Rob Reininger · Assistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services

Yeah, so imagine you're going to choose your starting location of Area18, and then for the ships that you have at Area18, you'll have a hangar there that comes with your starting location selection, right? And that's now your hangar. Instead of Hangar 27, it's Rob's Hangar, Rob's Medium Hangar, whatever. And just like any other hab or persistent location, you can go there. Now, the only thing is that we're not going to build one hangar entrance for every single player that's actually on the server or in the game as a whole. It's going to be controlled through ATC. So you're going to contact ATC and say, hey, I'm ready to go. And Chad can talk maybe more about the technical side of this, of how we're going to be bouncing players around. But basically, we're going to take you, we're going to move you while you're doing your stuff inside your hangar. And then, hey, I'm ready to go. ATC gives you clearance. That opens up a door. Doors open. You fly out directly into the city. And it's all from your persisted hangar space.

Chad McKinney · Lead Gameplay Engineer, US PU Gameplay team

Yeah. So I'll just go a little bit into detail on that. The idea is that no matter what, for now, we're going to have locations that don't have the number of hangars to support even the current player limit, let alone whatever we've increased that to with Server Meshing, right? So for that reason, we're always going to have this problem of too many players mapped to too few hangars. However, we do want to maintain the player experience of feeling like you do own a hangar at a certain location, even for these ones where there are too few. And so for that reason, we're actually going to pin the players to particular hangar entrances, so that in your experience as a player, you'll go land somewhere, you'll fly away from somewhere, and it's always from the same hangar at that location physically. Now, the players may notice that there's going to be a kind of magical sensibility to it, because if we have 100 players in the server or whatever, or even the current 50, then the same players will be using the same hangar entrances and exits. How is that possible? And the reason is because there's magic happening under the hood, where we're magically moving these things around and we're using zones to isolate them from each other, so that you don't see the fact that they're all getting intermixed, but the experience for the players is that it's one continuous experience in and out. Now, that's for these locations, again, that have a more limited set. We absolutely, with this system, can expand it to have locations with larger amounts of hangars, which would then allow us to do things like individually put down persistent hangars for players, and that would probably have to work in accordance with some kind of procedural system for placing out very large numbers of them. And I know this comes up a lot; players are very aware that we have the real estate, right? We have these huge planets; what are we doing with all this space? Certainly that's an opportunity, but for the first outing, we're not going to have that unique one-to-one hangar experience for each location. Instead, it's going to be working with the locations that we have now, but the system, as we make it, will support that in the future, if we can work in accordance with the environment and level design teams and planet teams to facilitate the other part that would be required to have that kind of experience.