So I think the concern there, and don't you worry, is that if you can't get your Hornets, well then how can you fly in dogfighting? So the test ships, if you have access to any of the three, those will be the first ships you see in your hangar. So you have nothing to worry about. Everything will be fine. Next to the helmet. You can't play. Do not forget your helmet.
Don't fly without your helmet. That's how you kind of access the Arena Commander menu system, through the helmet, so you've got to put that on first. That'll come out with a how-to and the documents we're putting together for that, but you heard it here first.
Can we discuss? So it's a very quick discussion. There's not any in the first iteration. We've got a lot of the stuff in place to get that rolling. It's just we don't want to do anything to destabilize the build at this point. Let's get this out the door.
It's bug fixing and a little optimization. I mean, it's fun because we have multiple studios working on it and they're all in the main branch. So we branched last week and we have intermittently stable builds. And so now we're getting more and more stable. So adding features would be bad at this point.
So we're going to add some rooms. There will be a lot more coming on the room system. There are rooms for rooms. Separate from your ships in your hangar.
So, yeah, we're going to be putting that in. There will be many rooms. As you said, once the asteroid hangar comes out, that's the first iteration of the room system, and we'll have a bunch more stuff coming online. Some we don't want to say yet, because there's some really neat stuff I think they're going to like. But that's post Arena Commander.
TL;DRA head-to-head Arena Commander match would be fun but isn't happening next week because of a trip to a Squadron 42 summit; it might suit the new community show, and a retrospective show is planned instead.
Yeah, I don't think that's going to work. I mean, maybe that's something that maybe the new community show could engage in. I mean, I know we're going to have some of that stuff. I'm sure Ben's got some of that up his sleeve. But all of those people, well, half of those people will be in the U.K. at a Squadron 42 summit. So we're going to be leaving this Friday to Manchester, and we're going to be talking about what we need to do to make Squadron 42 happen and how that ties into Persistent Universe and all that other gobbledygook. So we will not be able to make that happen, but we are going to have a really cool show, kind of a retrospective look back at the creation of Wingman's Hangar, its twists and turns.
The answer on this one was yes. He didn't expound upon it a lot, but he was talking about the different versions of ships over the years, which happens with cars. Everything evolves, so why should we be any different?
Yeah, the idea here is that the game is going to always be growing. We'll always be adding things in, so that means technology and that means everything will be changing over time. New stuff to discover.
TL;DRCustom organization uniforms are a cool idea that wouldn't be available out of the box, would need CIG approval and art skill, and might be considered in the long run, with file-size concerns.
Actually, that was Chris's response, too, was that's a really cool idea. Standard caveats of if we do this: A, you need to be pretty art savvy to get something in our game, B, we have to have CIG approval of anything that goes into the game.
Right, and also, anytime you do texture changes or things of that nature, it adds to the size and footprint of the game on everybody's machine. So I'm sure we'll have to figure out a system where either if you share globally, everybody has to get that patch, or if you just share it with your guild members, maybe there's a batch file you can drop in there. It's like a choice or something.
That's kind of an alliance thing. I mean, sure, alliances, yes. Yes, there will be alliances. The thing about alliances, whenever we do alliances, I think of Axis & Allies or Risk. It was Phil, me, Chris, and Erin that were playing Risk all the time, and we would always have alliances. Those things never lasted more than two turns at the most, and then pretty soon somebody broke the alliance. It was a beautiful thing.
Those LA kids are definitely really pushing even harder than the rest of the group. Everybody's working hard. Everybody's working very hard. LA guys sometimes look like zombies in meetings. But Chris would like them to take a holiday, is the way he put it. But there's still work to be done. There always will be. So people try to grab vacations when they can.
We do. I mean, we all take vacations. I've got one coming up this summer, and people take time off. It's just, this is a lot of work. And most of us are here because it's a passion. We want to be here. We want the game just as bad as everybody else. So the only way we get the game is if we create it and make it.
TL;DRNot definitively; CIG must keep tight control of its universe, and may later let players pitch ideas to a review board, noting the Next Great Starship contest as a first step.
That's a tricky one. So obviously if you're running a local server you can do whatever you want. But we do have to keep kind of tight controls on what goes in our universe. Like any other persistent universe game, you have to make sure you're keeping your fiction intact. So we've talked a little bit about this and this may be a thing later on down the road where we let people come up with ideas and present them to a review board of some sort at CIG and then potentially bring them into the game. But there's a lot of work required to bring a ship idea into the game as an actual functioning piece of equipment.
TL;DRStealth means reducing heat and EM signature with less powerful, more efficient equipment, not cloaking, so you are harder to detect but lose output; powering down is another option with a reboot penalty.
So a lot of times when people ask about stealth, they're talking like Predator-style or Klingon cloaking device type, which is not our approach to it at all. Stealth is really an effort to reduce your signature for your ship, so the amount of heat you're generating, EM in general, and you can't really change your profile, so that's hard to do. So the trade-off is you get equipment that is less powerful, consumes less power, is more efficient, so you're not generating as much heat or as much EM signature, and then the end result is that you're harder to detect. You will lose some of the output of that stuff. So you have less power, you have less oomfy guns.
