Hello there, do you have time to talk about our lord and savior, the Station Interior?
You may remember this reddit thread we created a while back that summarized various points regarding the new Citadels.
One point that stood out quite a lot was your disappointment regarding the lack of station interior in Citadels. We discussed that quite a bit internally and decided to revert that decision.
So yes, Citadels will have station interiors.Several reasons for that. First is psychological. We want Citadels to feel like home, like your little protected bubble away from harm. Having an outside view of space around the structure doesn't convey that. In fact, it gives the feeling you're exposed to external factors, which is the exact opposite of the goal we wanted. Compare that with NPC stations and Outposts, where you feel safe spinning your ship despite having an army of angry nerds waiting outside. Again, it purely is a psychological effect, since Citadels will still be destructible, but we feel it's important point to keep.
Second, we have technical concerns by only having an external view mode. What if there is a lot of visual noise happening around the structure when you're docked? (ex: fleet fight) Well then you have a lot of rendering to do in the client, significantly slowing the docked experience. While you'll still have TiDi if you are in a station interior in a busy system, your client won't have to load all the effects around, which is a serious advantage.
So, based on all of that, here is how it's going to work:
- If you are in a subcapital or capital ship and you dock into a Citadel, you will get a regular station interior with ship spinning like you would on NPC stations or Outposts.
- If you are in a supercapital (titan or supercarriers) and you dock, you will get another station interior but with fixed camera (can't spin the ship). That's because there are various technical reasons tied to that.
- When inside either of these station interiors, you can also go look at the window, which is the external view we were giving you before. It most likely won't have the overview or ship brackets, but it will at least give you a general tactical assessment of what's outside. If not, you can always undock (tethering will keep you safe), look around then dock back. If nothing else it can also serve as a nice scenery when activity is going on outside the structure
- If you take direct control of the structure you will of course have the overview and ship brackets, since you need these to fire the structure defenses.
- No captain quarters in the new structures.
Hope that helps!
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