Edward Fuller

So if you have a CS3, then ATC will not allow you to make a jump through a permanent jump point.

So if you're out murdering people, ATC is going to say, no, we don't want you here. We'll call security and you can be on your way.

So the current plan is that in 4.0, if you want to go to Pyro and commit all the murder and savagery you want, you have to clear your record before you go.

Either never have done it or clear it before you go. And it's also worth pointing out that it's on both sides. That ATC check is on Pyro as well. They guard their border. So if you're in Pyro and you're murdering and causing all kinds of... Well, no, it's a bit different because in Pyro, right, the jurisdiction isn't all UEE.

Correct. So in Pyro, the law enforcement isn't quite what it is in Stanton. So if you're out murdering people in most places in Pyro, you're not going to get a CrimeStat because you're not being monitored. It's not what we call monitored space like Stanton is.

But there is a CrimeStat of some sort in Pyro, because there'll be a jurisdiction that covers the jump point and the station on the Pyro side. So say you go around doing your murder in Pyro, obviously you're not actually earning any of those crimes with the UEE. So if you go through, there won't be a problem. But if you then cause a ruckus right outside the jump point there, those will be fines that will prevent you from going through.

Using permanent jump points will use quantum fuel. It's going to be per jump point, it will be fixed, but obviously we only have the jump point between Stanton–Pyro, Pyro–Stanton. But those paired jump points, it will be the same either way. We haven't got a precise number and it wouldn't be right for us to divulge that.

We're still balancing that. We're working with the economy team to make sure that whatever amount of fuel that we decide is appropriate is matched up both to our jump drives and to the economy. And the cool thing though is that when you're attuning to a jump point, it'll let you know how much fuel you need so you'll never be able to go halfway. So the jump drive won't let you go unless you have enough fuel to make the entire trip.

And also there's a station so you can refuel. So you're naturally going to arrive from QT and you will have burned something and then you'll arrive. And then if you don't check out, then you can go and refuel and then you'll be fine.

It's not a shortcut by any means. First of all, in order to fall out, you have to take enough damage on your ship that your jump drive overloads and can no longer support your travel through the tunnel. So your ship is going to take damage, wear and tear. In not great shape. We're still balancing exactly what that is, but it's not going to be good for you. And then even if you do survive that exit, if your ship's in good shape, you will, but if you survive that exit, you're not going to be where you intended to be. I can't guarantee where you're going to end up, but it's not going to be where the jump point ends up. It won't be the happy part of Pyro. It's going to be on the edge of space. And if your ship has enough quantum fuel and if your ship's still in a good enough shape, maybe you could get to where you wanted to go.

I think it's worth noting that while we've been clear that it's distortion damage that builds up, the effects of distortion damage today on ships that are in the PU today versus on ships with the resource network is going to be different. And wear and tear on components. So as we showed with fire yesterday on ISC...

Oh yeah, you could be on fire.

All these component shorts that the distortion damage caused can be starting fires.

If you went into a jump tunnel and your ship wasn't in the best shape to begin with, and then you get launched out of that, you may take enough damage from distortion that you have a catastrophic malfunction on your components.

That's just the stuff we're doing intentionally.

Who knows what's going to happen if we don't intend. All of that happens systemically outside of the jump point itself. It could even be during the jump.

You might be riding the tunnel and picking up distortion and then some fire breaks out. Don't ride the edge. Stay in the middle.

To a certain extent, it's expected to be a bit of a roller coaster. For the permanent, the stable ones, the reason why they're so important is because they're large enough to be stable and pretty much any ship can get through there.

The highways of commerce. They're reliable, right? But there is a difficulty to every jump tunnel, right? So specifically, you can't coast, you can't walk away from your seat because you have to fly, you have to avoid the edges of the tunnel, all the obstacles in the tunnel as well. But for the actual difficulty, there's also factors like there's going to be turbulence in the tunnel. So when you're flying, you'll feel turbulence and you'll have to contend with this, and smaller ships will have more turbulence. So they'll be contending with it even more. And then you have the larger ships, which will have maybe less turbulence. But then they also have to deal with the obstacles in the tunnel, just like the small ships, and they have less space to maneuver. So there's quite a lot of factors in there, even between ships. Just because it's a massive tunnel doesn't mean the little ship has an easy time. And it doesn't mean that just because the bigger one has less turbulence it has an easy time either. They have different kinds of gameplay experiences.

We've already kind of talked about the turbulence in the tunnel, so ultimately jump drives have an impact on how they fly. So the main ones are how ships fly.

So we have different sizes of jump drives and those more or less correspond to the size of the ships. They will affect how well you are able to handle the turbulence in the jump tunnels.

