I had assumed it would use the canvas system but now you mention it, maybe it will just be predefined images.

what probably happened is they hired more content devs than ui or coders thinkjng that was the best distribution of skills. Hindsight says they probably needed more testers and devs than artists. Harder to shift after the fact unless you get buyin for crossfunctional teams and even then not all bugs or problems can be solved faster by throwing more resources at them.. sometimes that has the opposite effect

Thing is nothing is bug free. Fibe years later and GTA 5 still has bugs and a monster budget. Anyone waiting for the perfect game needs to get in touch with reality. Provided the basic mechanics work most of the time, that's really all a player with beta access should be expecting. If we don't run into walls of bugs during beta that alone would be very concerning that the community imposed unrealistic expectations on a WIP. Warframe is still bug ridden and had humble buggy beginnings too. Most games that go the distance strive for getting basics like player movement right and then iron out the rest with hotfixes.

Yeah I am guessing about as much too, being able to reduce the guess work with a little info that should be readily available is the TL:DR of this suggestion really.

I have seen others mention in the ts discord that a more detailed tracker is coming with the new website, however it would be great if we could get a little more detail on the 3 tasks that have remained in testing for some time. Without knowing what they are it becomes more difficult to defend the time taken. Even knowing just the task names would dramatically help enabling the community to manage expectations. If there were a Blocked by phase etc so we know more why something isnt moving this would be even more awesome too. To be clear, like most of us I am happy to wait till it is ready, I just prefer to have an explanation ready to tell people I share news about the game with encouraging more to buy-in etc. It's also nice for being able to roughly plan/guess when to book in time-off work etc to enjoy that beta phase too

I coulda sworn in one of their way earlier videos that there was talk about using the in game businesses to drive a stock market online since i think you can manage aspects of your business from you laptop and phone anyway it makes sense that data is going to be on a remote server and therefore the stock market is just the UI that pulls in that information. As to it being cross servers.. that'd depend on how they've architectured things. If it uses a central data lake on AWS or similar to pool in player information so you can move between their Officially Hosted Servers keeping your pledge rewards and properties etc .. then it likely means the information about player owned businesses etc would be stored in the same way. On the subject of using IRL Stock Exchange, I think it is contextually unrelated to in game and doesn't necessarily align with what it appears the devs are aiming for: A self contained ecosystem that emulates life allowing players to fulfill various roles that drive the cogs keeping everything going.

I think if you can choose from a prefab to go in a vacant dedicated lot it wouldnt have perf implications as itd be all baked and pre lit etc. Custom building is a diff story tho

Javascript HTML5 web applications would be pretty easy to support being loaded into the in-game web-browser and it's one of the most common / easy to pickup languages making it a perfect option for creating rich and fun new software apps that could be sold on an in-game App Store. This creates the opportunity for players with that kind of background to build out new features into the game that would otherwise take a long time for the dev team to get around to and also gives them a way to earn in game currency. Expansions - API to interact with other in game systems like the stock market, bank, shops, factories, phone GPS, security systems etc. - Live linking to real externally hosted (Approved) web applications further increasing immersion and crossing the bridge between in game and reality. Essentially I would think it'd be neat to have an in-game editor for building these, but lets face it, if people are allowed to create applications like this, most are going to use an external setup and just spit out a minified javascript bundle, copy the code and paste into the in game editor to spin up their web applications... which isn't a bad thing really as it saves the hassle of building a fancy IDE in game.

That sounds more fun for sure and glad to hear on official servers the times arent crazy like an hour or more because for people like me who only get small windows of free time, an hour is a lot. Those minigames could make 45mins an interesting time by the sounds

I think it should be opt-in at best. Having played RP servers and going to prison in other games I can testify it is BORING. It is so boring it makes players drop your game as fast as they pick it up forever. We play games to escape reality and I don't work all week trapped in one place just to get home, jump in a game and remain trapped for hours staring at a cell wall. That said, you raise some good points. Why can't we use the phones/laptops to submit our case before a Judge working remote. Players can differ this to a lawyer or do it themselves.. same for police. Itd heavily reduce delays. Each side has 15mins from time of jailing to submit their case. Perp gets their "1 phone call" if they wanna use a lawyer or send their own. Using a lawyer grants +10 mins for perps rebuttle. Total drops to 30 mins and time spent in jail already is taken off final sentence (if any is awarded). We live in a tech world we should make better use of it.

Definitly, this idea only becomes viable to do early if the devs have already built existing apps on mobile / laptop devices using a chromium browser / html5 + javascript. If it uses C# or C++ or LUA etc then it won't be viable for quite a long time...if at all.

The ability to mod can have a significant impact on the underlying atmospere of a game. Even something as small as tweaking hunger, vehicle handling, camera position or walking speed by only tiny quantities can change the balance of how a player thinks / feels about a game as systems like that are close to the core. In contrast to this I think increasing the number of apps available for the computer devices (phone - laptop) doesn't change a core variable, it simply increases player immersion with more variety on devices already sporting a selection of apps. If players can own businesses, and one such biz is a software company responsible for vanilla apps... opening up that market place to other startup software companies will give ppl with those skills an income opportunity. We already have opportunities for musically talented, combat talented, artistic skilled etc.. players, why not software devs ^ ^

The other thing I thought about with it would be that a small JS library could be provided as an SDK of sorts with methods that hook into the API for us so all we need to do is call them and it bridges the gap saving time and reducing opportunity for defects when creating applications that hook into various APIs made available. everyone hooks into them the same way so everyone gets a baseline performance equality.