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.

For me, kind of the smaller to mid-sized craft, because it's enough to build out where they can have a bunch of different gameplay potential to it. We can explore some different options with it in sort of the infinite timeline of things, where we can build it to be this thing now first but then potentially go to other options later, but without being such a behemoth ship where it's like, okay, I'll make this ship this year, for just the amount of work and detailing that goes into anything.

For me, it seems I get most satisfaction out of the bigger ships like the Caterpillar. When you drop down those doors and the vista is just out there and you're standing there in gravity looking at this amazing view, and then we get to blow them up too. So I have a lot of fun with the bigger ships. I'm looking forward to working on the capital ships, and we're working really hard on, I won't go into detail on it, but the gravity, inside gravity and putting little ships in bigger ships and all this stuff. And we're going to be delivering some cool stuff for 3.0.

The zone system is one of the most impressive achievements for me personally with Star Citizen. The ability to put a ship inside another ship and be able to transition seamlessly, I imagine that makes for quite a number of challenges.

Yeah, our engineers working on that, like Chris Rain specifically, he's just done an amazing job with the zone systems and local grids.

Patrick, what's your favorite type of ship to work on?

Size and type doesn't matter as much as how many pieces I get to blow off of it. Honestly, that's pretty much it. When I look at a ship, the first thing I think of is this is going to be so fun to tear apart. I'm looking for all sorts of little flaps and winglets and panels. Does this animate? Oh, can I rip that off too? Where are the areas that are going to show cool damage as a player? What are you going to see? What's the damage going to look like when it's landed and you want to repair it? What's it going to look like in space? Which is the coolest ship that just looks awesome when it's blowing up and parts are exploding and there's fire going off. I know that's really vague and totally not specific.

We have to balance the amount of debris that can fall off a ship with the optimization. Each separate mesh costs a certain amount of draw calls, so we have to kind of keep it in check.

And a draw call is the CPU calling to the graphics processor.

Yeah, it's the number of passes on a certain mesh. And say you have 10 draw calls on a hull and you start to break it in half, now you have 20 draw calls. You break it off again, you have 30 draw calls. It's not exactly that way, but you can kind of think of it like that.

Yeah, it's just a matter of building that foundation out first. Because one of the things that we've been using a lot more in the past year or so is this internal tool we have called DataForge, just for making authoring so much of this content a lot easier and a lot faster, and using something like that to then, okay, now we can much more easily make these different kinds of screen records to say this is what this ship's HUD is, this is what the interface is going to be. But just getting that foundation to say, okay, we could build any HUD for any ship on any panel setup in very little time. Once we get to that point, that's really when we can start saying, all right, what are some of the ways that we can play with this and make something really cool and make something different from that foundation set?

I know Chris is really interested in ship customization, but we think what we'll do is we'll probably establish the ships as designed first off and then allow for things like that later. One of the efforts going on right now is, you've heard of Item 2.0. Have we mentioned Item 2.0 at all? Is this news? Item 2.0 can be divided into several categories. There's seat 2.0, there's turret 2.0, there's landing gear 2.0. But what we're focusing on right now is the seats. And what that means for the cockpits is that the joysticks and the MFD monitors are going to start to become one object, or at least separate from the ship, that can be plugged in. And that's actually just starting right now. So it opens the door to customization and swappability of interiors down the road.

I saw a little bit of that in the ATV yesterday actually, when you saw the Cutlass cockpit completely removed.

And that's very much, even though it's still sort of one of those on-the-cusp ships, some of it will be set before all of Item 2.0 is in. There's still going to be other aspects of Item 2.0 that will be layered in over time. But just making sure that we're building it to take advantage of these new systems as soon as they come online. So like you mentioned, it's its own seat item. So on that infinite timeline, cool, we get to a point where now we could offer different seats. Now you can change that out much more easily and as a preset thing, as opposed to... like the Aurora LX had the leather.

Now, this was a video within ATV that we did with Calix, who's not here at the table right now. But I want to go ahead and answer this just for Calix here. Just like we do 40, 50, 60 different concept images when we're designing the outside of a ship, we do concepts for internal systems. That was a concept for a particular internal system that Calix was working on. It was all done up in Flowgraph, which, if you saw the last Happy Hour Game Dev, you got to see Calix working in Flowgraph. It's not a finished, final approved system or whatnot. It was something he was exploring at that time. We do that quite often. There's lots of little systems that we start to work on, and in a vacuum they may work, but when you have to put them into the game with the 200 other systems, the 300 other systems, they may cause all kinds of trouble. So no progress on that at this time.

