TL;DRAtmospheric flight is not expected to change much for the first Hurston release, a basic implementation, though they say they intend to work on making atmospheric and space flight feel different.
I mean, they are very different states for the ships to be in, and I think there's a lot more to do. And I know we're kind of not happy with where things are at the moment. I know community backers aren't happy with the differences between the two states, between space flight and atmospheric flight. A lot of that comes down to the tuning of the ships. We've got two very different systems in place. The tuning of the ship is very different; it's just that it's not different enough. Drag, for instance, is the obvious one that is affecting ships. It wasn't so noticeable before, I think, 3.2. The last big batch of IFCS improvements that John made really made it a lot more noticeable. It's really just, as I say, it comes down to the performance of the ships and allowing the atmospheric differences to affect the ships more. And that's what we're working towards. For 3.3, it's looking unlikely that there will be that much difference, but we are working towards updates and improvements to it.
Now, when you say it's not likely to be that much updates, that's because the Hurston that we intend to roll out with 3.3 is what we commonly refer to as a tier zero implementation. 3.3 is more about getting the planet itself in, and the object container streaming and all the assets and stuff like that. The current moons we have, like Yela and Cellin and whatnot, don't have a whole lot of atmosphere at the moment, so the big atmospheric changes haven't been absolutely necessary up until this point. With Hurston, we do intend Hurston to have a breathable atmosphere. I was asking around on this, so forgive me for jumping in with this, but our first 3.3 implementation won't have the full atmospheric flight changes that we're intending. But we are intending them. I think that's the more valuable part of that.
IFCS isn't done by any means. We're still working on it. We're forever talking about how it should work and what we're going to do next. Atmospheric flight, we need to come back to it, especially from the design point of view, just making sure those ships are different enough. And as you say, the density of the atmosphere is going to be much higher on Hurston than the moons we have already. So we need to really notice that. It needs to be a considerable consideration for the pilots.
So not something that folks should expect for 3.3, although maybe we'll be surprised, but I wouldn't expect it for 3.3 in the rollout. But it is something that we want to work on. It is something that I know I've heard Chris talk about in the past. He wants that tangible difference, that sense of difference between flight in space and in atmosphere. As for the details and how that will present itself, I'm going to say stay tuned. We've got some stuff in the works for you as far as getting that information to you.
TL;DRYes, the intention is to make as many interactive actions bindable as possible, limited by engineering time, with some such as starting engines and powering on possibly already in.
Yeah, I guess the short answer is yes. The intention is for us to have as many of these as we can get in and available as actions that are bindable. Anything that you can sort of look around and see and interact with, we want to have shortcuts for, just for those players that want to use it, really. I mean, not everyone wants to interact in that manner with the stuff physically. Some do, and we want to cater to both. So anything that probably comes in first as an interactive button, and it's just about when we have the time to open these up as actions. I was just going to say, we could design these as much as we want, but we need engineering time to look into them.
And you started some of this back in 3.0. Some of these things are already in game. I know they mentioned specifically start engines and power on. I think some of those are in 3.2, if I'm not mistaken.
TL;DRThe team is aware that EMP is too deadly because ships' items have low distortion protection and the power plant now powers everything; values are being raised and tested, with ideas not yet shareable.
Good question. Timely question, I think, because everyone's having a big problem with this one, aren't they, in Arena Commander? It's something obviously we're aware of, and it's been around for a while, as you say, but it's been made worse with the new ship, with the switch from, I think, Item 1.0 to Item 2.0. A lot of the items on all the ships have been set with a very low distortion damage protection, so they will get wiped out really easily. I mean, yes, it used to happen just the same before, but now that it's been switched over, those values are low, but we're in the process of upping them and testing them and addressing this problem. It's very much something in flux for 3.1, but we couldn't be more aware of the problem. I'll say that. It's hard to talk about the eventual design of EMP, but I can say that we are aware of the problem and that we want to look and fix it as soon as we can.
I can attest. I'm on that same email thread. I've seen the conversations. They're already kicking around a couple different ideas. Nothing we're ready to share with you yet. We're going to try some stuff.
I'm not so much involved in the design side of that, but I can tweak the numbers. For me, it's getting and looking at all those items and seeing what distortion damage these EMP charges do and then trying to balance that out.
