David "Bone" Gill · Technical Director, UI

I think I might have caused it. I might have dropped myself in. Yeah, we talked about how we show all the points of interest. It turns out there's a lot of interesting points in the universe. It was about filtering, right? So filtering what you want was really tricky. So it just didn't happen for a long time, because you can't filter by distance, because you obviously want to go to places far away. So yeah, it was an extremely tricky problem to solve, and it's taken this long to actually get to a usable solution. When we talk about the markers, we've had long discussions about, well, let's merge markers together when they start overlapping. So do you have enough information? One of your friends with a planet, do you get the information about that kind of stuff? You don't want the information where you just get a blob of overlapping text, that's no good, right? Do you make them avoid each other, or do you make them like, hey, your friend's here and also there's a planet here? How do you describe that as a bit of UI? Deeply tricky problems to solve in a sort of systemic way. Everything needs to be systemic. We can't just say, oh, right, here's just the ruleset, because the ruleset is endlessly complicated, because we have an endlessly complicated game.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The systemic solutions are what take so long. It would be easy enough to go in there and stick a proverbial patch on something and just stop it temporarily. But everybody knows the most permanent thing in any video game is a temporary solution, and it would end up just blocking and breaking a bunch of things down the line. We always look for these broader systemic solutions that can keep solving these problems as we add new things.

David "Bone" Gill · Technical Director, UI

And when we don't, we always get tripped up. If we sort of cheat, say, oh, well, let's just come up with some bodgy rule, right? We always get tripped up by it, because something else comes along the way. And again, when I've worked on more traditional video games, let's say driving games, if you're going to draw the world, you only have to draw enough of the world away from the track. Whereas in Star Citizen, you can go anywhere, and all these things interact with each other in a systemic way. You have to find a solution that works correctly all the time. We've really made a challenge for ourselves to do that. Love it, though.

Zane Bien · UI developer/programmer/designer

I think if you ask the same question about other things, why it's been there and taking so long, and it's been there for years, it's because it's an old system. We don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole. It's a waste of time. That's because we have this new system that we're working on, and all the focus ideally should be directed towards that. We're in the middle of development.

Gabriel Hector · Systems Designer, Manchester

And for this question specifically, the marker system has now been reworked. We have a new marker system, so it's no longer in Flash. We can actually start looking into this. We now know exactly how things are done, and we have our best men at it.