Guillermo Bilbao

So the first thing is that soft death is a bit of a temporary solution. We don't have the full damage penetration. We showed a placeholder for it at CitizenCon. I think everybody saw the Maelstrom presentation with the ships breaking apart. So that's going to be part of it. What we right now have for soft death eventually will be more of a systemic thing, in that some ships, if they kill your power plant or they kill all your relays or you have a very bad crash landing and you no longer have wings, or your ship is no longer able to fly or to move under its own power, there will be some degree of repairs you can do manually if you get spare parts or you've got engineers working on it. But as you mentioned, the SRV is also the solution when that ship cannot fly. There's no way to repair it in the field. You just tow it back to a base and do the regular repairs there.

So right now we have this soft death. The entire thing doesn't just destroy, it just becomes kind of a potentially useless hulk. But with the SRV, we'll now be able to grab it with a tractor beam and pull it back to a repair station and get it repaired instead of waiting for the insurance payout.

The repair isn't in yet, so you will be able to move it, but repairing, we didn't prepare it for that yet, so there are no drop-off points yet with the SRV. But for the future, that will be the case, that you have the dedicated drop-off points where you can then fix the ships that you cannot repair on site anymore, especially the bigger ships, because there's the concept of size one and size two ship items you can replace, right? You can pull them out with a tractor beam and pull something or push something back in, whereas with the bigger items, size three and upwards, you cannot remove them, so if they are destroyed, you lost them, and then you need to bring the ship that is now dead in the water into the hangar and have it repaired there.

So it will be harder, but it will only be harder if you have a ship that already has a certain age. So if you have your brand new ship that you just pulled out of your hangar for the first time, the wear and tear is non-existent on it. So that means that there is no maintenance required. So if you prepare the energy management on the ship, no matter how big the ship is, you can fly it on your own. But does it really make sense? Because then you are suddenly on the move, then you might get attacked. So parts will get destroyed on your way. That will result in, yeah, you from the pilot seat have to get up and then walk over to those destroyed pieces and repair them. So yes, you can do it, but it will be a real pain to actually maintain your ship.

And that was always very important to us, that we make sure that we don't block away the content for players that really would like to fly out their ship. And it works. They can travel from A to B, and if they avoid combat and if they make sure that they maintain it when they have the time to actually maintain it and bring down the wear and tear again, sure, it will run smoothly, like with fresh cars, right? So you can also have a fresh car that just doesn't break that easily.

Yeah, and it also comes down to the difference between single fighters or any ships with interiors. If you're in a fighter, you lose a component, well, that's it. Your wing is gone. You cannot stop and attach it again. Or, well, any of your internal components get hit, you are dead. When you're with a multi-crew ship, you can just take that damage and accept that you no longer have shield generators. The difference, obviously, is if you have a crew, they can put out fires, they can really mitigate that damage or find solutions for stuff that, if you are solo, well, it's going to be more complicated. But again, the ship works. It's not like we're going to purposefully make multi-crew ships bad. If anything, it's kind of the opposite. A multi-crew ship with a crew ends up being more survivable, more effective, because, again, it has all its redundancies. If it's on fire, you can put it out. If there's a missing component, you can replace it, which is something you don't get.

It's building an effective baseline for a single player and then finding ways to improve the experience by adding friends.

Yeah. I mean, it's going to be the same if we're talking about turrets. Obviously, you have friends in the turrets, well, you can shoot better because you actually have access to those guns. Or if you get boarded, you have more friends inside. Well, again, that's also a plus.

So there were plans for having more bespoke repair, but that will not be part of the initial release. We will just go for the simple solution first, and then we will observe how that is actually perceived by the community. And if there is the necessity to actually make it more complex or more bespoke per item, then sure, we will think about that. But for now, it is really a very simple repair mechanic for the items. And then we will see, because what we don't want to do is that you need to read a handbook to actually understand, okay, what item do I actually need? What resistor do I need? What capacity? It doesn't make sense that we have to make people study our game to actually be able to play it. So it's still a game. We are a simulation-driven game, so we want to tailor to that, but we really want this feature also to be out, so we don't want to overcomplicate it and then block the release of it.

Though that applies to actually repairing the item with the beam. Obviously you still have the damage control of the whole ship, which involves, you can have fires, you can have bad atmosphere, you can have actual loss of atmosphere or toxic atmosphere due to a fire, or you could also have relays being knocked out and you need to figure out which items to turn off or turn on to compensate and keep fighting as well as you can until somebody can repair that. So there is already a degree of complexity to the damage handling. But yeah, the main thing is going to be, right now, for repairing, just the beam, and we'll see.

