John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yep, so we have a few ships in the pipeline that make use of them. The work done for the handheld tractor beam is probably 70% copy and paste into the vehicle ones. There's obviously some number twiddling behind the scenes in terms of the force and mass, and the VFX team want to upgrade the visuals of it, because obviously it's a very thin, spindly FPS one versus one that you would find on a larger ship. And it sort of works out of the box in the use cases we have. It is of limited use right now; it will be more used for the cargo refactor when you've got physical crates to load and unload, and that's why you don't really see it. And there is some UX that we want to improve, because on the FPS one, you have all your information on the back of the multi-tool. It tells you your force, limits, everything. That is all getting transported to the remote view on the turrets, or if you're in a manned turret, having it on the turret HUD planes. Because whilst right now I could jump in game and use a tractor beam turret on certain ships, I have to know what all the buttons do and all the limitations, because it's not being presented to me. So it's not ready for player release. And then towards the end of the year, we're going to be doing some work. So at the moment, vehicles are just simply hard coded to not work with it, because there are some quite interesting technical problems to do with IFCS and tractor beams. IFCS is basically built on the assumption that one person is controlling the flight of the vehicle, and that becomes not true when people are grabbing it with a tractor beam. So we know what we want to do with it. We just need to do that, because that's what everybody wants to do with tractor beams.