Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

It's a good question, actually, because it really depends if we're talking core technologies for Star Citizen or core technologies for Squadron 42. Now, we try to keep that as co-planar as absolutely possible, but they are two very different types of games, right? One is a single-player, a little more cinematic scripted kind of experience, whereas the other one is a huge MMO. I don't think there's any massive ones. I think maybe, in case the roadmap doesn't have this, the solar system transition. So going from Stanton system to another system, so the wormhole kind of idea, that's got to be addressed. So I don't know if that's on the roadmap, and if it isn't, it probably should get there at some point, but we need to get Stanton done first, and then we'll fly out of Stanton. But in terms of core tech, the thing that that wormhole stuff relies on is the object container streaming, which is very, very busy right now and definitely represented on the roadmap. I'm trying to think of other things. I mean, there's opportunities like core tech changes or things we'd want to do, but they're not necessarily blocking Star Citizen from getting made to any effect. So the major pieces of tech that we needed for this game are almost there. Really only the object container streaming is one of the biggest ones. And that changes the paradigm with how we work with objects and levels. So that's a big one.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's also a good time to remind folks that, as has been stated in Calling All Devs, in other episodes of RTV, in ATV, everywhere we can, not everything that's being worked on is on the roadmap.

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Yeah, none of my stuff is.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The stuff that you see on the roadmap are the things that we intend to release in those quarters. So there are things that will be worked on continuously throughout 2018 that may not be coming until 2019. Those are not on the roadmap. And then there are things that we do think will come in 2018, but they're smaller features. They don't fit easily within one of the epics and stuff like that.

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Maybe to dig into that a bit, we've got tons of R&D projects that we work on that, again, if we put that on the roadmap, people feel pretty disappointed a lot of the times. There's a ton of times, just general game development, that happens all the time, right? You explore an idea. You have to try something before you know it doesn't work. And sometimes you say, no, we're just not going to do that.

Steve Bender · Animation Director

Because it's about making fun. If there was a manual for fun, everybody would be able to do this. It really is, in some cases, trial and error.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

One of the things I like to say is that this is game development, not game construction. We are figuring out the answers to these things. We are figuring out the things we want to do and then how to do them as we go along. That's what game development is. If you're doing something that's truly never been done before, if you're doing something that's truly innovative in the industry, there is no instruction manual for it.

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Yeah, and a lot of stuff in isolation has absolutely been done. I can't think of a really easy example right now, but just because one feature existed somewhere, that's never been coupled with this feature, right? And sometimes it's a combination of the two things that make it really difficult.