There's an excess of children who need adopting; adding more worsens things. Unlike spending a lifetime building a trident. Spending your life building a trident implies paying the devs lots and lots of subscription money, which they can us to do cool things like adding VR support, overly tidy hangers, and perhaps one day FPS boarding parties. And speaking of hangers, is this only going to be for station hangers, or will capship hangers eventually include 3d spaces for docked ships?

you're not listening to whistler, pizza! Tsk tsk. Bad boy.

Well, at least I was trying to meander back onto the topic, unlike your whistlerblowing. :P So, to resume said meandering, how does the hanger system actually work? Are you sitting inside your ship's cockpit looking around at the hanger (and if so, what happens when you change ships?) or does it move your viewpoint out of the ship?

yarr

*takes sip*

Man, so many dramatic and pessimistic assumptions :(

Thank you so much to those who took the news positively. I think the Hangar looks great, it's probably Curt's best work to date, and he's put a ton of effort into it. We're doing a lot of related asset and engine R&D that will probably have a big beneficial impact on all new graphical content that gets added into the game.

For those who are more unhappy or uncertain about our direction:

- Features that are added for VR, which also make sense for non-VR, will probably be available in non-VR eventually. I've already written about this with the cockpit stuff. But don't expect that in "beta"?

- VR is also a wonderful way for us to experiment with re-tooling a ton of "dated" content, like the user interface. I never expected this to be "VR-only", heh.

- Just because we support Windows out of the gate, does not eliminate Linux or Mac support from the future.

- There are huge benefits to being early on a platform or paradigm shift. We aren't "chasing" anyone, there's no other space MMO that's going after mobile VR the way we are, as far as I'm aware. No disrespect to Star Citizen, I think it's a beautiful looking game, but I don't really care what they're doing. I'm doing something else.

- If we want to launch on Steam, it makes sense to have the added interest and support from Valve that comes with being a SteamVR title.

- Our mobile support actually worked out super well for us. On Android we pull in 10,000-20,000 new users per month without spending any money on advertising, and without ever being featured in the Play Store. And we haven't even launched on iPhone yet. But more than anything, it put us in a place where we could go after mobile-VR.

- The Rift and the Vive are really cool, but smartphone-based VR is going to be a mass-market global commodity, probably with an audience in the hundreds of millions within a couple of years. Being an early "definitive" experience there is going to be an interesting thing. And yes, our starting so early on the Rift is a huge part of what's making that possible.

- We aren't just working on VR. I just happened to write a newsletter about it, because we've had a lot of interest, and it's coming up. Much of what we're doing also falls under "1.9 development".

That's cool and all, but what's coming to the game that'll get me to renew my premium subscription for another year?

- Just because we support Windows out of the gate, does not eliminate Linux or Mac support from the future.

Maybe if game devs ask Oculus for it, it'll carry more weight than us Kickstarter backers...

That's cool and all, but what's coming to the game that'll get me to renew my premium subscription for another year?

Well, there's lots of stuff coming, some of which would probably make you happy. Like, all the 1.9 stuff is still actively in process, and I'm trying to work my way through some good Suggestions content. But the OP here is just one newsletter that I wrote about one thing. It's unfortunate that we're so swamped that we aren't pushing out a lot more news lately, although no matter what news I write there's usually a certain number of people who will say "I don't really care about that, what else do you have?".

If we want to launch on Steam . . .

Um, when did this become an open question? You've been greenlit for years, literal years, and now there's some doubt if VO will ever actually launch?

Well, there's lots of stuff coming, some of which would probably make you happy. Like, all the 1.9 stuff is still actively in process, and I'm trying to work my way through some good Suggestions content. But the OP here is just one newsletter that I wrote about one thing. It's unfortunate that we're so swamped that we aren't pushing out a lot more news lately, although no matter what news I write there's usually a certain number of people who will say "I don't really care about that, what else do you have?".

I think ARF's point is that "lots of stuff" and "some of which" and "all the 1.9 stuff" is really vague and not very good for keeping enthusiasm high. There are always going to be people that want development efforts focused elsewhere, but communicating what the development efforts actually are would go a long way to keeping a broad spectrum of users happy because there will be something they can get excited about. Even if it adds to the delivery timeline, most users are willing to wait for things they care about as long as they know what to care about.

At this point, I'm not even sure what the 1.9 stuff actually encompasses. I don't know if features have been trimmed or changed. It's hard to stay excited about a version number that has been on the product backlog for so long that the entire scope could have changed.

I'm assuming that you guys have some sort of tracking that targets specific features for specific releases and planned dates. Is it possible to publish this in some way so current development efforts and upcoming releases are more visible without adding the overhead of creating a news post for all of the development work?

Making their tracker available to the public so we can track their progress on the many things they're working on but not finished with yet is one of the many things they're working on but not finished with yet. Many of those many things are things I'd rather they continue working on and stop not being finished with yet more than granting us the ability to know which of those many things they're still busy not being finished yet on.

I'm assuming that you guys have some sort of tracking that targets specific features for specific releases and planned dates. Is it possible to publish this in some way so current development efforts and upcoming releases are more visible without adding the overhead of creating a news post for all of the development work?

