So it thinks it's in the wrong direction.

Correct.

It was a nightmare having to go through the entirety of the XML and find out where we'd accidentally put X or Y, or a minus instead of a positive, and there was no real good feedback for it. So we'd have to just comb through the whole thing and try and figure out what wasn't firing or why it was pointed that way.

Thousands of lines, and as far as the game knew, you intentionally put it that way. Because you're telling it that. You said fire down the X axis. It didn't know that you wanted it down the Y instead.

Well, if it's physically pointing in the wrong direction, it won't fire if the implementation file has it in the opposite direction, because there's a degree of functionality with it as well for how far away from the angle it can point. But then that was the other problem: if we were one degree too far on a fixed thruster or something, it then wouldn't fire, despite the fact that it was correct, positive X and Y, because the angle wasn't the right angle, and we wouldn't know.

So now there's a tool that tells you.