David Colson · Vehicle Experience Programmer

So the main thing that we want with landing aids is the old radar-like view of the landing pad that we had in [...]. The problem with that is that it's a really complicated piece of 3D UI. And if you remember from the CitizenCon UI talk, a lot of the UI tech is being revamped at the moment. And one of the current focuses right now in January is 3D. And so we're working with them at the moment to add a lot more 3D elements to all of the UI, HUDs, MFDs, etc. And obviously one of those things is the landing UI. So once that 3D UI tech is developed a bit more, we're going to come back and rebuild that landing aid. And then that, in combination with lights facing down or cameras that face down, will help that whole experience.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The first thing we did with the new Building Blocks UI was the 2D, because it's the easier side of it. And we saw that in the CitizenCon demo where you had the elevator panels that were the actual buttons you interact with. So that would traditionally have been all Flash, which is great. You make that one elevator panel; in another ship, now you make another one, and it's duplicating it all. Whereas with Building Blocks, it's just sort of inheriting of style sheets, as a very simplistic way of putting it. And then 3D is the next step. So we do actually have some very primitive 3D support now, but it's a whole different ballgame from rendering a cube to rendering one of our ships on it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And when you mention lights and cameras, I want to make sure that folks know those are things that we're exploring. This is not a guarantee that every ship is going to have a camera system underneath it. It's just we definitely know that there are ways to make landing easier.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, there's a lot of ships whose lighting state is suboptimal, and we want to go through and fix those. So primarily you have the headlights, so you can actually see where you're flying. Some of them are a bit too dim. Some of them are broken. Those will get fixed. And then we're going to look into having, when you're in a landing mode, landing lights that come on that show you, like a real-life plane, a more illuminated area beneath you.