Have you considered climbing points for parts of a ship where it would make sense, i.e. the Cutlass Black side doors or the bottom of the ladders, so you can still get into a ship when things go awry?

So that's actually something that I have to do once I get out of here: I'm going to go over to Tech Art's desk, because they've actually gone and done this on a few of the ships. There are problems with that. The current sort of ledge grab system we have doesn't do a check for what's at the end of the ledge. So say you've got the Cutlass side doors that open. We've got a ledge grab on there. You go run up to your ship, you ledge grab in. Great. Someone shuts the doors. It's still going to try and make you do that. It's probably going to be a coin flip of: do you just go straight through the doors, or do you hit the doors and fall back out again? It's something we want to do, but we want to do it in a way that's a bit smarter about it. If the doors are closed and you try and ledge grab up, just don't, rather than go through the whole state of checking.

It's worth pointing out as well that that kind of engineering decision, that has meant that that check doesn't happen, is usually because of a trade-off. In a lot of situations, in environments, a check like that is not necessary, and putting one in would be a cost to performance that maybe is not worth it. But in the particular case of a ship, maybe that cost is worth it, or maybe there's another solution that isn't as expensive.

The other aspect of that is the doors not opening all the way down to the planet. That's another case of making them, rather than just be a canned animation, systemic or procedural: opening them to the point they hit the floor and then backing off a tiny little bit, so they don't lift the ship up. So we tend to be safe on the amount we can do, which, as people have seen, when you start landing at really funny angles and you've got one leg off the ground, puts the ramps into this position. The two are sort of tied together. There's things we can do, but often they cause more problems than they solve, and we need to be smarter about how we check it.