Right, exactly. And you could also turn off your ship and wait for somebody. But then the penalty to that is, well, you have to turn it back on and let it boot up again when you're going to attack. So the trade-offs are just what do you want to be better at.
So, of course, the basic consideration anytime you say, hey, let's throw in some alien races, is how long you're going to have to build them. And the animation team gets all kinds of crazy when you say, hey, here's an eight-legged animal, go animate it for us. But down the road, I can definitely see that happening. It's one of those things that takes time, so it doesn't take priority over what we really need for the base game right now. But it could definitely happen somewhere.
Again, as we build this thing, it's never completely finished. We'll be continually adding on it forever and we'll be listening to what people want at that point.
That would be a really, really big explosion to catch somebody else in it, unless they're sitting on top of you when you blow up. So, I mean, there could be explosive cargos, and if you got hit in the cargo, that would mean you'd probably blow up. I'm not sure that would do any damage to your opponents. Like I said, unless they're right...
TL;DRExplorers should have plenty to find thanks to huge star systems with much empty space, re-navigable jump points, derelicts, procedural content and cargo crates, though the answer isn't a full list.
I actually am one of them. I want to explore too. I think that our poll results have been very consistent on that. A lot of our fans are explorer types. I think that we keep that in mind all the time when we're generating content. So there's so many different answers to this, but for one, the star systems that we're building for the game are huge. And the points of interest, the really central activity areas, are just a small portion of that. So there's a lot of empty space in every area. And if you want to go map that and find interesting things at the edges, that's a long trip. So that's one thing. For the people who really just like to know, have seen everything everywhere, that would take a long time. Another thing is navigating jump points. You can find new jump points, but you can also go back through and re-navigate an existing jump point if you want to shave some time off of the passage time. There are also going to be derelicts. We're going to have a lot of procedural content that can appear...
Just run over it and you've got stuff. The cargo system involves actually being able to load stuff into a box and then put the box into your ship. So, yeah, you can open up your containers and look at the cargo inside. I guess if you want to throw it all over your ship, you could. It seems messy.
Part of it's from game design and how the game feels. Part of it's performance-wise, since we are still fairly early in the project, so we haven't done all the optimization we're going to to maximize how many we can fit on one game server. Then there's going to also be how many we can fit on one machine, how many game matches we can fit on one machine at a time.
TL;DRGame servers register with the instance manager, and when a player picks a level and mode in the matchmaking UI, the matchmaker scans running servers and places them in a suitable game.
Well, basically, we start up X number of game servers and they register themselves with the instance manager. And so the matchmaker will talk to the instance manager and say, hey, how many game servers are free for games to be played on? Or what are the different player counts and what are the different levels that are currently running on each of the game servers. So when you log in on your own computer and you go to the matchmaking UI, you pick which level you want to play and what game mode, whether it's Capture the Core or Battle Royale, you put in your selection, you hit go, and your message goes up to the matchmaker service, and it's going to scan all the game servers that are currently up and running, and find a game for it to place you into.
The ever-raging debate over first person and third person. And the real crucial thing, I mean, having played a lot of the dogfighting now, it is very difficult without the radar. And if you're in third person, you get no radar. You get no HUD. You can see a little more, not as significantly as you might think, but you lose the benefit of all your equipment, and that's really crucial.
And there's UAVs flying around these days that give you third-person views of battlefields, so why 900 years in the future wouldn't we have the ability to have a trailing camera or something? Plus, we want you to see how pretty these ships are.
Quick answer on that is no. But I think the meaning behind it is your ships are safe. When they're in your personal hangar, your starting hangar, then your ships are safe, I think is the reasoning behind that question.
There'll be plenty of other places to board and to fight. Think about that for a moment. What if you're offline and somebody can just attack your hangar and you come back and all your stuff's gone? That would be annoying. It would be like, I'm part of this game and all of a sudden my stuff's gone. I'm not enjoying that. So that's a no.
Right, so exactly. In case you didn't know, a lot of other MMOs will have set servers and data centers around the world, and however close you are will affect your ping, where ours is actually going to spin up shards or spin up servers, clusters in different areas around the world based on where people are. So at least that's how it's going to work.
TL;DRThe PvE/PvP slider is a preference, not an absolute, so PvP can't be fully avoided; both player types get plenty of content, and lawless areas carry more danger of meeting players.
The slider is a constant topic of discussion on the forum. So yeah, the slider is a preference. It is not an absolute, so no matter how far you take that slider, you can never prevent PvP content.
Well, if you're running your own server, then you can do whatever you want to some extent. So there will always be plenty of content for both types of players. It's not going to favor one over the other. We treat everything equally, or try to when we're building the game. But when you do get to lawless areas, there's certainly danger of you running into players. In more, shall we call, policed areas, even if someone were able to occasionally jump you when you've steered it away because you don't like PvP, they'd be constantly hunted and free targets for PvPers everywhere at that point.
So I went straight to the people we won't name. It's like the worst kept secret. And so our cover mechanic is sort of a combination of many things. There is a snap cover, a go-to-this-place-to-jump-into-cover. There will probably be some auto version of that as well where you can just sort of assume that you're going to duck into cover. We try to cover all levels of skill. But when you're in cover, you can move around. You're not stuck in a position. So you can move in cover and look around in cover and all the things you'd want to do to get full situational awareness.