Notable Information
➣ Q – Who makes the ships?
✦A – Designers come up with the briefs. Content team makes the words become pretty pictures. Vehicle art team makes the pretty pictures become pretty objects. The reality is that it is a very big web of teams to create a working ship.
➣ Q – How is the vehicle team broken down?
✦A – There is no one studio that is assigned to a specific manufacturer. The teams are assigned to a ship by work load and time slots. We do not want the teams to feel burnt out by creating for the same ship manufacturer over and over.
➣ Q – How does CIG decide on what ships gets developed?
✦A – The team has dedicated time slots for patches and so they plan the development of ships to make sure they target at least 1 ship per patch. There is a finite amount of time and bandwidth that each team can dedicate to ship development. Each ship has to go through several teams to make it to a Live build so it takes a lot of planning and time to get ships to a complete a state.
➣ Q – What is the priority for the ships teams?
✦A – The priority is very different for each team. The design team perspective is that we want the ship to make sense with how its built and functions with current game content.
➣ Q – What is the priority of “wee woo” lights
✦A – We are very pro “wee woo” lights but we do need a better way to control the lights.
➣ Q – Why does CIG choose a new vehicle over one that is in the backlog?
✦A – It comes down to size, scope and what gameplay is available.
➣ Q – With the Firebird and the “Nursa” (Ursa Medevac), is the team more or less focused on creating variants?
✦A – Its a mixed feeling, but we want to make ships that reflect the current standard. Sometimes its more efficient to create a new ship with its own character rather than trying to edit an existing ship, and potentially ruin its character/feel.
➣ Q – Is current modularity being released a turning point to start the development back up?
✦A – There are certain modularity features that are not quite ready, but we are at a stage where modules that you need to take the ship somewhere to swap is now possible. Ships moving forward that have a hard swappable modules will be targeted to have the feature released with that ship.
➣ Q – What are the next modules being worked on?
✦A – Drop ship modules and HAB modules
➣ Q – Did you tell the mission team about how the pulse could be used?
✦A – We sent an email to the mission team, but the goal was to make a vehicle to fit anywhere. The current situation where people are driving it in a station was not intended.
➣ Q – Any planned fixes for vehicles like the Ursa bouncing/bumping around?
✦A – Its somewhere between the network and physics. We are looking into it but we are trying to prioritize other fixes first.
➣ Q – Are ground vehicles a big priority vs space ships?
✦A – They both have a similar priority but its still dependent on the type vehicle. When making the decision we have to consider what features are we going to have to go back and fix.
➣ Q – Did you change med bed spawning just to sell more Nursa’s (Ursa Medevac)?
✦A – The intention was to always have med beds spawn. The goal is still targeting “death of a spaceman”.
➣ Q – What from Citcon being actively worked on?
✦A – We are half way through development on all ships shown. All the ships shown except the legionnaire is scheduled to be released. The legionnaire is going to be in a longer development cycle due to gameplay features not being ready.
➣ Q – When is the Zeus flight ready?
✦A – ES and CL are targeted for 2024 The MR will be later
➣ Q – Will there be another Sabre?
✦A – Yes, there is another Sabre that is being developed.
➣ Q – When will the Polaris be flight ready?
✦A – Polaris will be flight ready at IAE this year
This post was written by nerdgasm