What can you tell us about the status of implementing physicalized components?
TL;DRPhysicalized components are progressing slowly as ongoing core tech: placement is planned at concept, groundwork for placing items in object containers is done, hopefully more next quarter, and the code should finish before the art.
Well, so that's something that we can both talk about. Because for a lot of the ships, we deal with a concept point now: we have the metrics for all the components.
Yes, we do. So we have a new concept artist who started with us about five and a half months ago. So he started as a junior and so we've slowly been running him through the mill, as we say, and so we've been giving him components to look at. I mean, it's a lot better now that we've got actual metrics. Everything's better now that we've got metrics. And so it's really just sort of making our way through the massive list of manufacturers that you guys have made for us. Thank you, Will and Dave. And just figuring out what the style guide is, basically, from my side of things.
And then pretty much every ship in the last two, three years concept-wise has had the placement of them identified at concept. So when the production teams come to them, they're built. You would have seen it in sort of ships... The Terrapin was the first big one that really went to town with the component hatches, so you could see where they all go. And then everything since then has them and everything before then has a plan for where they're going to go in terms of actually putting the physical items in those places. So this quarter, one of the vehicle teams actually did the preliminary work to be able to place actual items inside the object containers, which can then connect to the vehicles, which gives us the ability to put them in place and then down the line gives us the ability to shoot them from the outside to do the physical damage to them. The stopping point has always been up until now, and still a little bit now, that everything inside an object container can't talk to the vehicle that it's within, which has stopped Retaliator modules from progressing because we needed to have the missile launchers inside the object container so it could all be swapped out with the entire bay. But we've got the groundwork for that now. Next quarter, we can hopefully do a little bit more. It's one of these long ongoing core tech tasks that you just chip away a bit every month and you slowly get close to the end. It's not a one line and bam, everything's done. You need to sort of re-archetype a few things. But it's still planned, still happening. We're slowly getting there. The biggest hurdle is really just the art debt from having to go back to these old ships and... The code will be done sooner than the art.