Guest:

• Chad McKinney, Senior Lead Gameplay Engineer

TL;DW:

• Jared’s head will be scanned for one of the games.
• “When I said that (we’re really close to releasing personal hangars) that doesn’t mean we were close to going live.”
• ATC and transit were the most problematic parts to implementing the new hangar loop due to their age.
• Transit is already in the process of rewriting, ATC will follow in the future.
• Hooking personal hangars/cargo to the new mission system also shed light on some previously unknown problems with its implementation.
• Since the 3.23.1 (later 3.24) patch was already late, they decided to spend more time on it to polish things and include some of the player feedback. They couldn’t do more as they didn’t want to cause a general delay for the rest of the company.
• Chad wishes he’d split the functionalities more so they could deliver them faster and in a better state.
• “In the original proposal of the item bank it works as it does now actually.” (no drawer, just opens the old inventory UI)
• Item kiosk UI will most likely stay as is (no drawer), just with all the improvements from the freight elevator kiosks (search and all the other stuff).
• Answers from Rick Porter & Ian:
  • “We plan to add ‘garage modules’ so we don’t intend to expand the pavement (of the personal hangars) but there should be more room for vehicles where you can basically add on modules and expand the hangars (…)”
  • “The plan is for personal hangars to be able to be customized and expanded in the future with addition of these modules (there’s no finalized list of possible modules yet).”
  • They’re planning to split the public and personal hangar decorations (cables and all the other garbage) to allow players to fully make the latter their own while keeping the public ones feel lived in/used.
  • We’ll be able to move the freight elevator in our personal hangar when hangar customization modules are released.
  • Cargo decks need a significant rework as cargo gameplay approach has significantly changed since their implementation. They will be used in some way eventually.
• ATLS tractor beam functionality will be an exclusive feature for now, there’s ongoing discussion whether to copy it to other vehicles and handheld devices.
• No bed logging from beds included in this year’s Citizen Con goodie pack for now, overall work on bed logging and logging from hangars will happen in the future.
• Hangar decorations being unruly is a problem with physics, more info in the last week’s chat with Benoit. Will improve as server performance increases.
• Option to put 1 SCU boxes into 8 SCU ones was removed due to issues on the delivery logic side (problems with delivery of nested objects). Will probably return in the future.
• We’ll be able to call our ships into other people’s hangars eventually. There are still some technical and design problems to figure out before that happens.
• ATC is probably the oldest system in the game.
• Spawning vehicles from freight elevator is still planned.
• They’re looking into making the process of calling up your ship faster.
• Chad haven’t heard about hangar alarm (the one happening when spawning your ship) being a problem, there are no plans to adjust the volume or add an ability to turn it off at the moment.
• They want to add support for manual loading for the Hull series and other ships that require docking. Improvements to automatic loading will come later.
• Hover trolleys had some physics and game loop issues, they’ll come back eventually.
• Auto loading is planned to always be a thing but not for every object (not for mission cargo, some personal items).
• Inventory search will include more item data/fields in the future.
• Mining bags not working with freight elevators is a technical issue, they’re aware of it.
• There will be an option to spawn multiple ships at the same time in the future.
• Option to name cargo boxes is still in design stage but it’s planned.

No SCL next week, this one might be the last one until after Citizen Con.