Calix Reneau · Technical Designer

This is another one of those really timely questions. Got a good batch here. I was actually just talking with John Pritchett a few days ago about something similar, about being able to pick a flight leader and set your IFCS to treat them as the relative frame of reference, so when they move, your IFCS will track that and move to accommodate. It will require a friendly IFCS handshake, so you're not going to be able to use this to make dogfighting disappear. But what it will do is that you can do complicated formation maneuvers by moving relative to your squadmate rather than relative to the universe. I'm sure that that will make interacting with the universe difficult. But we actually have a fairly broad spectrum of exactly how it's handling that frame of reference and it's something that we're hoping to try pretty soon and see exactly how that feels and if that's a good way to go about it.

Matt Sherman · Technical Designer

Formations are definitely an interesting thing, and especially with something as big as Star Citizen and taking it into true three-dimensional space and managing all those positions at once, it's a big challenge, but that'll be good for us.

Calix Reneau · Technical Designer

Well, even to the point of being able to communicate formation. We had a proposal for just having, here are my wingman spots, and that positional data is going to stream to you so that you know where to fly in order to fly with me. And so we can cooperate a little bit more and take advantage of some of the emergent things that happen because of our simulated systems. So yeah, I'm excited to try that out. I'm always the one: just try it, see what it's like.