Just asking about ships again, as most of them in game are very old, and even while most of them were remodeled, I wonder if there are any new ones to be expected soon.
Or just general remodels of ships like the Atlas and the Axia Wraith?

Also are there any ships to be planned, even if for npc use only, bigger than a HAC (I know implementing a ship any bigger than that beast is a problem with the relatively "squashed" sectors we have now, and a lot of other issues I am open to know more about).
Also, will there be more small (aka goli-sized, or bit bigger/smaller) capitals planned? As honestly some players like small stuff just as much as they like enormous hunks of metal (like I am).
Also, what were the very first capships to be added to the game for npc use? I always wondered about this, even if its a bit unrelated.

So, in the past I "announced" the Trident variants when I thought those would be shipping imminently, and then various problems emerged and they had to be held back, and people were very upset about this. So upset, some accused me of "lying" and so on, which was never the case, I was just a bit too "optimistic", and didn't realize it at the time.

Anyway, at this point, I generally don't "announce" this kind of content until it's literally about to roll out. I don't want to be accused of misleading anyone. Game development is difficult enough to predict, even for our own internal milestones.

I will say that new and improved ships and variants are still a part of our goals.

Also are there any ships to be planned, even if for npc use only, bigger than a HAC

There are some truly "massive" ships that are mentioned in the backstory, and I would like to see some examples of that kind of thing come to fruition. But, as you say, there are technical challenges to extremely large ships. We've spent a lot of time in 2019 and 2020 (and then again this year) improving the AI and navigational capabilities so that "Large" ships can more safely navigate sectors. We want to create larger and more complex sectors, but we also have to have AI that can handle it, which presents a series of different development challenges, but we've made a lot of progress.

I would also like to be scaling up stations before releasing bigger ships. Otherwise the universe looks a bit lopsided with gigantic ships that are larger than the stations where they dock up. There's a whole other project around "giant stations", which has been cooking for a few years. Again, it includes some technical challenges, since it has to "visually" work across mobile-phones and gaming-desktops.

Also, will there be more small (aka goli-sized, or bit bigger/smaller) capitals planned? As honestly some players like small stuff just as much as they like enormous hunks of metal (like I am).

I'm interested in greater variety across the board. I think the more diversity there is in ship-types flying around, the more interesting the universe will be.

Also, what were the very first capships to be added to the game for npc use? I always wondered about this, even if its a bit unrelated.

The "first" capship was the Heavy Assault Cruiser (which had a different name, back then). Now, I use the concept of "for NPC use" a little loosely, because initially it was basically just a big station with auto-turrets, that couldn't move or fly, and would shoot at people. But, eventually we made it able to move around and so on, and the concept of capships came from that.

I always wanted "really big ships" in the game, and giant battles and such, so I commissioned a capship pretty early in development. The Trident came after that. Then the Constellation and Teradon, a couple of years later.

How big you plan the stations to be? Will there be some truly monstrous structures, similar in size to the old latos m-7? I heard that thing was absurdly large. It even went outside render distance and some point. Current stations are like little candy boxes compared to it (like even the capitol stations are rather small, i assume 1,5-2 km long, tell me if I am wrong, probably yes).
I agree that some ship what is more than twice the size of a HAC would look funny big near current stations, we need very schonky structutes to fit well for them for sure

How big you plan the stations to be? Will there be some truly monstrous structures, similar in size to the old latos m-7? I heard that thing was absurdly large. It even went outside render distance and some point.

There's a lot to respond to there. But.. yes, we've looked at "extremely large" content, and will continue to evaluate it. Pushing back render-distance and changing the way that works is also going to happen. So, effectively, there will be unlimited render distance.. which then also changes how assets will be created; there's a lot of hand-in-hand between engine tech changes and assets that push the limits.

