With the new stability assist feature, proximity assist, coming online, how does it differ from or improve upon hover mode? Does it replace hover mode or is it meant to complement it?

It's meant to replace hover mode in the sense that it is going to get closer to the goal that we wanted without the sacrifices that we had to make with hover mode. Hover mode was a really cool mode in terms of how it controlled, but it just turned out to not really be suitable for our game. There were just so many situations where it wasn't really ideal, and a lot of levels and ways we've set up things weren't designed around flying with hover mode, and so it introduced just a whole host of problems. So Proximity Assist will replace-ish, such that the VTOL animations that we currently have in hover mode, where you go into hover mode and it will automatically play the VTOL animations, that's now separated to a button that is a mode. It's a button that will be a button in the cockpit as well at some point, where you press the button and the VTOL thrusters rotate when you press the button. And that's separated from proximity assist, so you can have them rotated down without having proximity assist on. And then when proximity assist is on, it's quite a subtle system. It's very easy to forget that it's even there, which is how it's been designed. The idea is that as you're flying low to the ground and near stuff, the ship just controls nicer and more accurately. Unless you are really finely attuned to your ship's thrusters, you almost forget that it's there. You can think of it like an assist. It's just helping you fly low and close to things without flying around like you're a hummingbird or something.

There is more. There's one thing I want to mention on top of that, which is that there's a piece as well that we haven't got in 3.7 that will also be coming to help replace what hover mode was, which is the system where we are going to scale down the strength of thrusters in atmosphere. And that seems subtle, unless you think about the ramifications of that for a second and you realize that that's really significant. And what we can do with that is for ships, say, that have VTOL thrusters, we can set their efficiency curves such that they're barely able to hold themselves up in atmosphere unless they rotate their VTOL thrusters down. And so that is what gets us this not being able to hover on your nose with a ship that has those rotating thrusters, because those front thrusters won't be strong enough in atmosphere to hold you up. So you have to rotate your thrusters down and then you have to stay level. And then in space, nothing changes, obviously, because there's no atmosphere there. But yeah, that's an important component that I want to make sure is understood, that that's also part of this, because it may seem initially that we're making a backward step with taking out hover mode, but it's just us more carefully re-evaluating it and getting closer to that goal that we originally wanted.

Like I say, it will get us back to the goal of stopping ships moving around like hummingbirds, whilst also pointing those down. So we've done the first bit, which will reduce the hummingbird stuff, and the next bit will be that, hopefully without all the pains of hover mode, of all the ships being upside down or smashing into hangars or no-fly zones.