John Crewe · Vehicle Director

This was actually something tech art were looking at the other day, seeing whether we can get somewhere with it. I could speak for hours about doors in video games. Doors in our game. Doors in Star Citizen. Anyone that's ever worked on video games knows how problematic doors are. They seem like they're a really simple thing, but they just go down a huge rabbit hole of questions and answers. And in Star Citizen, we essentially have three ways of doing doors or lifts or elevators, however you want to call them. We have a simple door, which is just basically an item that rotates between two states. You see it on all of our internal doors, simple back ramps. And as long as it goes between open and closed, that's good. We can't use that for the Caterpillar because it naturally has three states. It has open to horizontal and then down to the ground. We have the elevator system, which is used on a lot of our ships for moving between floors and transitioning to the outside of a ship. That has some issues. If you've ever been on a 600i elevator in quantum and found yourself with the elevator in the middle of space, that's one of the issues with that. And then we have the new transit system, which is primarily built for environments, and you see that in a lot of ships, but there's an issue with that at the moment, a limitation that we're resolving soon, where it can't go between zones. So it can't be a lift inside a ship that then goes outside the ship. So if you look at the Carrack's lift, for example, that only ever goes internally. That's a transit lift. But transit and the legacy elevator system can't do complex synchronized animations, which is what the Caterpillar needs. So the Caterpillar needs the original door system, but expanded to have multi-state doors with complex linked animations. It's a fun problem to solve for what looks like a relatively simple thing. So we could change the animation to just go all the way down to the ground for all the doors, and that will fix one set of issues. And then people will ask, why do I have to open the doors all the way every time? And you would likely run into the issue where, because they will open all the way, and the Caterpillar has such a long nose, you're going to have to have a nicely flat surface along all those areas for those doors to not lift the entire ship up.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

It's a nightmare. Yes, we want to do it because it's cool. But we hit this problem with a lot of our ships when we're in early stages, white boxing them. And we're like, oh yeah, we're going to do this bit here. And then normally someone that understands the complexity of the issues comes in from design: yeah, it's not quite going to work, we're going to have to change this bit.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There's been a bunch of really good articles on various video game websites about the complexity of doors in video games. And especially if you have no insight into game development from the outside, it's like, hey, it's a door. It opens, it closes. It's simple, right? But behind the scenes, they are simultaneously, one, one of the most complex things in games, and two, the most abused things in games to get things done. Anything that moves in games, probably a door.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So before that answer sends people doom and gloom to Spectrum, are you hopeful? I'm not saying tomorrow, but you feel like we'll get it?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, we'll absolutely get it. Like I say, I think a sensible first step will just be to change the animation to be the full one and see how bad that turns out. It may not be as bad as we think it's going to be, but we'll see.