Dan Trufin · EU PU Gameplay Features team

There's been a lot of silence on that, and for very good reasons. The programmer that works on this has had to go into the bowels of the code and refactor pretty much everything with how our items work, when it comes to how they function, how they generate resources. There's been so much groundwork. We expected there to be probably about half a year of groundwork. It turned out to be a lot more. This is a thing that will affect everything from ships to vehicles to stations. It touches the core of how our game functions. And I think at this moment, we are at the point where we start working on the actual gameplay. I know already there were heavy discussions even this morning. Yeah, this morning or yesterday, there were heavy discussions of how we get the tanks on the Starfarer for refueling to transfer fuels between each other and the ship, because we want that to use the resource management and distribution. We don't want to build another system just for refueling, or another system just for putting ammo into weapons on a ship, or power, or all these things. There needs to be one system. All items in the game work with the system. We don't have 10 pieces of code that we need 10 programmers to oversee and maintain, where whenever one breaks, it's different from the other one. It's one system. If something breaks, you know exactly where to look. But we are getting to the point where we're starting to see this being used in gameplay. It's still going to be quite a bit till we see a full ship where you can start cutting power, rerouting power, sabotaging: if you remove this item, or this item runs out of fuel or out of power, this happens. We're still a bit out. Again, I don't want to give out any date, because I don't know it. As you can see, with our initial estimation of how much that groundwork of code needed to be, we estimated half of what it actually was. But this is also a good moment, because a lot of other programmers can start jumping in on this thing and start to integrate. Whoever works on weapons needs to integrate this. Well, how do you get your ammo from a general ammo supply crate? How do you power the weapon? Does it need CPU? Does it need all these things? And how are the shield guys going to do the same? The guy that builds the power supply needs to work with it. So we're at the point where we can slowly start to bring more people into this, as the groundwork has been completed.