Dan posted the townhall on Youtube:
Since some questions were left unanswered from the doc I’ll -very quickly- address them here:
Playbenni: How long would you estimate would a barebone VR implementation take?
Initial investigations ( aka SteamVR api ) could maybe get a minimum, dirty version in 2 weeks ( basically just the stereo rendering and head tracking ). Making the UI work in VR would need some extra weeks. Figuring out the controls: if only gamepad, maybe quickly. If we’re talking of motion tracking, then the question is what would you interact your hands with ? The cockpit ? Then everything in the cockpit must become functional -> you easily add a month or two, plus some artwork revamp of the cockpits. Finally, the elephant in the room is optimization. If our philosophy is “if you want VR, you’ll need an RTX card” then yeah, not much to do. If however we want VR to run at 60 Hz+ on older gens, then the game needs a huge optimization pass, and that could add a few months.
TL;DR: I’d say from 1 month ( quick & dirty job ) to 6+ months ( for motion tracking, artwork revamps and performance optimizations ). That’s if we did the job ourselves. If we hired a contractor to do it for us ( to minimize distractions on us ) it could take longer and the budget would likely inflate by x2 or x3.
Playbenni: Would it be possible to have the kickstarter reward of naming NPCs, Planets etc. in sooner rather than later. In my imagination it would only take a form field on the website in the user settings and the server to load the names from a simple database.
It’s a matter of priorities. Website work requires both frontend(webpage) and backend (database/infrastructure) work. Keith would be the one doing those. But at the same time, Keith will be implementing assets streaming into the engine. We’re already over the vram budget and stuttering issues ( as well as driver crashes ) are becoming more and more frequent, which means we can’t add more content to the game atm ( planets, assets etc… ). Between these two, I think vram is arguably far more important to get resolved sooner than later ( and even then, it’s gonna take months, probably even until the end of this year ).
Follow up by Pendrokar: “& what about the 3D statue rewards?”
They’re at the design stage. Dan has been working on them for a while ( at low priority ) and the design is more or less figured out. Next step is modelling.
Playbenni: Does the engine currently have the capabilities to spawn a planet with a very opaque/foggy and dense atmosphere like Venus for example?”
It does, but the huge drawback is that the planet looks crap from orbit. You don’t see any ground details, the surface is barely or not at all visible, so you get this giant ball of a uniform color. But maybe we can do this for a single moon somewhere. It’d certainly be interesting to see how battles at low altitudes look like with a limited visibility.
Playbenni: Are changes to the flight model in atmosphere still planned for release or after? DCS and flight simulator fans would probably appreciate it if the handling was more airplane like in atmosphere and it would add another layer of depth to the gameplay.
Updating the flight model in atmosphere isn’t that hard ( I mean, if you want a proper, 100% realistic atmospheric model, it’s super hard. But “tweaks” to the current model, in particular to add lift and help ships more naturally turn in atmospheres, is definitely doable ). The tricky part is making the AI fly with these new constraints. So with players only, I’d have already implemented these changes (we kind of already had that in pre-alpha if you remember); but with AI, it becomes a huge task which isn’t prioritized for any time soon. Unless you’d be happy with AI ships flying very awkwardly in the atmospheres, constantly missing each others 
Arkenbrien: “It was mentioned that the company has concerns outside of simply making the game. This much is obvious, however seeing as most everybody hasn’t run a company like yours before, what are some challenges that you’ve been dealing with, and could you occasionally include them in your future community updates?
I think I partially answered that in the townhall on another question. The main challenges we have right now are financial and organisation. Financial, between although we had a lot of breathing room with the Early access, it’s not like we got millions. For example, hiring a new programmer is extremely difficult. We can either hire a junior at an affordable salary, but it could be counter-productive considering our huge and complex codebase and the fact that neither Keith nor I really have the time to tutor a junior. Or we could hire an experienced, senior programmer, which would cost $100K/year in the US. We definitely can’t afford that. So we’re tring to find an experienced, senior programmer that isn’t in the US, but it’s not so easy. The last programmer we interviewed had a decent resume/CV, mobile games development experience and salary requirement was okay… and ended up having no experience on massive codebases and knew little about multithreading…
In terms of organization and management, it’s more or less what you’d expect from a company running remotely and with every members in a different timezone. Also, Keith spends the majority of his time simply “running the company”, which isn’t something that is immediately visible to you guys. That means writing contracts ( which often needs to involve our lawyer ), talking to accountants, figuring out taxes, doing payroll/royalties payments, answering support requests (you’d cry if you saw how many KS backers still don’t know how to get the game on Steam), organizing trips (GDC’s took a lot of time due to investigating hotels, meetings, phoning to contacts etc. and unfortunately got cancelled). I mean, the list just goes on and on, and none of that is “working on the game” - but without it, there would be no company, hence no game.
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