But actually, you mentioned that we already have some items that need bespoke repair. So we have the fuses for the relay that need to be exchanged. So that is a type of repair. We also have life support, that is its own type of complexity, with the scrubbers that you need to exchange, because at some point they will deplete. So this is also something that can be counted as maintenance or repair in this regard. Then, like Guillermo just said, fire is its own danger. So that is definitely something that has a bespoke counter to it, which is the extinguisher or even venting the rooms. So there are some things that are already a bit more complex in comparison to what we showed at CitizenCon, repairing the power plant, which is you use the beam to repair it. But yeah, as said, we have already a lot of complexity, and well, I wouldn't say that our team is the best in handling multi-crew gameplay, but we try to be good, and it's really hard to manage. Even with the amount of people that we had on the ship, you saw us fail in the CitizenCon demo. We blew up. That wasn't intentional, that we blew up. We wanted to have a nice success at the end of the demo, but I was like, yeah, okay, let's leave it in. But yeah, so there's a lot of complexity already there.

So, I mean, I guess the fuses for the relays are part of the subcomponents we have. The life support system also has a set of subcomponents, the scrubbers, for example. Not only the scrubbers, but yeah. Well, we're also thinking maybe some components we were thinking about the other day may need to be subcomponents of maybe the CPU or of the avionics system or of the power plant. So yes, the way to say it would be like, yes, we have some components that are still going to exist in some form, but only if it really makes sense, if it's adding some functionality, because that's where just modeling health with...

You don't need to drill down on every single thing just because we need to drill down on every single thing.

Yeah, that's like our credo, or it started to be our credo, which is we really want to have meaningful gameplay rather than complex gameplay for complexity's sake. So this is something that is starting to be very, very important for us. But also to answer concretely on that question: we have them on our plan. They are not currently planned for the initial release, because there are several reasons, but especially content would just kill us if we would just say, by the way, we want to have subcomponents for every item, and then, yeah.

And especially, something that we always have to consider: every bit that we add adds to the time it actually takes to get to the gameplay that you actually want to consume.

No, I think actually one subcomponent that you may see, since the resource network doesn't apply only to ships, it also applies to locations. And one example is for puzzles, for repairing a sub-network in a particular location as part of a mission, you may need to swap out these parts, which may be bespoke or may also be the same kind of parts we use in ships. So it really depends on the level of complexity we want to add to a particular area of gameplay.

So all of those actually go through the same set of relays. That means generally if you knock out a relay, all the resources you want to get to the items stop flowing that way. What we do have is kind of the opposite, is relays that do not allow some resources through. This makes sense if you think of a Starfarer: we have the external tanks on one side and you have the internal tanks, and when you are giving fuel to some dude, you don't want to be draining your internal fuel tanks. And as far as the game is concerned, they are the same thing, they're just fuel tanks, why can't I take fuel from them? So we added relays that do not allow that kind of connection between both sides of the network. But we still obviously can have an alternate bypass that is turned off by default, and if you want to do that, we would allow it. But yes, as a general rule, most ships or most situations, you're going to have all the resources going through the same route. And if you lose the connection, well, that's it.

There are actually two answers to that question. So the first part is every ship will have a somewhat bespoke layout of where the relays will be located and how they will be connected. There will be differences between military ships and civilian ships, with military ships having more relays than civilian ships to allow for more redundancy. There will also be differences between manufacturers, just because of the way that their ships are looking, because we have to fit the relays on them, and that also dictates how the relay or the resource network is actually set up. And so there comes the first difference from. And the second is ship item manufacturers. So it's less Drake itself. So if you have a very expensive power plant you put in your Drake ship, it will not suddenly work worse because it's sitting in a Drake ship. No, it will still... the wear and tear rate will be different. So if you invest more money in your ship items, they are less likely to be affected by wear and tear. Malfunctions might even be triggered less often. So item choice will matter in that regard. So even coming back to the single player: if you invest a lot of money into your ship and buy the best items ever, you even reduce the amount of interactions you have to have with items. So it's more likely that you don't have to run around alone in your ship and try to fix it.

Yeah, and also in addition to brands, I think we already have it in-game: you have the different classes of items, in the sense you have competition, military, industrial, civilian. That's also part of the balance in there. A competition item would probably have a pretty short lifespan, because we expect you, after the race, to go back, change it altogether or repair it, while an industrial or military part is expected to be in the field for a longer time. So that will affect the wear and tear rate and obviously, therefore, some of the other...