It's also the steering of the ship. It's the yaw, roll and pitch, the speed and things, because you actually have to fly your ship.

So the jump drive actually affects your ship handling?

Yes, because ultimately, when you're in that jump tunnel, the experience of controlling your ship is similar to being out in normal space, but your jump drive is allowing you to manipulate your ship in this space that is between space.

So the jump drive becomes the engine and the thrusters, in a manner of speaking.

To an extent. But you've got to imagine this jump tunnel is this stream of energy. And if you're not aligned to that stream of energy, you're going to get pushed the wrong direction. So your jump drive is actively helping you stay aligned to that stream of energy in the tunnel.

And then the different sizes just make that process easier or more difficult.

Well, so there's also, ultimately, this distortion, right? And that effectively acts as your health for whether you can actually survive getting through the tunnel or not. So right now we're playing with the numbers, right? So it could be that all the drives have the same sort of distortion pool for the first release. And then in the future, we're going to have more jump drives. There's going to be more variety and they may have larger pools, but then you'll have better maneuvering on that one. So there's balance there and there's sort of interplay between the parameters. So player choice will still be a factor of choosing which jump drive is suitable for the way you play.

I think we could probably just start from the top. Get away from the jump point itself and just talk initially. Because you had, oh, everyone's queuing outside. They're just queuing in front of it, sitting ducks, ready to be shot. That isn't the case, though. So when you arrive, you're going to be QTing towards the station before the jump point; the jump point's off to the side, right? So you're going to be arriving there and you're going to call the ATC, right? So when you call the ATC, and let's say they do put you into a queue, you're already quite some distance away from the jump point. And as long as you're within range of the ATC, you're in the queue, and the range expands past the station and past the jump point. So this is a huge range. And in that space, you can be in SCM or NAV, you can be buzzing around, you can be tens of kilometres away from anyone else. You can put space between yourself and others and you're still in the queue, as long as you don't leave that really big reach. You don't have to stay in NAV mode. You can defend yourself from people. That's a misnomer that you have to go and then sit in a big line ready to be shot at. That's not the case. So that's the first major change. It's not a change, but that's a clarification of exactly how it works. After that, yes, you're right. Then we're on to turrets and AI. There's definitely AI Navy ships there. There's definitely turrets. Yeah, I know, I shot myself in the foot. But that's what it is. These things are in our game and they are going to be the thing. I'm sure we're going to make them more potent or something.

Well, the thing is, we want to keep the world as much of a simulation as possible. It's a dangerous 'verse out there, but we don't want to make it punishing for people who just want to go through a jump point, for instance. So we're going to have things to protect the player there, whether that's turrets or AI. And if those security ships and those turrets aren't cutting it, we will take more drastic measures, whether that's zones of protection or shielding or whatever it takes to make the game fun. That's our goal.

I mean, the ATC is there for the permanent stable jump points. They're there because the powers that be, in this case the UEE security forces that are controlling this to maintain law and order in the system, they have set up shop and they are controlling people's jump drives. So they can't attune to the portal within that sector unless they give them permission. And that's the whole purpose of the ATC. It's like your jump drive on your ship, when it comes within the radius of these stable, controlled jump points, it's controlled by ATC. You literally can't attune to the jump point unless ATC gives you the right to do so.

I think that's probably the biggest disconnect. One of the newest pieces of information that came in the episode is that there are two distinctly different kinds of jump points. Before, we had this distinction of sizes, but they were all considered to work the same. Now there's two functionally different ones. They're both generated by spooling up your drive in general, but one is, like you said, the highway. It is a civilized, tamed experience by humanity or the Xi'an or whatever system you're going to. And the other one is still akin to the Old West. There's no ATC, there's no anything; you find it, you spool it up yourself, go in, who knows where you end up kind of thing.

And I think that's a good point, is that for right now we're just talking about UEE-controlled space. The way jump points work in other systems, that's very much TBD.

We are talking about this specific jump point between Stanton and Pyro. Obviously there's a tremendous narrative reason why the UEE would not want this jump point to just be open.

Yeah, it's their border. They protect their border. I mean, obviously, past experience demonstrates they're not very good at protecting their borders. But as Rick said, they might come from somewhere else. And they're actually really good with this jump point. It's just that the other ones come from somewhere else.

Thanks to jump points, the universe is a bit of Swiss cheese, right? But the stable ones, those that they know about, those that are consistent, those are the ones that they can at least maintain some control over. That's where they invest.

