Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

A lot. So, again, I walked through that in the presentation, what we were about to do, but I can tell you already what we already have done. So we changed the planet. The planet that we had was a V3 planet, and I talked about it, and it sounds funny, right? We changed the planet. But it was really important. Because V4 planets came up right at the time that we were launching this, but we needed to be sure that we could bring a stable build to CitizenCon. And I'm not saying V4 necessarily destabilized it, but we knew that it was going to come about a month before we were going to go to CitizenCon. So we actually locked ourselves off in a branch for about two months, so that we weren't taking the main branch updates. But what happened during that time was three major systems that went in, and we had to consume those into the branch. One of the major systems was Planet V4, as I mentioned. So now that we've come back into the main branch anyways, we put a new planet in place, and it looks a lot different now too. Visually it's much better. I'm so much happier with it in terms of the art. The actual visuals of it look a lot better. I'm very happy with that. But again, the mentality was make it fun, and then we make it pretty later.

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

And I don't know how much the community necessarily knows about it. I know we've mentioned it. I'm not going to go too in-depth on that one. But Chris had done some work on a physics proxy refactor, which was fantastic. But it was big; we had to consume that, too. So we consumed that. And then on top of it, we also took server OCS, which, I think it's a question later on, doesn't directly affect us in Theaters, but we had to consume that code base anyway. So those three things have already happened. We're done. So that's good. The other thing that we did, it was kind of interesting, and it was a bit of feedback that we got at the same time as something that we just realized as we were doing it. So when we were doing these sessions at CitizenCon of the Theaters play session, we had the 20 on 20 in a room. And myself and Rich Tyra and JJ and a couple other guys, Lee from our QA department, were walking around the room as people were playing. But what we found we started doing was like drill sergeants or something. We would call out encouragement, or I'd like to set up a little bit of rivalry for guys. But no, we were calling out, hey, make sure you go unlock that spawn point. Make sure that's your main focus. Go to that location. Hey, don't run here, run here. And what we talked about afterwards was that they're not going to ship a Sean Tracy or a Rich Tyra with Theaters of War, so we better be sure that all these callouts are triggered in the map. So again, it's like little reminders from your commander of what you should be doing or what you shouldn't be doing, or a re-encouragement of a thing, or trying to stop you from doing a certain thing. It's really important, actually. And we found that once we were doing that in these Theaters maps, it played a lot better, especially when you're doing your first round of it; you're still figuring out how this whole mode itself works and what you're meant to do. So that was a big part of it. So we've actually captured all those VO lines now. And we're basically implementing them all. It's not difficult, but it's time consuming, because we have to set up events for all of them. It's like, okay, when do we actually trigger that? And how do we know that the guy's running the wrong way? And things like this. So that'll be an important bit of it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You're going the wrong way.

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Yeah, that's actually a good example. It's like feedback for the out of bounds. We had a little bit of stuff that would come up on the screen, but it wasn't super obvious. You had an idea you were going out of bounds, but you didn't know how long you had. There was nobody really telling you how to get back or that it was really important that you get back. So that's an important component of it. The other thing we did was completely rework the spawn screen. So we're also dependent on this Building Blocks technology, this UI system. And as it was coming online, it's only got so many features every time, so we had to lock off a little bit early, and it only had so many of the features that we needed for the spawn screen, which is really, really central to the mode. This is giving you a top-down representation of the map: where everybody is, where's the mobile spawns, where's my spawn points, where's an unlockable spawn, where's the enemies right now. It's a really important screen, basically, and it's your landing page. So we've completely reworked that, and it looks great now. I'm very, very happy with how that thing looks. So that's done too. What else have we done? I've got a big list anyways. Oh, transitions between phases. So this was, again, about player feedback. One of the bits of feedback was that it wasn't immediately apparent, especially the first time you were playing, that sometimes the transition between, well, phase one and phase two on the old map, it was like two and a half, three kilometers. And a lot of times people would finish phase one, they got it all captured, everything's ready to go, and they would just beeline it. They would just start walking, right? Now, okay, yes, the objective thing says this is really far away, but eh. It wasn't immediately obvious. As we were walking around, we could see people that were just running out into the woods type thing.

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Anyways, transition between phases. We don't want everybody running the Daymar Rally between phases or anything like this. So what do we do about it? And I don't want to reveal everything that we did about it, because it's really cool, and as soon as you guys get hands on, you'll see it and you'll know exactly what it is. Okay, so first of all, we put a couple vehicles right outside the front, and these are not spawnable ones, they're just buggies and things like that that are sitting right outside the phases now. So basically, as you're walking, you're going to realize very quickly that you've got a long way to walk, and rather than turning around and going back, you'll have a vehicle right in front of you. There's some real creative ones in terms of grouping up the team together to make that transition of phases, and this is something that I really always wanted. I've always imagined the experience of the battle for Hoth, where the defenders are really waiting, right? And there's that moment where all of a sudden you see them coming over the thing and it's the whole team. Or even better, when everybody's sitting and all of a sudden a whole fleet jumps out of hyperspace together, you know? It's those moments that I was really going for. So we put some transitional tools within that. And again, I just don't want to say exactly what that one is. But as soon as the community gets hands on, they'll see exactly what it is. But we make that transition much easier. So again, you're not going to get stuck running there on foot. And again, whether that's AI helping you out, whether that's other things, I don't want to go too into detail on it.