John Crewe · Lead Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Current state, where it is: we know there are issues with it. And I actually have, because I saw that question, some notes from the engineers that are working on it handed to me. I'm a designer, not an engineer, so I apologize to whoever gave me these notes if I misinterpret it. ESP. People were complaining that it was broken or not reliable enough. There is an issue where the pips were, because it uses the pips to work out the ESP, and there is an issue where it was picking the wrong pip or no pips to do the ESP on. So you get wildly different behavior to what you were expecting and inconsistent behavior. That's been fixed, and is with QA now in a QA test request that they're testing at the moment. I believe you had a look at it.

Andy Nicholson · Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Yes. Just a quick look at the code shelf myself, and it seemed fixed to me. I tested it on a static ship. We had some issues, obviously, with UI preventing QA from getting a full test on it. But the changes that John Pritchett had made seemed to have resolved this problem. I mean, we recognized in 3.0 that there was an issue. We didn't have enough time for it to come together for the 3.0.1 hotfix or interim patch, whatever we want to call it.

John Crewe · Lead Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Yeah, it took a lot of investigation because it wasn't a 100% reproducible issue. You had to have a bit of luck to reproduce it and then catch it in Visual Studio. So you had to spend a lot of time investigating. And they had a vague idea of what was going on fairly early on, but it took a lot of iteration to really nail it down.

Andy Nicholson · Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

It's tricky. I mean, you played the game and you felt something was awry, and the testers felt the same, and all the community feedback was telling us this. And you get loads of different feedback: oh, it's working differently when I'm using a joystick or a gamepad or mouse. And you start to go, okay, there's something weird. How do we pin this down? It's fine for me. It's fine for me, but maybe they don't understand what ESP is, because it's quite a complicated thing to even explain. For those that don't know, it's enhanced stick precision, which, the closer your movements are to the target's movements, the more I think it helps adjust you to the target. I think that's the best, easiest way to put it.

John Crewe · Lead Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

It sort of desensitizes your movement to enable you to be more accurate.

Andy Nicholson · Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

If you're good, it'll make you better. That's the kind of design philosophy behind it. It's not an auto-aim in the strictest sense.

John Crewe · Lead Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

You still have to do input to do it. It doesn't just move your cursor near it.

Andy Nicholson · Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Yeah, and I was playing it this week to see how it was working again. There was perhaps a sense that it was a little bit too sticky or corrected a bit too much.

John Crewe · Lead Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

So that's one thing that came out of the QATR that we've got to work on now. It is design-tunable, but the values we had given for it were with the previous iteration of it. And with these fixes, it's changed it, so we now need to go back and do some more iteration on it to make it not as gluey.

Andy Nicholson · Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

I think with changes to rotational velocities on the ships in 3.0, that probably made it out of sync with each other. The algorithm isn't able to keep up with these ships and their turning rates. So yeah, we need to look at that for 3.1, but the fix is in QA testing. Future of ESP? I mean, it's so important to have something there, I think. When you're targeting these tiny little ships sometimes, some kind of correction to get you on course. When it's not there, people notice it, I think, eventually.

John Crewe · Lead Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Yeah, and it's like all of our assist systems, it's toggleable, so if you don't commit, tick it off. Advanced players can easily switch it off. And about IFCS, this is a really engineering one, so if people want more of an in-depth explanation, I'm sure Jared or someone can find an engineer to talk about it. Before you could fix ESP, we had to fix IFCS. So a big problem people were seeing was the control attitude sort of separating position- and rotation-wise. That was caused by changes between 2.6 and 3.0 that sort of went under the radar.

Andy Nicholson · Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

It did to us as designers. We would never have known about this.

John Crewe · Lead Technical Designer, Foundry 42 UK

It was part of the whole optimization for 3.0, moving lots of things to a batch update system so it would be more efficient. IFCS worked on a fixed time step, and with the batch update change, it now works on a variable time step. So things were sort of getting out of sync, and that's what people were seeing with the two reticles becoming out of sync. So the control methods that IFCS uses have been improved to account for the new optimizations more thoroughly. And lots of improvements and just iterations on that. And that, again, is with QA now being QATR'd.