The grades will get a different meaning, like the types will get a new meaning to that.

Oh, also, since again, this goes back to the damage system, because without damage penetration and stuff like that, we don't actually get the fires or the actual damaging of the components. There, the hulls also become a bit more relevant, the armor, what materials the manufacturers normally use. We already have some differences planned: this brand usually uses this type of alloy, which has certain properties, which is how you get lighter ships or heavier ships or less armored ships as a rule.

Well, I mean, the obvious one is if something overheats; it's part of the things that drive into the malfunctions or the dangers popping up. So, yeah, bad heat management, for example, could suddenly lead to a power surge going through the ship and killing components, or a fire starting in front of you, maybe setting you on fire if you're unfortunate. So yeah, to some degree, you can make things worse. You can always make things worse. But obviously we're not going to insta-kill you just because you punched a component to fix it.

Actually, that's the good part of the entire change that will come, which is we are more item-focused. So it is less like a dramatic death with the entire ship directly exploding. No, you will start losing items first, and then you might be dead in the water for a long time, until someone picks you up. And that is all the consequence. So you're just dead in the water if the right components break at the right time. If the wrong component breaks at the wrong time, so if your quantum drive, for example, explodes because of a malfunction, that might have a consequence that is very similar to what we have right now, that the entire ship explodes.

Yeah, the power plant specifically. Soft death really, what it sort of models is either the power plant died in a peaceful way, so to speak, or you lost your relays, something like that, which, you just lost power. What we currently have for big explosions is more like the reactor took a critical hit, it went into its critical load, nobody did anything about it, it exploded.

No. Yeah, if there's an airlock, airlocks work like an airlock is supposed to work. They will actually cycle, probably ideally in a smart way. If there's good air outside and good air inside, no need to cycle. But in most cases, the airlock will behave as a real-world airlock should. On the other side, if you open the door of, let's say, you open the cargo bay of an A2 while you're in space, well, there goes your air. Not all ships are ideal for all scenarios. Some of them have these EVA suit lockers and they have these double airlocks and particular paths to get to space, which are safe. In others, they are not really... Obviously you can always vent your ship so you don't lose the air, but that also comes with its own challenges, and your engineer or whoever is on the console needs to manage it properly. So that's also where part of the ship roles will come in, which are better built for certain scenarios versus others.

Well, we're going to have subcomponent targeting. It kind of exists in some form in the game, but it's not really... I think Yogi showed it even at CitizenCon. Yeah, actually, for the turrets; obviously, it will also be used for stuff like trying to hit the power plant or trying to hit any other internal component. At the same time, yes, if you know where each ship's components are, you already know where to shoot. Obviously, the targeting helps you, but anything you bother to learn or any experience you have is always going to be superior, I think. Especially when it comes back to, you mentioned sabotage. In that case, your use of scanners is a bit more limited. And knowing exactly where you need to go, how to deal the most damage, it's always a good skill to have.

We even had that already in our demo, right? So we had a faked penetration there. And because we knew where we needed to shoot, we could potentially target the power plant.

Yeah, and ships have weak points, not necessarily made on purpose, but simply because of the way they're built. The hull is not the same thickness in all places. The ship components are not distributed evenly. So knowing if your weapon can make it through the hull and the shields in that particular part of the ship, it's easier to hit the components. I think that's always something good to practice and learn.

It's going to be interesting to see how that affects pilots and the way they fly too, knowing where your weak spots are and learning to not expose them during combat.

And actually that is what we are all looking forward to, right? So we really want this, that maneuvering and knowing your ship well gives you an advantage over if you don't care about your ship.

Well, your ship will be on fire. No, but currently, well, with the new MFDs, you're going to have probably a better display. You already know that you have this little picture of your ship in the MFD, and usually when you get hit, you see the red mark, and the components slowly go red from blue. That's going to be part of it. Obviously, you also get the messages. I think if you're playing the game right now, you already have this first set of misfires. These are the old ones, the shield failure or thruster surge, stuff like that. You're going to keep seeing that. That's also part of the new system. They are triggered using the new logic, but they're still the same effects. But yeah, in general, it's going to be mostly that, because as a pilot on a single-seat fighter, you have very limited action you can take against that. Obviously, you have your triangle, capacitor, well, wheel. You can put more power to the shields if your things are getting hit, but at the end of the day, if you are losing a cooler or something like that, other than turning off items altogether, there's really not a lot you can do, which is the weak point of fighters. They don't really have that same power in the end.

