What the hell's up with the coffee shop vendor? Of all the things that were prioritized, is it in preparation for something more substantial? It just seems like a reskinned bartender from where we're sitting.

It is. I mean, on the surface it is. So basically this was one of our junior designers' first tasks, getting in and doing this. And this is kind of when the AI teams were shifting over towards S42 and basically dealing with other features. This guy and the AI team, or the content AI team, were working on this and basically were getting moved around and pushed around onto different things. But this was something that they were working on and cleaning up, and this is really how we deal with vendors: they will be different reskins of the bartender. But in reality, where I wanted this thing to go more towards was the black market dealer. Somebody that can sell you something, because at least for black markets, we don't feel it's right that you're fencing something to a kiosk versus somebody... It's missing that personal feeling. So that's really where it's heading. And there were some code changes that were done underneath to basically move it towards it that way. But I can definitely see from an outside perspective: yeah, this is a reskin. And in many ways it is.

I brought it up not just because I thought it was funny and I like throwing you curveballs every once in a while, but I think it's important. When I say we, I mean the folks outside of game development: we don't always see the context behind some of these decisions. And we often forget that in video game development, Star Citizen, just like anything else, there's turnover. There's new people coming on board. There's old people leaving for other opportunities. And when these new people come on board, you don't just throw them down the well and be like, make server meshing happen. You start them on these smaller beginning tasks; many times they have to learn the tools that we use. They have to learn the processes that we developed. So a lot of times when backers see kind of a head-scratcher, like this seems like a weird kind of side thing, whether it's our game or some other game, just keep in mind there's always context.

So for example, there's combat features that need to be worked on or focused on, or there's flight features that need to be worked on or focused on. Well, it's the same thing with social features. So whether it be a pizza vendor or coffee vendor or any noodle vendor, there's just vendors in game that need to be worked on, need to be built out. It was just that we chose this one first, and then that's what we did. But in many ways, this is just laying the groundwork for other things to come. But for right now, again, the feature team and the tech team, most of their focus is shifted over towards S42, so it's really basically getting that stuff working, and most of theirs are going to be focusing on combat, making sure that that's tight.