Well, although just to also comment on that, because I know even when he popped on the stream on Wednesday for a few minutes, he mentioned he's working on the interaction systems. And so he's definitely still working on things in that nature, but like Jared was explaining, it's just making sure that whatever we build... you can build a really crazy prototype that makes any multiplayer server you run it on collapse. And so it's just making sure that it's always viable and it's always something that is stable enough for just the crazy scope that the Persistent Universe is going to end up attaining.

Oh, that's interesting, because this is a Calix question. He did some prototypes for variable terrain. So we have the idea of springy landing gear, and along with that system it's going to take into account the cargo doors and whatnot. So we're thinking hard about uneven terrain and how that would actually work. And we want to keep the ship basically level, but the landing gears and things are going to fall into crevices, and the door is going to open and the ladder is going to open to a certain amount.

Chances are you're not going to see the final implementation of whatever that answer is in 3.0. It's going to be something that evolves just like anything else.

Yeah, it presents just immediately a lot of challenges for tracking the balance of the ship, especially if we get into larger and larger ships. Now, for something smaller, you'll probably have better luck, because you're also going to probably find something that's almost more inherently flat to the shape of your ship. But if you start getting to, say, you're bringing a Caterpillar down, even with any different landing gear compression, there's only so far below those landing gear will still extend, and so you'll still need to find as big, clear and flat of a tract as possible, but you won't get screwed over by there being a little bit of variation in that.

The full systemic damage system. So I kind of put a list together at the beginning of the year of what we wanted to achieve for damage and talked to design about this. So first off, we want the dogfighting experience to be really good, where you have indication of where you're getting hit from and effects going off in the interior. And you kind of get the warning that you're about to go critical, and you have some time to get out of your seat and start to repair things. We're going to add radial damage to missiles. And the difficulty there is there is a zone inside the ship and a zone in space. And the radial damage has to affect interior components in order to hurt them. So once that is established, we will add damage to the interior components, their own radiuses which they influence also if they explode, and they can also send feedback on the pipes, and pipes will expend heat, and then your overall ship performance will decrease based on these factors, and if enough critical systems explode, you'll achieve a ship destruction. But we do want to allow for the possibility you can break a ship in half without blowing it up. So if you start to shoot the hull and you're not hitting any critical system, you could probably snap it in half.

And also a lot of that is going to play into where the different components live inside of a ship. I know the Vanguard was very much built initially on its almost redundant setup, where it would have a power plant and a cooler inside each of its main housings on separate sides of the ship. So yeah, you've shorn off one half of the ship, but it still has all those functional components where it can keep flying even if the other half went critical. Whereas something that, say, has two power plants but they're right next to each other, and then one of those power plants takes critical damage, it detonates, it does this explosion radius; well, it's right next to the second power plant, so even though that power plant may not have taken any damage, if the first power plant criticals hard enough, that one's going to go along with it. To try and create some of these more systemically occurring events for this kind of critical damage, but also make sure it's not something where how you critically damage and blow up one ship is how you critically damage and blow up every single ship. So it's, oh, I've got this one gameplay routine down set. So I've got that down set for the Hornet or for the Constellation, but I'm still learning for all these other ships that give me trouble.

We've also spoken about, as your ship takes damage, the captain would assign tasks to repair certain aspects of the ship, adding gameplay for the passengers. So we're very concerned about occupying the passengers with things to do. So we talked about fighting fires and repairing and adding fuses to components, where you would have this kind of almost mini-game where you're repairing the component itself.

I imagine that would extend the time to kill on these larger ships quite a bit.

Yeah, and that's definitely one of the goals, especially once we get some of the Shield 2.0, Item 2.0 in. There's a lot that will be going on with that, where even just your basic shield operator guy is going to have a lot to do in terms of just doubling or tripling the longevity of your ship by them being dedicated to that role. But then, like Matt was saying, if one of those components gets fried and you've still got someone else on the ship, they may be the one running back. Shield generator 2 is broken, find that panel, open that up, there's the broken fuse, grab the replacement, get that stuffed in, power cycle that shield generator and pray it's not going to take too long before you've taken even more damage.