Yeah, well, that is an open discussion right now. So it might change. As of now, we have a tank that stores the atmosphere that you have in your rooms. So let's take an example with one room, and you want to vent that room. We don't vent the atmosphere in that room outside. We vent it into an auxiliary storage so that you don't lose it, because we see the atmosphere as a finite resource, and you should really care about your atmosphere in space because it's a precious resource, right? And so you vent it into the storage. So you have the room now completely empty of atmosphere. And if you decide to fill the room again, it takes the atmosphere from that storage back in. Sure, we also thought about, okay, what happens when you accidentally vent it? So we have some auxiliary atmosphere sticks that you can put in, and then by chemical reaction, magically create atmosphere for that room or for the rooms of the ship. But the idea is that you always have this storage that you have to manage. So you fill it and you have this concrete, finite amount of atmosphere on your ship that you have to manage.

And we also separate it along the way, in the sense that there are tanks for oxygen and inert gases, but also for waste gases that we don't want in the atmosphere at all; there are different tanks. So yeah, it also limits how quickly you can get rid of good or bad air in both cases.

But also a nice way to catch atmosphere is actually, if you did mismanagement and your auxiliary tanks are empty and you're breathing through your suit and you're depleting the oxygen from your suit, what you can do is go into the atmosphere of a planet, open all the doors, and then suddenly all the atmosphere rushes in, you close the doors and go up again. You just have to make sure that the atmosphere of the planet is actually breathable. But that is also a valid way to fill your ship back with atmosphere.

Every time it's the same answer. Fresh ships: very unlikely for any malfunctions. There might be some that are happening, but very minor ones, so you can even ignore them and live with them. But if you have a ship that has several hundred hours and the wear and tear is really, really low or really, really high, then you have to maintain it more often. But we really want to make sure that it is not annoying for players. But this is something that we will balance once we have it out there and players give us feedback on it.

For the long-term maintenance, it's more about some items being a bit less reliable. If you keep using it, it's kind of a way of telling you, hey, use something new. And with salvage and all the ways you have to get components, it's really not that hard. Or you have to pay more attention to your components. But stuff like fires or anything really critical that is crippling, your ships aren't going to randomly burst into flames; it's more of a consequence of damage control. You're in a fight, you take a direct hit to a relevant component, you get an electrical fire. But you shouldn't expect to be cruising around Stanton and suddenly three rooms are on fire and you die.

But we also want to reward player choices there. That is, if you decide to run your ship at only 20% of the performance it could run at, like have the power plant always run at 20%, so basically underpower your ship, that also has an impact on the malfunction rate. So the less you push your ship, the more likely it is that there won't be any malfunctions. But also the other way: if you are in a combat scenario and you want more than 100% out of your ship items, sure, that will dramatically increase the chances for malfunctions.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, but it's dependent on the wear and tear and the health of the item. So we have parameters that give us more control over when these are happening, but sure, there will be some RNG.

Yeah, for some of them, the conditions are more like thresholds: you are overheating by this amount, you have the power throttle over this amount. So we know you're pushing your ship. At that point, we start rolling dice from time to time, where either nothing happens or maybe a minor malfunction happens or the moderate ones happen. For other cases, we just want to say, based on the wear and tear, even at that point it has to be very rare, in the sense that, yes, we do it randomly, but maybe the mean time is supposed to be days or something like that. Simply, it could happen, but we're more interested in the player choice aspect: overheating, running your ship at overclock all the time, stuff like that, which we think is more like the cost for that choice you made.

So that's a good question, and it comes first with, okay, what is soft death? So soft death is a bit of an interim solution due to the fact that we cannot currently in the game let you damage the power plants or relays or anything like that. So that means that, the way the game works currently, if you set something to zero HP, it will just explode. Soft death allows us to bypass that a bit so that you get a non-functional ship that you can still loot. With the physical damage system, we expect that to change, and instead of having soft death as its own thing, have it be more along the lines of, if you lose enough parts of your ship, well, you will stop flying or you will stop being able to fight. And whether that's repairable, well, it will depend. In some cases, some components are easy to change and repair. On the other hand, power plants for some ships are so large that you will need to tow the ship all the way back to port to do any kind of repair.

Yeah, so to add to that, the soft death that we currently have is basically just an interim solution to the proper soft death that will then come with what Guillermo just described. Even moving forward with Maelstrom, it will be even more complex, where players will be able to shoot away certain sections of the ship. So you don't just have to repair the ship items on it, but you have to exchange entire segments of the ship itself.

