Guest: Chad McKinney, Senior Lead Gameplay Engineer

Personal hangars:

• Main reasons for the delay were:
  • Incorrect estimation of the finish date due to the size of changes.
  • Additional work required for some of the features.
  • Various stability issues making the game unplayable.
  • Some things happening outside the features (team restructuring, changes to direction)
• Tasks planned for 3.23 are “really close to completion”.
• They don’t know whether cargo changes will be released before or after Invictus.
• Previous episode (two weeks ago) didn’t happen because Jared got a concussion.
• At the moment people not in your party will be treated with the “impound” mechanic when accessing your personal hangar. This will be changed in the future for a “less gamey” solution.
• Personal hangars will be inside armistice zone so no shooting.
• Unwanted guests can steal your stuff if they manage it before the trespassing timer runs out.
• Party members have access to your personal hangar even if you’re not there. They can use all the available features there (cargo elevator, item kiosk etc) but only to access their own inventory.
• You’ll only see your personal hangar and ones belonging to your party members when using space port elevators. No more access to all of the hangars at your location.
• Kicking people from your party will remove their access.
• If you buy a bigger ship after getting your personal hangar you won’t be able to spawn it there, you’ll be assigned a public hangar when you do it. This will change in the future.
• Don’t leave any of your stuff in the public hangar as it will be deleted after leaving the location.
• They want to add an option to pay for “temporary storage” to retrieve the stuff you left in public hangars.
• There will be a warning about the stuff you’re about to lose.
• Plan for the future includes the ability to upgrade your hangar size as well as renting hangars at other locations.
• Team started working on party member access to your local inventory however this will require more security/permissions systems.
• Only one personal hangar at the starting location for the initial release. No changing.
• Criminals will have to live with their personal hangar being on one of the main planets for 3.23.
• Long term plan is to allow players to acquire personal hangars in any location that has hangars.
• There might be different hangar prices depending on the location in the future.
• No player limit for personal hangars, feel free to invite the whole server.
• Bed logging in hangar initially, they do want to look into this option in the future.
• You’ll be able to use your tractor beam in your hangar, not weapons.
• Many classic hangar decorations won’t be a thing on initial release as they need to be reworked. We’ll be able to buy and set up furniture.
• “If you can pull it out and manipulate in the game today, you’ll be able to use it to decorate on initial release.”

Cargo changes:

• “If there’s no hangar you won’t have the auto loading as an option. That’s a feature, not a bug.”
• Small locations (without hangars) not intended for large scale trading.
• Freight elevators will be attached to the landing pads, no need to move cargo at long distances.
• Auto loading times will be adjusted.
• “We want people to engage with manual loading.”
• Auto load time and cost will take cargo volume and number of boxes into account (transfer values of the same amount of cargo will differ based on container size for example).
• Cargo weight is still planned to affect flight characteristics. Not implemented yet as cargo not attached to the cargo grid isn’t currently counted towards mass of the ship.
• Ability to attach objects other than boxes to the cargo grid is coming but not yet ready.
• They aren’t sure what they’ll do with cargo decks since they were designed before current cargo implementation was decided upon. They do want them serve a bigger role beyond being a store for boxes and tractor beams.
• Stolen loot brought to the personal hangar can be stored, can’t be sold. You won’t be arrested.
• Trying to sell mission cargo net you a fine. Doing it in places like Grim Hex means selling for much lower price since the cargo is treated as high-risk.
• There are plans for customizing (naming/labeling/tinting) boxes/containers for easier organization. No specific solution as of yet.
• Cargo elevators come in 4 sizes (small, medium, large, extra large) with different max SCU values they can hold. All should be able to fit stuff like vehicles.
• No option to spawn multiple vehicles at the same time using the ship elevator on initial release.
• Fauna brought to personal hangars should persist, needs testing.

Next week’s stream will be on UI (inventory, Star Map, etc.).