Matt Sherman

It doesn't have anything where it's a bespoke system, just its component default loadout is going to be really tuned for that. So it's the kind of thing where if you're trying to run all six guns on the Hurricane, so the four turret guns and the two pilot nose guns, all simultaneously, that's going to choke you out on power and heat throughput.

With the default components?

Yeah, with everything default, everything stock. But if you're really doing it where the pilot is flying the ship and the turret gunner is really the one doing all the heavy shooting, it's going to have enough cooling to hold up with that throughput. So there will still be a few pauses. I think right now, though, it can shoot for about a minute or so.

A minute of sustained fire?

Yeah. When you set it to the staggered fire that manned turrets have access to right now, it just can keep shooting and shooting and shooting. And it takes a while to actually choke out the power or the cooling on it.

In a wing of them, yeah. So one thing just to sort of squash with that is don't expect to be taking a single Hurricane and taking on an Idris by yourself in it. That's no. Even yesterday on ATV, the description was, okay, if you have a wing of Hurricanes, because you bring five Hurricanes to a fight, okay, now you've got 20 guns that can focus on target, firing perpendicular to the flight path of their ship, where a dedicated fighter is like, well, no, I'm basically focusing in this front 30 degree arc of my ship. So the Hurricane has just a hell of a lot better coverage range.

Yeah, I saw a lot of people comparing it to the Sabre or other ships that have size 3 guns. Like, well, why wouldn't they just be as effective? And I think you really spoke to it there. Whereas with the Sabre, they've got to come at you and then go away and come at you and go away. The Hurricane, because its size 3s are on that turret, can come right alongside you and just strafe the ever-loving...

Absolutely, yeah. And you can just keep that fire up because then, oh, your target's running in a straight line. Well, okay, I'm going to just fly parallel to you and my guns are able to stay on target the whole time, versus any other ship in that same size. So it's like, yeah, no, the Sabre wouldn't be able to do that. Okay, you could technically decouple, but then you're going to be fighting against red out, black out for how fast you're moving to try and maintain pace with the other ship. There will be enough complications to it where it's like, well, yeah, you could do that or try to do that, or you could just have a Hurricane flying parallel and shooting perpendicular and just blasting your target.

I made the joke in Ship Shape that you don't want to get in front of the Hurricane. I think you just don't want to be anywhere near it unless you're in the cockpit.

Don't be in the top hemisphere of the Hurricane.

Right now, no. That's not something in the cards. It was intentionally designed where the front seat was specifically built to be the pilot seat, including the hardware needed for flight. So you don't just have a single stick and you're flying your ship functionally. It's the throttle and stick, or even other ships where it's a dual stick setup. So the rear seat was built to not have all of that set up to it. To try and accomplish that, we'd have to kick things back to art, do a rework on that. But also at the same time, that was just never its intended design. So one thing I've seen people bring up, because I've seen that sort of pop up in Spectrum as well, is they're saying, oh, it should have been an attack chopper. That was never really the aesthetic reference for the cockpit as much. A bigger thing was actually the dropship out of Aliens, where it's much closer to that, because we've already got the giant shoulder-mounted ordnance. It's just ours doesn't fold out like the Cheyenne did. But the cockpit is also very much in that similar kind of mindset, where you have a more panel-heavy pilot seat in the front lowered position, right up at the nose of the ship, but then you have a much more unobstructed support gunner seat behind that pilot. If you even go through and look up the Cheyenne itself, it's like, oh, you can actually see a lot of those same cues. Although they have a weird, cramped hallway to get the pilot and the co-pilot through to their seats. We're like, no, no, we can't do that for collision reasons and being a game. So the cockpit is how it is. It's definitely not an unheard request.

So an exact timeline, that's something that we can't really give right now, because of all things with iteration. The biggest roadblock actually with any of that is getting the actual manned turret gameplay into a really good spot first. So we've put these cool turrets on a number of our ships. We've got a lot of gameplay plans for making multi-crew matter, even if it is just a hired NPC, even compared to anything like a slaving rig or an AI blade. It's getting that manned turret gameplay where it needs to be first, and then start giving the other options to be like, hey, you don't have to have all your friends online all the time, so here are these other options that you can triage things down with. But it's making sure that the core experience is fun before we start adding those in, because otherwise it'd probably just short-circuit that whole experience.

And of course, we want as many people in the turrets as possible now. That's how we're going to get the feedback we need. That's how we're going to get the metrics we need and stuff like that. To automate them right now, this very moment, would actually undercut our efforts in making manned turret gameplay better.

Exactly.

Oh yeah, [the Terrapin] looks fantastic. Dan Kamensky has done a ton of work on this ship, so as you can tell, there's still a few glitches that we're working out. So this is really cool. I've only recently jumped onto this ship. Calyx has done the bulk of the heavy lifting with the design and plotting stuff out for this ship. I'm just coming in to do some help and clean up, just getting seats and stuff set up. But probably the coolest thing, even when he was getting me up to speed, is just the start of these component panels. That one did not function how we were expecting it to. But just having this first step of, okay, well, here's this panel, and we may need to thin down how thick the panel is, but it's like, yeah, I can walk up to this housing, this cooler 01, I can pop it open, boom, there's my cooler. Same on the other side, here's my other cooler. So right when the ship comes out, it won't all be fully interactive to the point where, okay, now you're physically ripping that cooler out or you're doing the manual repair work. But it's that groundwork for when we get to that point. So it's really cool to see. And he's got all the core components over here. These sort of got passed by a bit quicker in the update video. But you've got your life support, your jump drive, radar, and the exceptionally glowy power plant.