Well, trying to explain it to your granny is always a bad idea, because they're not going to be interested. But what we do is basically we turn the designers' ideas into something that will actually work in the engine. Often what we do is we make the tools that then the level and content designers use to create the gameplay.

Yeah, I guess Torsten comes up with an idea. He sends me a GDD. I then look at it, and then we translate it into code and tasks, and then do the tasks, and just combine the code together.

Well, depending on the feature, a lot of the times we will also be doing a bit of the initial UI work or a bit of the initial design work, because we need to actually test the features before we give them back. So you end up doing a bit of everything, honestly.

So usually we have two things. Either the release is pretty close, and we cannot really rewrite the game fundamentally to support all the things we would like to do. Or, in this case of the resource network, it's actually the opposite. We usually just go to one of the directors and say, hey, this system is not really compatible with what we want to do. And people say, okay, fine, rewrite it. Which is kind of liberating. You're not really held down by your own old code. That usually comes to bite me in the ass a lot. But no, actually, you get a lot of freedom to sit back with everybody who is going to have to use this system and say, okay, what does everybody want out of it? For instance, in this case, the resource network: all the future storage containers, the fuel, power, stuff like that, use the same underlying logic as the cargo containers that we're getting with physicalized cargo. So if the resource network has to move cargo for whatever reason, maybe refinery ships, stuff like that in the future, that's going to be the same system.

One definitely stands out. Recently we've had quite an amusing one with the room system, because we found that we were getting some room system crashes when people were doing stuff with the inventory, and that doesn't make any sense, they're completely unrelated. Eventually, after a lot of pain, we figured out that it was to do with helmets. When you drag a helmet out of the inventory and it goes as a preview on your head, well, a helmet has a room inside. But it's not a real room when it's just the UI preview. It's the hologram UI helmet. But the room inside the hologram was still trying to talk to the real room system and going horribly wrong because of that. So we had ghost rooms from helmets.

There's a room inside the helmets?

A room is anything that contains atmosphere to breathe from.

I think we had some interesting ones when we added refueling. That was another feature I worked on. Mostly about the docking, because up until then, docking was something that happened between the stations, which are static and have infinite mass for all purposes, and a ship that is also not trying to move away. But once refueling came in, people were trying to quantum travel with ships, were catapulting ships: you extend the arm, accelerate to cruise speed, and you release the fighter and it goes spinning, stuff like that. The code was supposed to handle that. It was supposed to break, it was supposed to punish the players. It didn't. So we were getting some pretty funny situations where ships would start clipping back and forth inside the Starfarer. Hopefully you guys are not seeing that so much these days, but it was pretty funny to debug.

One of my favorite classic bugs was way back in Arena Commander days. I think this predated the PU. Ships like Hornets would just explode randomly. Sometimes they would explode after two minutes of flight, sometimes after eight minutes of flight, and it was so hard to replicate. Some people could fly forever and be fine. Eventually what they determined was the old flight suit had a flashlight that hung on the belt. And because of the physicalized nature of the thing, when you were doing certain moves, hitting certain Gs, the flashlight was dinging the side of the ship for one point of damage, one point of damage, one point of damage, until eventually the ship exploded. And there was no predicting it. It was impossible to track because everybody flies differently and pulls different moves. So that was my awakening to, holy crap, these things can come from anywhere, even from a stupid flashlight.

I think we still have that one, but for mining ships: the mining consumables that you can put on the heads tended to detach without inheriting the speed. So if you were cruising through the Yela asteroid belt after mining a rock and suddenly one of your modifiers expires and tries to detach itself from the ship, you would suddenly have a collision at a thousand meters per second. I'm really sorry for all the mining players out there.

Yeah, I feel like it's way easier to have those small chats when I have a bug or something and I wouldn't normally write a Teams message because it's just whatever thing. But if Guillermo is sitting right next to me, it's easier to just be like, okay, what do you think about that? And I feel like it speeds up stuff on some things.

Yeah, you get a lot of that kind of collaboration now. I'm going to say I don't like meetings. Maybe there's somebody in the audience who likes meetings; I'm sorry for them. But on the other hand, talking to people, just going to them, as long as they are not in the middle of something more important, works for solving a lot of the small issues we have: figuring it out, understanding exactly what they mean in one of their messages on Jira or on Teams. Things like that, I think being in person works better for me at least.