Q21) What technical challenges need to be overcome to bring Ship-to-Station and Ship-to-Ship Docking online?
TL;DR Chris has done a significant amount of work on Docking that needs to go through QA and polishing. Despite that, they still need to make sure that when ships are Docked, they can persist even if they're streamed-out (so if two ships that are docked together are streamed-out, then need to still be docked together when they're streamed back in). It's also unknown what should happen to the interior atmospheres when Docking, which will need to be addressed.
One thing stopping it that MA can think of is "CR's magical stream". Mark goes on to say that CR (Chris Roberts) is an amazing programmer who has a nice little stream (of code I presume?) where he's changing a lot of the underlying ways of how they attach things, and he has the support of a lot of the Lead Programmers and Engine Tech. So in this stream, he's changing how the Devs attach things to-and-from different things, and one of the problems with the current tech is that, if they want to attach a ship to another ship, a whole slew of problems arise because the ship has an interior physics grid with a bunch of Object Containers, and if you attach it to another one of those, the code doesn't handle it very well and it has problems. So in that stream, he has provided a way to fix those issues, so that a ship could be attached to another ship and it would work as you would expect. If that tech gets past QA and they fix some of the bugs that have resulted from it, it would open up the doors to give them the ability to attach a ship to a ship, so you could dock a ship directly on another ship. For example, on the Constellation there's a fake Merlin atm because they don't have this docking ability yet, but if they get this tech in and working then they could do this properly. The other part of the problem is persistence, where if they do Dock two ships then they have to have some sort of game code understand that they have some sort of ship docked to another, so that when they're streamed-out and streamed back in, the states and connections are established. Then there's the other aspect of gameplay: what does it mean to dock a ship to another ship? Does the interior atmo need to be vented, or do they need to decompress? So it's coming, and once all the pieces are together then more might be said about Docking.
