Ground vehicles. Honestly, just ground vehicles. We've talked about ground vehicles almost as long as we've talked about the next version of the flight model.

So the two things are connected. We wanted to complete what we think is the new flight experience first before we moved our resources onto the ground vehicles. But, well, it was like three years ago now, we did do an update in a very limited slot of time we had, to introduce a new tire model, some new suspension physics, and just generally how they behave. Now, by going this route of how the flight model behaves, in terms of going for realism but accessibility and just things feeling good in the game, it made the ground vehicles better, but also introduced some of the problems of the ground vehicles, because we freed up the physics to react more realistically, which inherently makes them look unrealistic at times, because we're hitting solid objects with the bottom of the vehicle or with the suspension, kind of funny, and the vehicles would do strange things. So we've got a framework of the ground vehicles. And interestingly enough, we've got a meeting very, very soon to discuss the ground vehicle 1.0 plan of what we want to achieve with ground vehicles. Because as we do base building, as we do combined arms, the ground vehicles can become even more important for the universe. So we've got a plan to improve the tire model, the suspension, but just the general way that the vehicles interact with our world, so when you hit rocks and stuff, the vehicles don't flip over and crash all the time and feel very strange and feel like they don't have mass. Because the vehicles do have mass, but the force that is generated is a very hard force. It's a very simple calculation of just: you hit objects, force generated, force is applied to the ground vehicle. But we're going to start controlling that so it feels much more natural. And also, we're looking at converting the ground vehicles to the exact same systems that the spaceships work on as well. So they'll have an engine, a power plant, and everything will work as a normal Star Citizen vehicle as well. And this overall will make a much more natural feeling ground vehicle in the end, once we get some time to work on the physics of just how it interacts with the world. And I'm kind of excited by that, which will hopefully allow us to do more interesting gameplay and for the vehicles to actually have a purpose. Yeah, just be able to do more in the game and have that purpose, where you can go take your Ballista, park it somewhere and have it in the right spot that you want it, so you can use it for that purpose.

Actually, there were these big facilities we have on the ground, distribution centers. Those were our first intent of making ground vehicles more viable, because we equipped those distribution centers with very effective turrets so that you should land further out. Our planet environments weren't built for that. So we had a bumpy ride.

One of the biggest problems the ground vehicles have are the very beautiful looking planets. We don't have nice roads on them, because part of it is they're not habitable or, I can't think of the word, civilized with infrastructure. So there aren't roads there. And a lot of people underestimate the scale of Star Citizen, and they're bombing along in their Cyclone, which they don't realize makes a Humvee look small. And they hit what they think is a small rock, but if you stood next to it in real life, it's two meters tall. So a vehicle traveling 40 meters a second hitting something that essentially has infinite mass in how it is in the world... In the real world, you'll just go pancake into it. But our vehicles have mass; that thing doesn't have mass. Like Rich talked about, it was changed to a more realistic model and then we had to rapidly change it, because the physical forces that were being imparted on the vehicles were just insane. So there's lots of things we've had to do to tone it down.

When I saw something like Stormbreaker for the first time, I was excited. A big area that doesn't allow you to fly ships in and stuff like this. I'm like, great, do something like that where you can do vehicles. Imagine the entire patch content was ground vehicle related. And the answer I got back from creative director Ian Leyland was, we'd love to, but playing in ground vehicles right now isn't that great. So if you do an entire patch of content that requires everybody to roll around in ground vehicles, you better make sure the ground vehicles are fun and actually work.

I want them to be just as good as the ships, and maybe to the point where you never even want a ship. You're just content with your base-built location, ground vehicles, tooling around, doing all the game loops with ground vehicles.

Adding to that even, right now it's also not the most convenient thing to call your ground vehicles. So that is something that we have had on our list for ages at this point, which is ground vehicles through freight elevators, or nested spawning of ships with ground vehicles. So good news is we have been working on that. I was about to say, we proved it with the Atlas, but the Atlas is technically not a vehicle. No, it has been on our list for quite some time, because the moment that we allow ground vehicles to be more comfortably stored, or pulled up and then stored in your ship, I think they also will be used naturally more than what they are right now, because right now it's, pardon my French, a bit of a pain.