So as far as protective measures, turrets, automated turrets, we're hopeful. Obviously, automated turrets up to this point have been dependent, like a lot of AI systems are, on server performance. One of the things that we're very hopeful for is that with 4.0, with the advent of server meshing, with the distributed load of these things across multiple servers, that kind of performance will improve. People who have played on Tech Preview saw how much deadlier AI was when they played against them. People who have jumped into a new server that hasn't degraded can tell stories about how absolutely devastating the AI can be. So it is one of our hopes, and this will bear out through testing and whatnot, that through the advent of server meshing and distributing that load across multiple servers, AI turrets will perform much better than they have in the past.

Turrets and AI, yeah. If they have enough server performance on their side, they are lethal.

But then, if that's not enough, like you said, there are other avenues. We don't want to just hit it with a big heavy hammer right out of the gate. We want to try to build up. Some part of this is intended to be dangerous.

Yeah, exactly. If we were so prescriptive from the start, it would completely eliminate some area of gameplay. We could do that and then it would completely nullify something. But we like to kind of work the other way and try to maintain some of it, but also not let the griefers win the whole thing, right?

And we've got some technologies that the players already know about, like green zones and stuff, that can be implemented. We also have some technologies we haven't shared yet that we're hopeful to come online that might also apply to that. There are people who work here who want absolute carnage. I'm not gonna lie to you. Then there are people like me; I tend to be treasurer and secretary of the Care Bear fan club here. So I tend to be like, let's preserve the experience, let's make things as fair as possible. Like anything else, the answer is going to be somewhere in the middle. So we're starting a little closer to here, and then if it's too much, we'll adjust.

Part of my job as a design director is to make sure that the game is fun for everybody. If you want to be a griefer, I'm going to give you that experience, but the people that don't want to be griefed, they need to have a safe place, and they need to know where they can go to be safe, and we need to make sure that there's places in the 'verse for them.

A good example of that is the big changes to the space stations we're going to talk about on next week's SCL. Green zones on Pyro space stations, but then the creation of contested zones. So there are areas for safety and security, even in Pyro. And then there are areas for absolute carnage and chaos.

All right, so obviously you're coming to the end of your jump tunnel. Everyone's coming out of the same exit point. So they're all going to come out and they're all going to be in the same vicinity, the same sort of region of space. The point that was being made with this shotgun effect, or whatever it was we said, is that we have a slight divergence of the paths of those ships as they emerge. And the whole point of that is that they're still going to be in roughly the same bit of space. They're going to be maybe a kilometre across from each other or something like that. Within spitting distance of each other, basically. The shotgun is the divergence which allows them to not rear-end each other on exit. It's not that you come out all over the place and then you're like, where are you? It's not going to be like that. You're going to be there with your friends and everyone else who came through. And if you need to put up some kind of defense, then you will be all around each other to do that.

So for folks traveling in groups, when you call ATC, you'll be able to see how many people are in the queue. You can wait and get in the queue with your friends. So when you arrive, you will still be in close enough proximity with your friends to help each other out. But yes, there might be people who don't care about their crimes, who say, I live in Pyro now, I'm never going back to Stanton. There will be those people, and they're gonna be there to try to cause problems.

There's also multiple exits, though, it's worth saying. There's multiple exits to the exit. So there's multiple points around the area where you exit to. So no one can just be like, oh, well, they're definitely going to come out there. We've got that anti-camping. They can come out in lots of places. But they're still in the vicinity.

Okay, because that was the question. People were imagining wildly apart?

No, not wildly, like hundreds of kilometers away sort of apart. You're going to come out in the same place, but it might be a different place.

I think the response to that would be, if I'm going to be close enough to my friends, then it should still be anticipated enough for somebody who's made this jump a dozen times to be able to figure out the exit.

Yeah, sure, but they have to look in a lot of places.

It'll get borne out through the testing. We just got to get it in there and see how it is, and we'll adjust it if necessary.

And you're also going to come out in monitored space. The UEE has a presence in Pyro. So unless somebody's attacking that jump point, you shouldn't be in immediate peril anyway.

And you can just press all the crimes to them. I know that you could say, oh, they're never going to leave. But there's things in Stanton that Pyro doesn't have.

So if anyone dies through misadventure whilst in a jump tunnel, then you will simply respawn wherever you last registered your spawn point.

Gotcha, so if I make it to Pyro and I go through and I have some adventures and whatever, and then I die, if I haven't locked a new spawn point somewhere in Pyro...

Back you go, yeah. But even in that tunnel, right? So if you are registered in Stanton and you're like, oh, this is great, I'm almost to Pyro, and then you kill yourself, it doesn't matter. You're not going to Pyro. You're going back to Stanton.

Which is how it works today. You don't just respawn at the nearest space station or whatever. You respawn where you've registered.

That's how the system is intended to work. But equally, you could have also registered yourself at the medical bed inside your ship. You're going there as well. So you don't have to go back, if you were prepared for that, I suppose.