And then beyond that, if you think about a ship as a derelict that you might find in space, it's going to be pre-damaged, you're going to come across it, you might harvest it for components, you might strip the metals to store the alloy to create other things, or you might be able to repair that ship and fly it out of there. So we're looking at all these, from dogfighting to destruction to post-destruction and being derelict, this whole lifespan of a ship.

Probably just the MacGuffin umbrella of Item 2.0, because it's like, oh well, we can't do that until we get this 2.0 stuff online, we can't do that until we get 2.0. So just all the knock-on effects that it's going to bring in terms of really just fleshing out gameplay and opening up a lot of the possibilities that are just like, all right, these are our items on the checklist, but once we have that, then we can really start checking a lot of this stuff off.

To this point, we've been building ships using modified default CryEngine, or I should say Lumberyard stuff now. But now with Item 2.0, it's really how we've always wanted to build the ships, where the ship itself can communicate and it's networked and it's got proper optimization. So I'm most excited about finally getting there, and it's really happening right now.

I think they talked up all the features. Personally, I like lights. I think they look cool, and I can't wait until we can connect them all and have all the different states for all sorts of cool stuff. Because I think it's really the visuals, what's going on, how the world feeds back to you as the player, that really pulls me in anyway.

I've talked to you a lot of times about lights and about having external lights. Like searchlights, so you can go through an asteroid field and have a light when you're doing search and rescue, looking for a ship.

We're definitely going to have that on turrets. We're going to add kind of spotlights on a turret, so what you're aiming at you can light up.

Well, just one of the basic ones, because I also know from a lot of times just flipping through different community streamers while they're playing the game, they're like, oh, I wonder when this bug will get fixed on this ship, of getting out of your ship and having it just spin for no reason. And that's one of those sort of simple ones that we actually will be able to start really addressing and getting locked back down once we have Item 2.0. Because, like you were sort of saying, the current setup now: if you aren't piloting your ship, and not just, oh, I'm sitting in the co-pilot seat; it's like no, are you in the pilot seat of your ship? Okay, cool. Everything's powered on. Everything has some level of awareness. You get hit, the ship will counter-correct and stop its own movement. You get out of the ship, it has none of that communication. It has none of that awareness of self. So once we have Item 2.0, it's like, all right, cool. Now you're allowed to auto-stabilize again, because your ship's IFCS, even when you're not in the pilot seat, is going to say, hey, why am I spinning? I shouldn't be spinning. Thrusters, stop my spinning. And then you may come back and you've tilted from taking a hit or taking an impact, but it shouldn't just be spinning on its own and then pinball you out into nowhere if you approach the ship wrong.

The thing that excites me the most that's happening right now is the upgrade to the turrets. We've had a lot of problems with the gameplay of the turrets, and I'm excited. I just saw Mark Abent's new implementation. It's amazing. So I'm mostly excited about that. I've been helping him prototype a couple things. But beyond that, optimization is going to be... and the ships are going to actually look better when we do Item 2.0. And it may not be clear, but we optimize the ships by adding LODs to the ships. In a normal engine, LODs switch at a constant rate of distance. But in our engine, we have a switching rate based on the smallest average poly size of the LOD. So if you have a ship hull and it's got a little tiny poly in it, that LOD is going to switch to the next lowest LOD fast. So we spend a lot of time looking for these small polys. And then due to the old tech that we've been using, say to hook up the joysticks to a player and run IK, traditionally the joysticks have been part of the exterior of the ship. You haven't known that, but that's actually been a thing. So when we move the joysticks to cockpit 2.0, that means the little LODs that are on these joysticks won't be influencing the LOD switching of the entire ship, which means we get a better looking ship closer up and as it switches. So it's going to be great. I'm very excited.

And for anyone who might not know what LODs are, they're levels of detail. It's the difference between seeing every single poly of the ship when it's right up close and then watching smaller and progressively less detailed versions of it.

Yeah, modelers are ridiculous. They make these ships out of millions of polys, so LOD 1 will be 500,000 and LOD 2 will be 200,000.

And you're trying to find a balance between range and visual loss. We're trying to make it so you don't see any pop; you're not supposed to see the model change. That's the perfect world scenario of an LOD. But after a while, when you're really just supposed to hit a certain poly count versus certain pixel space, you're like...

Every time you see something just pop on the screen, that's an LOD.

Yeah, exactly. That's usually an LOD. Could be streaming, could be a model just appearing, whatever kind of issue, but definitely we try and make those as clean as possible.