Yeah, because right now what's happening with distortion is it's just taking out your power plant, but because Item 2.0 now powers everything, you take out the power plant, you've essentially taken out the entire ship.
TL;DROverpower is judged mainly by damage, rate of fire, spread and range, tested against small ships, but VFX and audio can also make a weapon feel stronger or weaker than it is.
Yeah, I guess all of those things. When we think of a weapon being overpowered, I tend to think, okay, that's the DPS, that's the time to kill of all the ships. The smaller ships usually, if I sink, so your weapon is overpowered. That's how I test it anyway.
Give it a little go on those small ships. Step one is what should this weapon be doing? If it's a cannon and it's overpowered, it's probably either doing too much damage or it's firing too fast. So an overpowered cannon is something different to an overpowered repeater. They'll probably have very different behaviours that are causing that overpowered weapon.
The easiest thing is checking the damage, checking the rate of fire, and then the spread, I suppose. It's the accuracy, the range. So how easy is it to hit with this weapon, and how much does it do damage-wise over a short period of time?
I mean, you can get other areas that aren't the natural statistics that cause the feeling of a weapon being overpowered. Some things you don't tend to think of, like the VFX or the audio. Some VFX might not be playing as you intended. They might be less intrusive, which gives the feeling that it's more powerful than it is. And the same for the audio. Quite often, people perceive weapon strength to the sound it's making. It sounds silly, but it is something. If you have a big sniper rifle in the game and it just goes [weak sound], then people tend to think, well, that's a rubbish sniper rifle. It could be doing all the damage in the world. But that audio really sells it, and if that's not on point as well, that can sometimes factor into it.
It all ties it all together. And it's like quite a lot of games, actually, if you dig into the details or you have access behind the scenes, some of the weapons are clones of each other. And it's just the visuals and the audio that change. You'll have people arguing that Weapon X is better than Weapon Y and it's not, it's the same, it's just the whole package that makes it feel that way.
TL;DRThere is no exact time to kill in mind; balancing starts with small ships and default loadouts and builds up, with larger ships getting less playtesting so far and still needing work.
Where do we start? Start small. The time to kill, I know obviously we said this, prefaced it a lot, that things aren't finished and it's still ongoing balance. So we tend to try and get things right on the small level, the small scale with damage, rate of fire and all those things. And then with the shield items, the armor items and the ship health. I wouldn't say that we have an exact time to kill in mind.
So you start at the small level and you do one ship against another ship. You get that rough ballpark time that we're interested in. And then we go, oh, what's the next level up? Does it sort of scale with that? And then they all sort of build onto each other. Then the wildcard is obviously people can change their loadouts. So when we do our time to kill goals or estimates, we do it off the base loadout. Because you can't really factor in every single combination of weapon and missile and shield and armor combinations that they can do. So we go on the defaults, and the default loadouts for every ship sort of contain most of our weapons. So when you're balancing one ship against another, you're already factoring in those weapons. So hopefully it doesn't get skewed massively if someone changes all the weapons from one to another, because it's factored in somewhere. But as we build up the ships, it does get longer.
We tend to play test these things a lot with smaller ships actually to get the feel right for those. I think I'd be honest to say that we haven't spent as much time with the larger ships and that is still work in progress. There's a lot more to do there.
TL;DRYes, the balancing applies to the current game state, and the small patch was a quick hotfix to isolate short-term fixes like lowering shield health and regeneration, with balance expected to keep changing.
It's quite interesting you have to talk about that patch as a little hotfix, which it kind of was. It was taking the state of the game in 3.0 and the things that we weren't happy with and quickly isolating things that we could do and fix quickly. So it was a very quick turnaround on, I suppose, everyone being back in the office and assessing the state of 3.0 and then what we can do just to get balance feeling much more enjoyable. A quick fix was, say, we brought down the health on shields and the regen on the shields. That's going to be something that's going to change a lot, even from now, because we won't have it right for a long time, I think. But yeah, that patch was a quick turnaround thing.
TL;DRBeam weapons are on the schedule as the energy equivalent of ballistic gatlings, though the code isn't in place yet; asked for one line, the answer is "Yes. Maybe. Yes, at some point."
