40:51 [Will we see more co-pilot interactions that will assist the pilot?]

what is said seems to have confused some in the comment section, so i’d like a clarification.

“one controls the pitch, one the yaw” was made fun of and it seems in the comments it was taken as “co-pilots will not get control of the ship”.

will there be no options and is it not considered to give flight control back and forth, not shared simultaneously but like already existing in other flight games with full control to one player at a time with option to move controls to the other? release/lock control?

it would not be “mixed” controls as talked about as it wouldn’t be both simultaneously giving input on the flight, to make that clear. this was not really addressed.

what about the options to actually use the ship comms? better navigation tools? options by co-pilot to mark hostile ships, possibly scan them?

irl and in other games inspired or simulating it have co-pilots control a remote camera, similar to turrets but just the camera (like the search light on the cutlass red), but with enhanced optics an vision options.

merely switching what seat controls what weapons doesn’t really sound like there’s any thought or actual work put into above mentioned co-pilot roles that are used everywhere else, as they make sense.

the only example given was “forward facing gimbles”.

what about control over the shield power distribution?

and did they really just joke around and then just say “or you can check the systems. you can roleplay that if you want to.”

what do you mean roleplay that? so i can’t actually check the systems? basically nothing will improve here but more control of the guns?

As I mentioned during the show on Friday, there is some work happening in regards to handling item control around. While most of the control paths are currently linked to pilot seats (like the gimbals, thrusters, etc.) the plan is that controllers can be swapped dynamically between different seats later. In certain ships you actually have already shared ownership of item control, e.g. a co-pilot getting priority of the ball turret (e.g. in the Hornet) over the pilot and in some ships that is the same for the missile system. It’s just that we cannot dynamically assign these based on player control atm as we don’t have any UI or process to swap control over.

As for momentarily swapping over flight control to another seat … I really like that idea and that surely would fall under the same system. However technically there are only very few ships that actually have a second pilot seat. So it would always be case of thinking whether or co-pilot seat is actually a co-pilot or otherwise a crew member.

And no, although Jared and I were in a joking mood on Friday (frankly, I was pretty tired) I was not really joking about doing checklists. With the new MFDs we’ve shown at Citcon you can actually run through checklists, compare the current vs intended settings. And it does make sense as well because those settings are not saved per player … those are persistently saved per ship. And you might find that somebody snuck on your ship and messed up your settings … e.g. disabling gravity assist, disabling automatic precision modes or inverting the pitch / yaw controls.