No, there really isn't. We are fully saturated in dealing with a lot of moving parts as it is. Like, for some reason, this week the Galaxy S7 is now running the game more slowly than the S6. Last week it wasn't running at all. We are in the midst of a non-stop mess to just try and figure this all out and ship it on some reasonable timeframe, and our dates and goals are highly reactionary. The last thing I have time for is news-posts to inspire people. I know the value of keeping people informed, both to our players / supporters who just genuinely care about the game, and also from a marketing standpoint of potentially interesting new people in the game; but we simply do not have any more resources to go around and be spent on.. anything. Not right now.

I am trying to wedge in some gameplay changes every week (that I'm geographically here), for whatever that's worth. But in the priority and bug juggling, I rarely know what's going to make it in for a given release, right now. We're just pushing forward, gung-ho.

Um, when did this become an open question? You've been greenlit for years, literal years, and now there's some doubt if VO will ever actually launch?

Er, ok, so I used "If we want to launch on Steam" as a concept interchangeable with "Given we want to launch on Steam", or "As it has already been established that we want to launch on Steam". It is in no way in question, sorry for the word choice; I'm trying to respond to this thread in between other things. The important takeaway was simply that, with thousands of games launching per year on Steam, it can be pretty easy to be lost in the noise, and there is value in having the potential for additional interest and support from Valve as a SteamVR title.

"Like, for some reason, this week the Galaxy S7 is now running the game more slowly than the S6. Last week it wasn't running at all. "

I play on a Samsung S7 and it actually seems smoother than my PC for some odd reason. Never once had an issue aside from voice chat (thanks for the reply on that). And I agree 100% that the immediate future of "mass consumed" VR content will absolutely be mobile VR. People already own the most crucial piece of the hardware...the computing power of their phone. $99 for a competent VR experience on a Gear VR is within reach of anyone with the cash to drop on a Samsung phone in the first place. The news of the mobile VR release is what pulled me in to this game. I am totally super pumped about zipping around and pew pew'ing in VR space while laying on my bed.

Timing wise, releasing on Steam around the same time as Elite's Engineers patch in May and the launch of No Man's Sky in June wouldnt really allow VO to garner much visibility IMO. It definitely will pull more users in if launched in a window some point later in the summer for that oh-so-reasonable price of "free to play". What VO will offer that Elite/NMS doesnt is an actual MMO experience in VR. Elite looks pretty, but in open play i rarely run into other commanders. Instancing ruins that experience for me.

Timing wise, releasing on Steam around the same time as Elite's Engineers patch in May and the launch of No Man's Sky in June wouldnt really allow VO to garner much visibility IMO.

I think you do not need to worry that VO will go on Steam in May or June. I asked about this before and it did sound like Steam was planned after 1.9 and (shortly) before 2.0. So not in the near future.

But I totally agree with your background idea. I hope the developers have it on their screen that the Steam release has to be perfectly timed. Vendetta has a lot to offer and is a very nice niche game, but it will go unnoticed if some super fancy graphics space game - with a millions of dollars budget and 2500 developers working behind the scenes - launches the 1000st patch around that time of the year. It really has to happen in a quiet time on Steam with few other spaces games doing anything.

The same applies for the iPhone release, of course.

I play on a Samsung S7 and it actually seems smoother than my PC for some odd reason. Never once had an issue aside from voice chat (thanks for the reply on that).

I'm glad to hear it, but you're playing the "production" version in the older OpenGL ES2 renderer. We've had to do a great deal of optimization to the rendering engine to get the level of performance needed for VR (which has to render twice as much data.. once for each eye, and needs to maintain 60fps while doing it). As a result, we're using some much more advanced features of OpenGL ES3, and running into more issues as we get into more cutting edge areas that aren't really utilized very often on mobile.

Basically, driver instabilities, and challenges related to the collision of "mobile" and "gaming", where the device is trying to be as power-efficient as possible, while we're trying to eek as much performance out of it as we can, which are diametrically opposed goals.

But I totally agree with your background idea. I hope the developers have it on their screen that the Steam release has to be perfectly timed.

So, that isn't really a thing anymore. We can run it past Valve and at least try not to launch at the same time as Call Of Duty or some other massive title, but realistically, there are thousands of games per year launching on Steam now. You're always up against something, probably a bunch of somethings. It's actually become tough for even the professional marketing companies who are hired to help with launches, as there are just so many launches and press reviewers aren't as interested in hearing about "new" indie titles anymore.

To put it more specifically, Steam has launched this many games by year:

Year - Titles
2012 - 382
2013 - 572
2014 - 1802
2015 - 3106
2016 - ~5000 (1258 so far)

This is why things like VR, and direct support for SteamVR, may have some value beyond that of "VR is cool". It's one more way to be highlighted, one additional means to (possibly) get a bump from Valve themselves.

Anyway, yes, we know all about the challenges of competitive launch timing, we've been doing this awhile :). We've dealt with it on Apple and Android, and even at retail, back when pre-scheduling CD manufacturing capacity was a big deal (we were late in 2004 because of a hurricane and Doom 3 using up all the capacity).