I just read it, a very good interview I thought.

Not sure I agree with this part though:

Chick: Fair enough. Going back to feedback from the beta tests -- this might be a difficult question because you might not be able to answer it diplomatically -- but what are some of the sillier complaints you get from fans? For instance, I'm just going to throw out a couple that I've heard. I hear people complain that the turrets don't move on the capital ships. Or that non-fighters don't fly around during combat.

Fraser: Yeah.

Chick: I've seen both of those and I think they're completely immaterial to what you guys are doing. Do you get a lot of complaints that you think are silly and miss the point like that?

Fraser: Totally. You named a great example and a bad example, and I'll explain why. In terms of turrets, a lot of people coming from Nexus or Homeworld expect that level of detail. But given what we were trying to simulate, and the system specs we were trying to hit, turrets doing that just didn't make any sense, especially at the scale we're doing it. It was absolutely silly. Waste of our resources, waste of the CPU's resources. So we didn't do that. Now, the other one -- ships not flying around with fighters -- we actually did that at the start. The problem is, given the number of ships you can potentially have, it was absolute chaos. It made for very poor gameplay. As realistic as it may have been, or as "Battlestar Galactica" as it may have been, it just didn't work. However, we did know it was something we could provide as a modding option. In Entrenchment, we actually unlock that capability. There are several mods right now that incorporate that as a gameplay feature. If you go to the modding forums on the Sins site, you can see a couple of examples. Who knows? They may be able to tweak the physics to make entertaining gameplay.

Now I'm not going to go off on one here, rather try to balance the arguement a little because it wasn't tackled very objectively.

We know you've added fighter physics as an option to Entrenchment, so lets just wrap that up and say good move and much appreciated.

It is also fair to say 'But given what we were trying to simulate, and the system specs we were trying to hit, turrets doing that just didn't make any sense, especially at the scale we're doing it.'

What people want ladies and gentlemen is turrets as an option, so my Quad-core 8GB 64bit system has the option to 'switch them on'. Now if its a waste of your time to develop this option because the majority of players don't have the system spec needed you have a community of modders that are quite prepared to invest the time for you and then you can judge the results for yourself if you empower them to do so.

So on behalf of the community that wants this enhancement feature, can you please give us some guidance or pointers on how it might be achieved. You've already got an outstanding particle system which reads constants and identity matricies externally, can you not go that extra step to effect the vector calculations on objects with variables and formulae?

Turrets aside there could be a great deal of benefits for other objects too, someone was asking me a few months back how they might extend/retract the pylons on their Galactica model. There is no reason why the core Sins game cannot include that style in its own way like hanger doors and well basically more advanced designs in general.
Not really immaterial when you look at it from that perspective at least I don't think so, turrets are just a by product of being able to control sub/child mesh objects at that level which is very very good thing for all players.

Its not only Capships, don't forget there are Starbases and enhanced tactical structures, any one of those would make a good candidate and wouldn't soak up massive ammounts of CPU cycles if applied only to those objects, or even just the pirate base which is hardly going to present in any large numbers.

Anyway I hope I have presented sensible feedback on this topic, its not a complaint its an oppourtunity to enhance the game.
 

Great interview.  I did want to comment on one part, though:

Blair, please don't fall into the mindset that the only multiplayer going on is online.  I play this game exclusively multiplayer with my friends, but I've never once played this game online.  All my multiplayer always takes place via a LAN, never online.  There's a large demographic out there that's like that, and they're never counted in online figures and people correlate online to multiplayer which isn't always the case!!

It's purely annecdotal, but just in my small town here, not including multiplayer would have cost you a good 6-7 sales, just in my immediate group of friends.  Including my own - gaming is a social thing for me, so without multiplayer I'm not interested, but again... I've never once used Ironclad Online.

As far as the phase lane thing and static worlds, this is really not a problem for me. I just imagine it differently than it's presented in the game. Instead of say "this map is a solar system and it has planets and resources" I tend to think of it as each planet IS a solar system and the entire map is a galaxy or a stratigic portion of a galaxy. Then static positions makes sense. I would think for every known solar system only a handful of planets would have any stratigic or resource value in real life. And phase lanes? maybe you can only jump so far, or a gravity well pulls you out of phase space anyways. So you have to jump from point to point.

That's my take anyway.

Which basically means instead of picking one thing, they have to do both. So no, it still doesn't make any sense.

Chick: The Adjudicators can do this?

Fraser: Oh yeah.

Chick: I've seen them drop the plasma balls that line up on a target, but those can track multiple targets?

Fraser: Yes. Anywhere from five to 10, depending on your upgrade levels.

WANT!

Lets just try it, if the Devs think its a waste of time then let the modding community expend the effort and experiment on their behalf. We'll find out if the CPU/GPU calculations are too much, and if it makes any graphical impact on the game.

Drop the whole turret business for a sec, if you can control submesh objects externally to that extent you could do much more.

What's not to like about that, why write it off so quickly?

The thing is, once something's included as an option, everybody and their brother is going to whine about not being able to turn it on. "Ironclad didn't devote enough time to making turrets work on my P3 250MHz machine"...or, "Y dint they cut the fiters and bommers so we cud watch the kewl pew pew?"

You know it and I know it. That's the crap they would have had to listen to. Better just to leave it out and let the modders take care of it, as Fraser said.

More than happy with that approach, atm only IC know if variables and calculations can be done externally and what those variables are. So short of using a disassembler and potentially wasting 100s of hours and still not getting anywhere a few words of advice so that 'modders can take care of it', or atleast start it would be much appreciated .

I'll admit I was a little dismayed about the lack of moveable turrets...at first. But once I get playing, I really don't notice it. I spend so much time looking at the bigger picture that even if they were turned on, I wouldn't get to see them.

One way around it, I guess, would be to make the turrets less...conventional (and so less noticeable that they don't move). I don't know too much about ballistics (and especially ballistics in space) but would a turret need to look like a turret?  Would it need to have a barrel to increase accuracy like in an atmosphere?  I always imagine that space based weapons would use a smaller, more compact mountings.  

In any case it'll be interesting to see if the modding community manages to work around it.  In the interest of keeping my framerate high I'd probably steer clear...

...but maybe be a little secretly jealous of you quad core gits out there