What's GOING to be happening...

I'm doing some marketing-related work, setting up some promos with a few sites, and things of that nature, and haven't had a lot of time for untangling some knotty design problems we face (one of which: our faction system, the vast inane mess that it is). Completion of the the faction/FF redux is, aside from billing-outages and server-performance-problems and other unpleasant things, our highest official priority. However, since I'm kind of stalling that development until I finish with some Business stuff, I've pushed people off to other projects that I think will be.. appreciated.

As a result, Ray is now working on making multi-player ships a reality in the near future. I can't say how near of a future, because we don't know yet; but if all goes well.. as early as this Friday, if not, then next week. This is a critical stepping-stone as we move towards the goal of Player Capships. In the near-term, you can expect some sort of small "heavy" that has the potential for turrets, such as a Behemoth. This functionality has been planned for a really, really long time, but there may still be some issues with the mechanics as we put this into place, so please have patience with any issues that crop up. Despite the possibility always being there, we've never actually done this before.. which is why dockable capships are always NPCs, and dev-flown capships have never been dockable. Of course, for the first version we'll just be focusing on smaller ships, as I said, where the owner of a given multi-player-capable ship may "invite" other players to join his vessel, while docked in a station. Dynamically joining and leaving these sorts of ships, outside of stations, will not be possible.. you'll have to wait for capships with docking bays for that to happen. Anyway, I think this'll be really cool, and open up a lot of potential for gameplay possibilities. As I said, the mechanics are still in flux, so things like grouping will have to be done independently of which players join which ships. If people want to take grouped missions as multi-player vessels, then they'll need to group themselves as a separate stage.

Michael is also working on a new system to allow scheduling of Events and coordination with a volunteer Guide, which will hopefully let us host and organize more events, and have the information clearly available. Hopefully we'll have some version of this by Friday, but I don't know if we'll make it visible or not, we may yet do some testing with the Guides.