Where do you start the game?

The game begins at the hangar. Basically, we're probably about two versions away on the Persistent Universe release schedule from allowing you to actually select your starting planet. Where you'll actually spawn is obviously within your own hangar. Your hangar, as you already know, serves as a kind of inventory repository. Right now, that's predominantly in the form of your ships. It's in the form of your flair objects. One thing that we'll be adding to your hangar in the very near term with the social module will be what we're calling a sim pod. I think we've actually got an image of that. Yeah, so basically this is going to become your new gateway into Arena Commander and the upcoming first person shooter module that you should see in the roughly March timeframe. We're eventually going to add a lot more customizability to the hangar that's going to include everything from a room system to where you'll be able to add targeting rooms, overclocking rooms, entertainment rooms, a variety of things. One of the things that Chris is very big on is allowing players to basically obtain trophies, pictures from the different areas that you see within the game. There's obviously a tremendous amount of effort going into building out some of the visuals and the locales that you're going to be exposed to within the game. And so one of the very appealing things is just the ability to take snapshots, obtain a trophy from the top of Terra Prime that says, I was here, and you can actually store that on a little display table within your hangar. We're going to add elevators into all of the hangars and the elevators are going to become your transition point to the primary city. So what you'll wind up seeing in the upcoming social module will be an elevator that's been added to your hangar and you can take that and basically select the main landing zone level, and all of a sudden when the door opens, you'll have transitioned over into the full-blown ArcCorp city. You'll be able to wander around, but we'll get into that in a little bit more detail later in this discussion. One thing that we just announced earlier today is the addition of some different skins for your buggy.

Before you get on to that, I just want to mention something about the sim pod itself. So you guys notice the date there on that image. That's a concept that just came in this week. And we are modeling this right now. This will be in pretty soon. One of the reasons why we're adding this sim pod is we want to get away from some of that very gamey user interface of hitting the escape key to have to get into Arena Commander. So we want to actually have something you walk up to and have to interact with to make it feel more alive, really, is what it is.

It feels more like a futuristic arcade game that you're stepping into and experiencing some sort of virtual reality as opposed to what we were basically building into the ship before.

Actually, before we jump on to the buggies, there's one other large feature. It's still a ways off, but obviously a lot of you know we had to put in kind of a stopgap measure because the number of ships that you can fit into your hangar is limited to five right now. And we had played with a few different things where we're going to expand your hangar horizontally, where we're going to expand it to different floors vertically, and then that winds up becoming very impractical. You want to go get a particular ship, you've got to take your own... So one of the things we'll wind up adding in the relatively near term will be the concept of an automated loading hangar, such that you may still only be able to have five ships visible at any one time. But as long as you've got one of these auto-loading hangars, you can go to a little display panel and select which ship you want on which pad and bring it up right then just via a whole mechanical process. Skelton could probably add a little bit of detail in regards to that.

Yeah, if you guys have seen, we were using kind of the Japanese parking structure. Basically it's kind of a big Ferris wheel under the surface and what it does is it basically goes down and dials in which ship you want and then comes back up and then you have your ship on the pad. Obviously, if you want to get to a ship quick, that's going to be a really fast and easy way to do it. That way you don't have to have a million ships that you're taking your buggy to back and forth to see. So the primary ships that you want to show your friends and stuff, you can have five pads worth of them. So we've been talking about this for a while, and I think it makes a lot of sense.