With the launch of hover mode, landing a ship vertically in a hangar may have become a little harder than it already was, when you consider turbulence, drift, etc. Are there any plans for a downward-looking camera, just like the rear camera currently implemented? It would be ideal to also have crosshairs to aid the alignment of the ship to the ground.
TL;DRThe long-term goal is a 3D AR landing UI with terrain and alignment cues, plus easier hover control in tight spaces, but it's a hard problem and not coming in 3.6.
So the long-term goal, which we can't do in 3.6, is to actually have the 3D AR UI that we had in an older version. I think it was SC 2.0... I don't know if it was 2.0, it was 2.5, 2.6, maybe 2.4 was one of those. So the goal is to bring that back. But the problem is that, first of all, that UI was using different tech. And second of all, that UI was built around that known geometry of landing pads that we'd set up. And now the game has planets and different shaped landing pads and all sorts of stuff. So that becomes a really difficult problem. And so we need to figure out how to, say, take chunks of the ground and then render low res versions of them and stuff like that. It's a really difficult problem, but that is the way that we want to do that. So when you put your landing gear down, you get this little UI and it'll give you situational awareness around you and it'll also give you alignment cues for the center of the landing pad. And there's also the actual fact of controlling hover mode, because I think especially when you're in tight spaces, hover mode doesn't really show its strengths. And so we're currently exploring options of improving how to control hover mode in tight spaces, to make inside hangars and inside landing bays and stuff a little bit easier to control, because right now I think you slightly move and you move way more than you expected. It's not great. The visibility also should mean that you don't need to rotate your ship down to look where you're going.
Not necessarily just a camera that shows you below. We're looking for a 3D AR solution, so you don't just get a 2D representation of what's below you. You actually see the terrain, you see the slope, and you see some guidance to your best potential landing area.
Yeah, that's the plan.
You got an ETA?
No, not 3.6.