So I'll tell a little story about beam weapons. When I first started here, beam weapons weren't in the lore. And then a designer, who shall remain anonymous, did a little prototype and showed it to Chris and the writers, I believe it was the Squadron guys, of this turret with beam weapons. And the moment they saw that, they were like, that looks awesome, we should do that. And whilst we don't have the code in place to do it, we do have them on the schedule to come. And they do provide a very different gameplay. For each of the weapon types, ballistic and energy and other types, we sort of try and have symbiotic ones. So the ballistic gatlings are the very fast-firing ballistic weapons, whereas energy beam ones are their equivalent. So it's a continuous stream of matter. So yeah, they are on the list.
TL;DRShips and items are classified by role (military, civilian, transport, etc.) and grades A to D, where civilian grade C is the baseline and other combinations shift stats like output, power draw and signature to give ships distinct identities.
As Jared said, if you go read the Shipyard posts, then you'll see it. It's a sort of convenient way of comparing. It applies to ships and it also applies to items. So we have the ship classifications, military, civilian, transport or industrial and whatever, and then grades A to D. So civilian C is an item that performs at 100% of its capacity. So ships come with typically civilian grade C items by default. That's bog standard behavior. And then every other sort of combination on that matrix increases various stats various ways. So, for example, shields: a civilian shield, grade C, is a shield. A military one, still grade C, has much greater shield output, regen, but consumes more power and gives out more signal. A stealth grade C shield is one that has less output, probably a slower regen, but it's significantly reduced. So you can tailor the behavior, and then you factor in the grades, they go up naturally and down. But each item has, I think, up to eight statistics that are factored into that grade. So depending on the item, they all go up and down, and that ties into their performance, balancing falls out of it, and then it factors into the economy as well. Value, definitely.
It's the same when it comes to the career roles, right? They all have, say, the transporter has industrial items that fit onto it to fulfill that role of the ship. The items are supposed to help us create these identities.
TL;DRScanning will have multiple stages, so players are expected to learn from experience that a ship is slower to lock, and signature readouts like infrared levels are coming back to make stealth visible.
It's probably better answered by the scanning guys. For now, the scanning will have multiple stages. So a very, very high-level initial scan gives you the rough information. So when you're trying to lock onto it, it will do a brief scan. It might say Hornet Ghost or another stealthy ship. It won't give you all the information of the ship. You have to keep scanning it. And naturally you're going to learn. If you don't own these ships or know nothing about it, you're going to hopefully learn by feeling that every time I encounter one of these ships, it takes longer to do this. Whereas if I find another Hornet, then it's, oh, that was much quicker. So then something is up with the Ghost. If you own these ships yourself, then naturally it's all explained to you in the lore on your equipment terminals. It tells you all about this.
Yeah, it was supposed to be like the signature of the ship makes you harder to hit or easier to hit. You've got loads of the items that are overpowered, maybe overclocked, giving off high signatures. The difficulty of showing that to players, I suppose we used to have little readouts that would just say numbers. That's coming back. It's coming back, good, because that makes a big difference.
TL;DRSwitchable shields and armor with different resistances to damage types are being discussed as an open possibility, and shields can already be tuned by moving faces and hardening them.
It's something that I think is really open to us at the moment. We have been discussing this this week, actually. I think some of us are more expecting that we'll go down the road of shields and armor that can be switched in and out that will have different resistances to different damage types. We have different damage types in the weapons already. We need to be making sure that the defensive side can be alternated in the same way. You can change your loadout for different weapons to do different damage types; you'd be able to do the same to counter on the defensive side.
And at the moment on all the shields, you do have some ability to sort of tune it. So you can move the faces around and that does have a significant effect. You can do shield hardening, which, as the name implies, does harden the shields and really does reduce the amount of damage coming through. So if you get into a combat situation and you go, I'm seriously outgunned here, I need to get out of here, you can just start flying in the opposite direction, punt all your shields to your back face, harden it, and it will significantly increase the amount of time it takes for those shots to come through your shields, to give you the time to quantum out of there or do other things.
TL;DRA fix for unreliable ESP and an underlying IFCS desync caused by the 3.0 update-system changes is in QA testing, though ESP still feels too sticky and needs retuning for 3.1.
Current state, where it is: we know there are issues with it. And I actually have, because I saw that question, some notes from the engineers that are working on it handed to me. I'm a designer, not an engineer, so I apologize to whoever gave me these notes if I misinterpret it. ESP. People were complaining that it was broken or not reliable enough. There is an issue where the pips were, because it uses the pips to work out the ESP, and there is an issue where it was picking the wrong pip or no pips to do the ESP on. So you get wildly different behavior to what you were expecting and inconsistent behavior. That's been fixed, and is with QA now in a QA test request that they're testing at the moment. I believe you had a look at it.