I mean, this kind of gets back to what you were saying earlier. Back in 2019, when I first joined the company, we were doing some previs, checking out what we thought looked cool and what made sense for Star Citizen. And the end result is we decided to go away from that jump gate ring visual because we didn't think it made sense for the way we envision jump points working in Star Citizen. They're not something that is maintained by human technology. You can't create one, you can't maintain one, you can't make one larger. There's no technology for that currently in the system. And with that visual in mind, it didn't feel consistent to have that kind of architecture around it.

Those are all narrative choices. Those are all choices we've made for the project.

It's a creative decision. Absolutely.

We just don't like them?

No, I mean, I liked it. I know a lot of people did really like it. There's something very iconic about that Stargate ring, for instance. But for the way we're envisioning jump points to work in Star Citizen, it just didn't feel right, so we made that call.

Yeah, I mean, you could also look at it this way. If you were looking at it, even in a lore sense, if someone had to build a gate structure to make a permanent jump point, and you jumped to a system that no one has ever been to, the permanent jump point on that side still works, even though, who built the gate?

There's those kinds of logical inconsistencies that make it difficult, and there's also the fact that we're not some other games where we have this ancient alien race that left behind a bunch of technology. There's a number of reasons why we felt that it was inconsistent for Star Citizen, the lore and the creative decisions we want to make, and at the end of the day, right now, we don't think it's appropriate.

One of the things you said there was right on. You said right now. As I said earlier in the show, we've all been here now long enough to know that whatever the intention and the thought and the plan is today doesn't mean that it won't change. Doesn't mean that one of us won't have a different idea. Doesn't mean that through the natural process of growth and learning we won't come to a different decision later. So this is not to say that they will never come back. But at this point, on this day, August 9th, 2024, there are no intentions whatsoever of bringing them back. There is no gameplay use for these. There's no gameplay function for these rings at all, because they're strictly an aesthetic thing.

People are very passionate about it. People want it. They can also make problems, though. Having rings like that could make problems. It could make effectively blind spots, griefable positions. They could create more problems by having this.

Any design decision we make ends up having knock-ons of some sort.

I mean, it's also like the jump point itself has had lots of visual treatment on its VFX. It feels a little bit disingenuous to say taking away the gate is like taking away the jump point, because so much work has gone into it. It's pushed farther than what we saw in ISC. Just because we didn't go this way doesn't mean that the way that we are going doesn't have the same amount of love poured into it to make it the best it can be.

We know they're there for transient ones.

We're talking permanent. Permanent ones, right now, the first one is large, and that's our intention.

The intention is that the reason why the permanent ones are so important is because they are one size fits all. And that's currently the intent. Whether in the future we have stable ones that are different sizes, time will tell. But for now, the reason why those are so important, the reason why they're maintained by ATC, is because they are the most useful.

We don't really want to prevent people from going to places just because their ship's large.

I think there was a certain strategy element of making sure that you had the right ship, and that you brought the right ship for the particular journey. I think when people lament the one-size-fits-all thing, they lament the loss of a strategic element of interstellar travel.

Yeah, and that's fine when we have more jump points and there's more than one way to reach a system, and some are longer, some are harder, some are easier. Depending on your ship, there may be the right jump point for you, but for the main ones that we need, those arteries to connect the universe, we want to make sure that those are consistent.

So while all the jump points are capable of fitting every ship, depending on the strength of the current inside and the amount of obstacles and stuff, you may still want a ship of a different size. And instead of that being mandated by us, that's a choice that we now put in the hands of the player.

Yeah, of course. Basically, this question is saying you don't want to have them for too short a period of time so that they're useless. Well, yeah, we know, right? So they're going to be, we haven't got the numbers, but the minimum is definitely in the sort of hours. So hours is a useful period of time to be able to use something, reuse something, sell something. That's sort of the minimum. And then it goes up from there, and everything in between.

There's nothing to say, you know, we're known for doing all these global events, XenoThreat and whatever. There's absolutely nothing that says we can't have a transient jump point show up to take us to a new kind of global event, and it's there for the whole week when that's happening.

Absolutely. And then it's really gone.

One of you dudes has to find it. And then you can't get there because it's actually gone. I'm realizing I probably wasn't supposed to share that.

There's a lot of cool things that we can do with jump points, and I'm really excited to add those transient ones in the future because they do add a lot of variety, and we could potentially add as many as we want, so it could be exciting. Not for 4.0 though.

There are no transient jump points in 4.0. That's not being coy, that's me being honest and real with you. One jump point in 4.0.

Well, one either side.

One pair of jump points. Two one-way jump points.