What are our thoughts about changing the standard quantum travel effect and providing some visual breakup for folks who quantum travel a lot? Is there a possibility for some kind of dynamic generation in those effects, where the effect would change based on how you've tweaked the engine or on environmental effects?

Yeah, so for sure, you kind of nailed it there. I think there's a bit of visual fatigue that comes in when it's one of the earlier effects that people just see a lot. I've seen that quantum travel effect a few times myself. And yeah, we use the term rot, like some things rot over time. It's just the tech that's driving the effects might have changed. So certainly with quantum travel, there have been fundamental changes to the backend work, like what is the engine doing with that actual process of quantum traveling, which does change how the effects are behaving. So I won't say they're broken, but they definitely don't look like they used to, and the timings get changed as well. So from a design point of view, it's really important that they care about the spool-up time and they care about all those kind of hooks that we then use to drive the effects. So I guess what I'm saying is we're aware that they are due an update. That is planned and scheduled. Actually, our VFX concept artist, Rob, I think next week, in fact, I think that's his next task. He's going to be jumping onto concepting the quantum travel. We've got some really good information from people like Nate, the Squadron 42 art director, and Hannes, the cinematics director. Those guys have got a really clear idea of what they want. We're going to use that. We're going to feed that into our concepts. To address your point about the more dynamic element of it and variables and things changing, I think absolutely that's something that we always look to do with our effects. I've talked in the past about emitter strength, so particles have a strength curve, and, Leo can probably elaborate on this, but we can actually use that strength curve to map that to other variables. Let's just say the quantum drive was getting damaged. We could actually visually reflect that. We could show a much more chaotic-looking effect. There's all kinds of things that we could do with that and that we would like to do as well.

There's also some possibilities of using the SDF tech. When I was exploring the look of the atmo entry, I also tried it with what a QT effect might look like. There's a lot of possibilities and a lot of really cool dynamic things we could do with it.

From a tech point of view, it was a while ago that we implemented the QT effects. And one of the limitations we have right now is that the effects are set up on the ships. So if you change your quantum drive, the effects will remain the same. One of the things I'd like to do at some point is make it so that we don't have those limitations anymore. So with a few changes to the system in the back end, we could actually implement per-drive effects rather than per-ship effects, which I think is also one of the things that people have been mentioning.

So somebody could take the quantum drive from an alien ship, like the Scout has a very different quantum effect, and bring it over to a MISC ship or an Aegis ship and put it in there and get the change in effect?

If the design of those quantum drives allows that, of course. Yeah, that would be possible.

Something we'd like to pursue, absolutely. You mentioned the different styles as well. Obviously, the most common one is the default, as we call it, the streaky blue one. But yeah, we've got different visual styles for different alien races. And we've always talked about having high- and low-tech variables as well. So maybe a cheaper drive would look different. It's a bit like putting a nasty old big exhaust pipe on your car compared to something high end. We'd like to be able to reflect that visually as well.