Yes. Just a quick look at the code shelf myself, and it seemed fixed to me. I tested it on a static ship. We had some issues, obviously, with UI preventing QA from getting a full test on it. But the changes that John Pritchett had made seemed to have resolved this problem. I mean, we recognized in 3.0 that there was an issue. We didn't have enough time for it to come together for the 3.0.1 hotfix or interim patch, whatever we want to call it.
Yeah, it took a lot of investigation because it wasn't a 100% reproducible issue. You had to have a bit of luck to reproduce it and then catch it in Visual Studio. So you had to spend a lot of time investigating. And they had a vague idea of what was going on fairly early on, but it took a lot of iteration to really nail it down.
It's tricky. I mean, you played the game and you felt something was awry, and the testers felt the same, and all the community feedback was telling us this. And you get loads of different feedback: oh, it's working differently when I'm using a joystick or a gamepad or mouse. And you start to go, okay, there's something weird. How do we pin this down? It's fine for me. It's fine for me, but maybe they don't understand what ESP is, because it's quite a complicated thing to even explain. For those that don't know, it's enhanced stick precision, which, the closer your movements are to the target's movements, the more I think it helps adjust you to the target. I think that's the best, easiest way to put it.
Yeah, and I was playing it this week to see how it was working again. There was perhaps a sense that it was a little bit too sticky or corrected a bit too much.
So that's one thing that came out of the QATR that we've got to work on now. It is design-tunable, but the values we had given for it were with the previous iteration of it. And with these fixes, it's changed it, so we now need to go back and do some more iteration on it to make it not as gluey.
I think with changes to rotational velocities on the ships in 3.0, that probably made it out of sync with each other. The algorithm isn't able to keep up with these ships and their turning rates. So yeah, we need to look at that for 3.1, but the fix is in QA testing. Future of ESP? I mean, it's so important to have something there, I think. When you're targeting these tiny little ships sometimes, some kind of correction to get you on course. When it's not there, people notice it, I think, eventually.
Yeah, and it's like all of our assist systems, it's toggleable, so if you don't commit, tick it off. Advanced players can easily switch it off. And about IFCS, this is a really engineering one, so if people want more of an in-depth explanation, I'm sure Jared or someone can find an engineer to talk about it. Before you could fix ESP, we had to fix IFCS. So a big problem people were seeing was the control attitude sort of separating position- and rotation-wise. That was caused by changes between 2.6 and 3.0 that sort of went under the radar.
It was part of the whole optimization for 3.0, moving lots of things to a batch update system so it would be more efficient. IFCS worked on a fixed time step, and with the batch update change, it now works on a variable time step. So things were sort of getting out of sync, and that's what people were seeing with the two reticles becoming out of sync. So the control methods that IFCS uses have been improved to account for the new optimizations more thoroughly. And lots of improvements and just iterations on that. And that, again, is with QA now being QATR'd.
TL;DRTurret pitch and yaw are both first order, but differing values and non-gimballed weapons make them feel different; they say it can be brought closer together and long term want a player choice of control order.
Before we came on air, because I knew you were going to ask that, I went and had a quick look at it. They are actually both axes first order, not zero order. It's just that the values on them are very different. And long term, we want to make it so you can have it on zero order on both or first order on both and give people the preference, because as with everything, people tend to go, I like this or I like that. You can never get the two camps agreeing on what they want from it. So at the end of the day, it's what feels right for you.
I mean, just to point out what the problem was that was highlighted with the question, I think, from the community, was that pitch and yaw on turrets were feeling very different.
Yeah, when you pitched it was more instant than yawing. And yeah, it's come down to the values that are in there, and we're going to be looking at that and always changing and improving stuff.
Yeah, I had a quick look at it, and the changes can be done that make it closer to zero order. It is actually first order, but the dead zone is very small on one axis compared to the other. And the other factor, if you think of our turrets, they're not gimballed weapons. So for pitch, the guns just have to go up and down, whereas for yaw, the turret has to rotate to match it. Perhaps if the turrets had gimballed weapons on them, they could yaw to hit your point of aim quicker. But there's lots of things to think about and improve on. We know they're not as happy as they should be. There has been work and there is work going on to make them better. Because everyone always comes to us going, how are you going to make multi-crew ships with turrets competitive against single-seaters? Why would I ever bring a multi-crew ship instead of three single-seaters? We're aware of that and working on it.