One of the things folks pointed out in the Ship Shape segment is that the interaction system, the prompts, now align with the surface of the item.

Yes, that was a recent thing. And also, this is just how bright that thing is on the inside. You see it everywhere. So I've been working on just getting the pilot seat and the support seat set up. We're still getting a couple of timing things cleaned up. One of the cool things with this ship is a lot of the design process is intelligent reuse of assets. So if some of this animation looks similar, it's actually because we're using the Constellation pilot and co-pilot seat as a template to build this stuff out. It's that same kind of, okay, seat will turn, you'll jump in, it turns you back around. The timings are a little bit off, but we've got all the great screens lining this thing. When it's fully lit up, it's really cool. And then basically we're going to be working to get this support seat going, the remote radar and scanning station, where we've sort of got the end goal of, yeah, you'll drop down this and then you'll be turning around inside on this pivot with the scanner up top, sort of dialing in on your target. So it's going to be really cool.

Not a lot of active progress. It's definitely something that we're keeping in mind. It's something that we definitely want to deliver some fun options and choices for people to make. But in the reality of things, getting more ships out is the bigger priority versus getting these little tchotchkes in. But we've definitely got a few lists of different dashboard decorations, almost, where it's like, yeah, I know, because one of the old stretch goal ones was a bobblehead of some sort that everyone wants to see. So it's like, okay, not just a bobblehead, but what if it just takes general physics? Can it shake with your ship? What are the kind of weird little things, the pendulum swings, whatnot. So there's definitely a lot of stuff that we want to explore, and it's just in its holding pattern right now, waiting for that right time to really build everything out and then start getting all of that integrated into the game.

I remember, gosh, it was a couple months ago, I guess, you were going around the whole office and asking people, what would you like to see in your spaceship? Just taking ideas. This has come up a couple of times. I know some of the guys on the Flair team in Austin have asked questions about internal ship decorations and stuff like that. So it's definitely something that's on our minds. It's just, obviously, one of the biggest aspects of game development is prioritization. So it's something we definitely want to get to. We don't know if its time is now just yet.

Yeah, because also once we frame some of that time and we really start diving into this, getting a lot of that other work out of the way first is going to let us really dive into it. So instead of just being like, oh, we've made a bobblehead or something, it's like, oh no, we've got a whole run of bobbleheads. We've got all these other little tchotchkes, you know, bring your fan back and attach it to the sidewall of your ship or whatever.

Just an idea, Cutlass people. He's not committing to it.

Hey, no, we did bring the fan back. The fan is on the pilot seat of the Cutlass. It's just an integrated little box fan now and not a have-to-punch-the-window-to-make-it-work fan.

Like you said, it definitely does have multiple interpretations. The core is going to come down to player-facing modularity. That's going to be the moment-to-moment choices anyone gets to make with how their ship is kitted out, what are their components, weapons, all that good stuff. But at the same time, we've also got developer-facing modularity, and that's a lot of the set for how we are going to be able to actually create and iterate all of this content that's going to populate the world of Star Citizen. So right now, the biggest thing for player-facing modularity is really going to be your component options. It's definitely something that we're looking to keep fleshing out. We've got the alternate room options for the Retaliator, and we're looking at a number of different things for various other ships, but a lot of it does become more case by case and how big of a win can we get for it. So I know in the long run, we still have modules planned for the Caterpillar, because that's its nice big segmented rooms. But at the same time, that modularity doesn't mean it's going to be just Legos. You're not just going to be, 'I'm going to pick this desk up and move it a half meter over to the side.' So there's still going to be some structure and form to it.

So if I understand you correctly, when we see a developer talking on ATV and whatnot, we're talking about two different forms of modularity. There's a modularity we use internally to build things, like for the Avenger. We build an Avenger and then we build these little rooms that go inside it sometimes, like the EMP and whatnot. But when we sell things, there's the market modularity, if you will. The way in which we present certain ships to the community, ships like the Retaliator, where it has modules like the bomb bay and the living quarters that you'll be able to swap out. So we use the term in two different ways, and I think that leads to a lot of the confusion.

Yeah, and we've also recently been showing off a lot more of the developer-side modularity. So just a month or so ago, when you did the Outpost Happy Hour with the UK team, that's a great example of developer-facing modularity, because it's, 'Hey, set up these wall prefabs, set up these node prefabs for, okay, this is this bed set and it's for this manufacturer, this style.' The planet generation demo that we showed, the building out of the Idris and the Javelin videos from a month or so back, where it's, 'Hey, here's these Aegis giant ship hallway chunks.' That's a lot of that developer-facing modularity, where it's how we're able to build a giant multi-star-system game without killing ourselves.

So two modularities, one for you, one for us.

Yep.

I don't think we know yet.

It's definitely something that we talked about as the Dragonfly started coming together, but it's one of those things where we need to get the Dragonfly built out, know exactly how big it is in compact mode, really sit down also with the Cutlass, plan out what we want those revisions to be...

And figure out not just if there's enough room to cram it in there, but if there's enough room to actually operate it.

Yeah, because that's the big thing. Playing 'will it fit' only goes so far, but 'will it function' is the far more important question. So it's something that we're actively looking into because we do want Drake's ships to feel like a family, but it's not something that we can absolutely promise right now that it will happen.

So it's not ruled out?

No. But it's one of those things we can't know until we actually build it.