We have some pretty crazy stuff we've built as test-cases, but I don't want to make any implied promises, vague or otherwise, about the exact scale of anything that may come out in the future. This is simply because there are a lot of moving parts around the "breadth" of our platform support, and anything that we ship has to work "everywhere".

The "old" Latos-M7, from years ago, was actually an example of a another test-case: a really massive-scale object built almost entirely without texturemaps (just polygon detail). That isn't the long-term direction we want to go in either, but it was interesting and informative.

Hmm
So the old M-7 station was just a big hunk of boxes with color but no textures at all?
Just a naked model? Also is there any remains left of it in game, like on the PCC server? Or anywhere I could take a loom at it?
Also you mentioning unlimited render distance, with that it would be possible to see some monstrous structures (like the one what was in m7, i heard that thing was 25km+ across) from like a 100 km away?
How cool that would be!
Also what about sector sizes? Will they be way bigger, and how you plan ships to traverse any distance above 25km with current ship velocity maxing out at 225 m/s?
Will it be like now, just will take an insanely long time?

You can see the old station in this video by YodaOfBorg: Watch here

However, I think it was blue, not red?

I actually found it on PCC yesterday in devlopia. It looks very weird with no textures (and oddly flickers on the glowy blue parts) and only the bare poly model, but its mind boggingly huge... like its docks are bigger than a Connie supposedly... Its just absurd to look at it with all the smol stations nowdays, as its 25km across at least and some of it goes off render distance constantly.

So the old M-7 station was just a big hunk of boxes with color but no textures at all?

Yoda's old video, that Luxen linked, is accurate.

Technically, I think I used a couple of basically "solid" colored textures, and then made some of them self-illuminating (the glowy bits), and I did some other trick to make the edges a little softer on the glowing details. I don't remember the specifics.

But, all in all, it was extremely simply textured, intended to use as little memory as possible, while performing as well as possible on GPUs of the era. By this point in time, textures were "expected" by GPU pipelines, so I think having "no textures at all" would have been less efficient than super-simple textures.

I actually modeled the whole thing on an early Atom-CPU netbook, sitting in a coffee shop in California, during GDC. I forget what year. But, because of the chaotic timing of events around then, I ended up having to actually build the asset while I was out there. But, thankfully, that was doable.

Extremely large objects bring big challenges, at least to make something look nice (or even just look "not-terrible"). If you do it the traditional "game-asset" way, like we do for ships and such, you'd have prohibitively high-resolution textures that no GPU could possibly load, so that's out. Basically your options are:

- Stretch an insufficient texture across too-large of an object, making the texels (pixels) super huge and blurry, which looks terrible.

- Repeat a texture way too often, which then reduces the texel size, but tends to make things look a bit artificial and silly at extreme scales.

- Multi-texture "everything" with lots of unique geometry and varied textures breaking up surfaces, which is basically how our traditional stations are made, as well as most FPS-game levels, and also the open-worlds in games like GTA5. This is doable, but the content-creation load to do a massive object is a big effort, and the downloadable size of the textures is enormous (makes the game a lot bigger, at least without getting into procedural textures and such).

- Use complex "detail textures", which fade in different detail at different relative distances, using more intensive shaders. This is what we do now, but back then I don't think we had detail textures yet, and even so, the sheer scale of the object was.. kind of too big for that solution alone.

So, avoiding all of the above, the goal was to see how "interesting" I could make something look by only using polygonal detail, since geometry is always "sharply defined" and never gets blurry with scale, unlike texturemaps.

Working on huge stuff is difficult due to the amount of effort you have to put into making it look good, while small things just can use lower detail textures with no problems, as at fighter scaled ships very small details are not visible at all
Also
I seen a weird structure in pcc in devlopia, idk what sector anymore, but it was just some station parts near each other, some oddly clipping
What that supposed to be?
It looks so weird
Also
Just because I can ask
When I will be able to fly a Helman Overseer, or something similar (maybe never?)
I think its one of the best looking of hive bots
I also wonder what its stats looks like