TL;DRZeroing all weapons to the slowest velocity is something they'd like to try but haven't committed to, since engineering time is scarce; they're also considering better default loadouts and weapon groups to reduce pip divergence.
I think that would solve a lot of problems, wouldn't it? People's issues with pip divergence. And it's something that, again, has been talked about internally. Because I know through speaking with Calix, he's had a mind to fix this kind of thing for ages. Whether it happens...
Yeah, it's one of those, in our heads, it's something we should be able to simply try. It's just trying to steal that precious engineering time away to give us a day or two of ability to set that up and test it. Because we think of lots of things. Everyone thinks of lots of things during the day and goes, that'd be great, that's going to solve everything. And quite often they don't until you actually prove it. And you've got to start working with it and see all the problems.
We know about different weapon projectiles firing at different speeds, the problems that it has by creating the pip divergence. We've already brought them in to be similar speeds. You can bring them in further.
Another thing we're considering for a future patch is changing some of the default loadouts for ships. I was talking with Chris about it. And a lot of the default loadouts for ships haven't changed over the years. And when they were originally announced, there was a very limited set of weapons. So they all sort of have very similar loadouts, or they would have a wild mix just to make them different. And now we've got a lot more weapons in the game. It's something we can consider looking into and just going, does this ship actually benefit from having this weapon on a fixed or a gimballed mount, when perhaps actually it would be much easier and simpler for that ship to be in a different loadout? I'm not talking wild changes like size five hardpoints on the wings of Hornets and M50s, but more changing this repeater for a different one that behaves a bit better.
I'd also like to look at the weapons used across the ships at the moment. It tends to be similar stuff on the loadouts, right? If there's a majority of the loadout configurations with, let's say, these two weapons, we could look at making those two weapons behave better together. That might make a huge difference to a large number of ships just by bringing them in a bit.
Another thing we definitely want to look at is the default weapon group assignments, because there's certainly some ships out there that just have the wrong weapon groups by default. They've got fixed and gimballed weapons together in the same weapon group, and then they'll have the other weapon group with a different set, when really they should be all fixed or all gimballed, or all ones that are similar together in one group, so they have that nicely converged.
Yeah, and when they vary so much, players like to lock them in anyway. You gimbal lock them so that they don't have that problem. And that's something only advanced players really know about doing. So we've got that issue of new players, beginner players, having these divergent pips. They're having trouble hitting things. It's an issue that we still need to solve. But I guess we've got a few ideas about it.
TL;DRAs the game moves to component-based damage, longer fights with repairs and rerouting power are expected, with the focus shifting from time to kill to time to disable, but the current fixed health pool can't support that.
We touched on that before, in the earlier answer about how we're balanced around the current gameplay and how we're going to move towards that component system. So yes, it is going to be like that. You will have, on the ships that have interior space, you will be knocking out those components, and someone will have to go repair, replace, reroute power to get the ship back up to function. And it's something we can't nicely do at the moment, because we have that fixed health pool and you're alive or you're dead.
There's been complaints about big ships. Sometimes they can just die really quickly. It's because of the current system we have, and we've had to work with it and try to balance around that. And sometimes it works really well for those small ships and for the large ships. And I remember the Aurora having all that superfluous health for the longest time. I remember the Aurora would just soak up damage like a sponge. And that was because of the current system.
Going forwards, mid to long term, it's going to be talking less about time to kill, more time to disable, to give you that gameplay. Because if you're blowing ships up, there's no way to board them and do anything interesting like that with it.
How are all these shipwrecks out there? Every time you get into a fight, they just blow up. I mean, obviously we've designed missions and stuff based around shipwrecks. That's the intention. That will be a long, protracted, multi-crew engagement. You need to be able to get out of one chair, run to another, change the system, defend yourself.
More great things that just fall out of that is they start generating missions themselves. So rather than it being design-placed wrecks, people can start calling for help that they're disabled, need repair, refuel, rearm. They need people to come help them do stuff, need to help them transfer their cargo. The game just sort of builds upon itself.