OE: Rodrigo would also like to know With Item 2.0, will we be getting the ability to augment hand held weapons with optics and other attachments?
Yes, totally. That is another biggest reasons for this item 2.0 thing so we can put these components into a weapon. A perfect component is a zoom component or a recoil dampener or something like this so absolutely. We showed on ATV a few weeks ago where I was upgrading the weapon on ATV and this kind of stuff so absolutely you’ll be able to do this.
OE: Patrick Moore asks, Will there randomised events such as vandal raids? Going onto say Would it be possible for a player to be minding his business, mining on a planet and then surprise, vandals?
ST: Yes, yes! Absolutely. Now I don’t want to butcher the quote from Chris but Chris said it once that “Worlds need to be filled with life and danger.” So that’s really what he wants. It’s not just about vandal raid or anything like that. There’s also… you got other wildlife or you’ve got other factions or you’ve got other NPCs there, there could be pirates around. So like we don’t want anybody to have a boring experience, but we also don’t want to make it a frustrating experience.
There is always in an open world game like this, a level of let’s call it emergent gameplay or randomisation or something that will change what you’re expecting to do in that next 10 minutes. You know what I mean? So yes there will absolutely be events that will happen to players, even though they’re not looking for them. They will happen around them, for example a storm will kick off all of a sudden. A guy might just be minding his own business, mining away at a rock, admiring the landscape and all of a sudden a dust storm hits him and he’s got to figure out how to get through, that you know what I mean?
OE: Well, you don’t want to be coming up against one of those.
ST: Nope. Nope!
OE: Reborn asks Will there be full and dense forests on planets?
ST: Yes, there will be. This is still something we are working pretty hard on. Right now the focus is on the next major release, i don’t think is beyond saying we don’t have any dense forests stuff in the next release per se. We are absolutely working on it. At Citizencon we showed off some of the vegetation assets and we are seeing how dense we can make them. We are just finalising development on this. I like the term ‘procedurally assisted’ because a lot of people talk about procedural generations where they assume it is just a program that comes up with stuff and the the pure other side which is all art driven, we are somewhere in the middle where it is procedural assistance through tools. We have a procedural assisted placement of all the outposts or forests and we are getting that finalised and in a state that the performance is in a good place. Will we have forests? Absolutely! Have dense will they be? They will be as dense as we can make them and still run well.
OE: Jack Boughton asks Will weapon switching speed/aiming speed/reloading speed/freedom of movement be affected by armor weight and have large differences between suit/non-suit armor?
ST: This brings up something we have been implementing in the past couple months. With this item 2.0 stuff one of the components we created is a physics component which says how heavy something is. Now what game code does with it is really up to game code.do we want to change the speed of selection of weapons or how fast the guy can run we can do all of these things.
Whether or not weapon selection is slower due to the armour I don’t think they have made that call yet. There are already weapon that take different times depending on their size. For example the big railgun shown on ATV it takes longer to equip as the animation is longer as it is huge.
There are more fundamental questions to solve first, the biggest when you have a system that will change gameplay variables based on weight where do you set your zero point. Currently it is at medium armour, so if you’re in medium armour you are at 1:1 ratio for the animation speed so you are neither penalized nor are you rewarded, but does this make most sense? Wouldn’t the zero point be a naked body and anything on top of that slows you down but how do you even begin to start balancing that.
