We were seeing that the Hull C was virtually art complete a year ago, and then it dropped off the radar. It just stopped. Talk to us about what's going on there.

Time for the Hull C saga. Everyone pull up a chair. So art-wise, it's not 100% done. It's not 100% final art. We're probably 80% of the way there, 90% of the way, of the final, what we call LOD zero art. So that is the absolute high-poly in-game asset that you see close up. What it doesn't have are all the LODs, which is what we need to do to make it run at an acceptable frame rate. And we don't have any artwork for any bits that deal with the contraction and expansion of that central section. So whilst we do have something in there, it is not final art, because we simply don't know the technical setup at this point. We can't give an artist a task, go set it up this way, because that's not actually how we may end up doing it, and that would just be wasted work. So art-wise, it's in final art. It's not finished. It doesn't have its landing gears fully done. So people have only seen it in its expanded-out flight state. It's not optimized, because we're waiting for all the codependencies to be done. And unlike other ships, where you could just release them without them, that's not an option with the Hull C, because it's a cargo ship. It's a cargo ship that has to be expanded to carry its cargo, which means it cannot land, which is our current in-game only way of being able to sell that cargo and load that cargo onto your ship. So we could release it as it is, permanently expanded, but you would never be able to load cargo onto it or sell cargo from it, which is kind of pointless in many areas. And also there's nowhere to spawn it, because you can spawn on a landing pad, because those have gravity, and now that spindly ship is going to fall out of the sky and land on it and probably explode. So there's a few really big co-tasks that we need to do. One, the vehicle state machine, which we talked about earlier, to be able to drive extra states outside of landing gear, because we could set it up in the old way with landing gear, but then you've only got those two states, where you actually need sort of landing gear in, out, and expanded as this third state. That's in progress. From a performance side, it carries, I think, 4096 SCU of cargo. We currently only have the one SCU cargo boxes. So all the great work the network guys and code guys have done to streamline entities and object containers would just be obliterated when this one ship and 4096 other entities turn up on it. So what we need to do is have the supersized cargo or the enhanced cargo functionality, and that will benefit the entire game. So if you order 16 SCU of cargo, it's not going to fill your crate or your cargo bay necessarily with 16 individual boxes. It might just do one box, and that would actually give you more of the raw materials, because you're not dealing with all the dividing walls. So we need that for performance reasons. And then from a pure technical setup reason, we have the way to trigger it, but we have these things called local grids, which is what essentially gives the localized gravity to the parts of the ship and allows the ship to spin around in space and you to be walking around inside it normally. Those are static at the moment, and obviously the Hull C is not a static ship. So we need a way to have the front section, the back section, and a bit in the middle that either stretches or animates out to join the two. So the animating part we can't do at the moment. It's scheduled with the German engine guys. They know how they want to do it. They just need to get around to doing it. Object container streaming has been a big sort of delay on a lot of those things. So not only is it transforming physics grids, but it's also having moving ones as well, because whichever way you set it up, either the front or the back is going to have to move, and we don't support that in a single ship. Again, known about, on the backlog, will be fixed. And then the last piece is sort of tied in, but it's more for the visual side of it. So we have things called vis areas and portals, and they essentially clip lighting to certain areas, and if you're inside a vis area and there's no portals, you can't see out. So you may have seen on some ships when things go wrong, like the Avenger, you open the back door and it's just a blank void. That's the vis area or the portal not working correctly. As soon as you go in, and there's nothing physically to stop you, you see everything as normal. Those, again, are static, and we need that central section to be able to morph with it. Otherwise, if we do everything else aside from that, you'll look at the Hull C and it will expand out, and then there'll be this section that is the length of the contracted version that is perfectly lit, and then it'll just be black, with a portal to another realm just halfway down the corridor, and everything beyond it will be completely unlit, and it will probably also affect the outside. So you'll have half of the ship lit correctly and the other half will be just pure black.

So a lot of technical dependencies for a ship like the Hull. And you didn't even mention docking.

Yep, lastly is docking. So a way of spawning it somewhere that isn't on landing gear. Not only do we not have the ability to do that yet, that's planned, because we need it for the Connie and the Merlin. So the first step will be ship-to-station docking, because that only relies on one thing moving. The stations don't move. Relatively, they don't move. And that's a simpler task than doing ship-to-ship, which will come after. And that will unblock the Connie and Merlin, and the Caterpillar command module coming off the Caterpillar. And also, we need a location to spawn that, because obviously Olisar doesn't have a docking jetty or something for you to spawn on. So the larger truck stops we have in game, and there's even larger ones coming, have that built into them. So unlike some ships, where you can release it without the gameplay, or some you can release with some of it, the Hull C is this perfect storm of, we need all these pieces to come in in one quarter, and then have the art time to finish it off. And for a variety of reasons, no one department's fault, they just have not been able to be scheduled to come in at the same time.

But still on its way.

Still on its way. It's probably the one ship that Chris asks me about the most. It's like, when am I getting the Hull C?