The developers answer fan questions on guild size, shield facing, upgrade modules, fuel and ammo, cooling, multi-crew Constellation play, command-and-control, UEE penalties and in-game radio. Staff also describe their Hangar work: elevator, holotable and build/patch system.
Well, that's an easy one to answer because we don't know yet. My guess is that we won't have limits necessarily, but we may make you organize it a little more as the guilds get bigger.
Yeah, we've been working a little bit on the nature of guild tools and everything recently, so we're getting there, but we're not sure just yet what we'll be able to do.
Well, I mean, the number of people in your guild, you can have as many as you want, but that doesn't mean you can all be in the same instance and stuff, right?
Why, an in-game radio, you say? Why would you ask? As long as it doesn't suck. We've talked about how we're going to have some sort of content for the universe, what that is, whether the hangar show transitions over to that or whether we create other new content. There'll definitely be something that goes, we'd like to track the lore and create something around that. So you guys will help us do that, too.
Yeah, that's a lot of content, because remember, slow communication, which means a station can't broadcast to every system, so we're going to need a lot of stations.
TL;DRShields can have different numbers of faces, from a single bubble to several, so a face such as a Freelancer's rear can be taken down and power redistributed.
Ah, okay. I think I see what they're asking me. So shields, if you think about Wing Commander, it used to be front, back, left, right shields. Well, we've expanded that a little bit, so now you can get just a bubble shield that is only one surface. It has a little more damage potential for the whole thing, and so that can be shot from any direction. But then there's also two-face shields, four-face shields, and actually if you look at some of the ones that are already on the ships, there are different numbers of faces. So yes, you could take down the shield in the back of a Freelancer, for instance. The energy can be redistributed.
But we are eventually going to lock down things. They'll come attached to characters in the game. But, of course, we're not to that point yet. It's going to be a while before we do that.
Well, I think there's probably going to be another pass on cockpits at some point. Because I have to admit that the view area is not very big on some of our cockpits. And I think we are all aware of that and we want to do something about it at some point. We've just been a little busy with the hangar stuff.
Yeah, getting it out there. And again, that's one of those things. If you guys want to see stuff, let us know, and we can probably adjust it. We'll see what we can do.
Well, I don't think it's going to go in cargo space, although you could carry extra fuel as cargo. In the upgrade space that ships have, you can add additional magazines for physical weapons or add drop tanks, for instance, under the wings of the Hornet. We're going to probably allow that at some point. So it's not part of your cargo space, it's part of your extra space. But other than that, every ship has a default fuel tank that just has a certain capacity.
Well, we've definitely said before that you can hire AI crew for your ship. But in the case of a multi-crew ship, you could, in theory, handle it yourself. Now, it's not going to be as effective without crew. For instance, there are avionics upgrades that would let your turrets be computer controlled. They just won't be as cool as Luke and Han in the turrets.
Okay, then. That's a great question. We get that a lot. People are really curious about C&C. I think Chris kind of answered some of that in last week's forum feedback, but let's hear more.
Basically, all those things are reasonable. We don't know all of the details yet, but yes, you're going to have some sort of tactical overview of the battle. Depending on whether we're doing voice communication in the game, you can probably give orders directly to the other pilots in your group, if you're all on the same voice network. So there will be some degree of all of that. We don't know what the degree is yet. We still have to design a lot of that.
Well, most of them are universal. You've already started to see that some in the hangar, where you can switch the guns out to any of the different ships in your hangar, which is really great. Some of the upgrade slot pieces will change with the size of the ship, but most of them will be like batteries for weapons. Those will be pretty much universal. You can just plug them into any ship.
Yes. Simulator. The simulator will have some training stuff. Now, I don't know how advanced they'll get, and it may be one of those things where we keep adding content over time.
True. And as we do add content, that's exactly where you'll go to learn how to fly and to engage, and as we add details or levels of detail complexity, that's where you're going to go learn it. And that'll be in the hangar.
So what are we going to allow people to do on the long journeys? We've talked before a little bit about having some sort of mini games, card playing, whatever in the game, but there probably won't be much available at launch time. That's one of those things you just continue to add in when you have a little time. We'll have things that you can do interactively, and you can play around with the pieces of your ship, of course.
It could. In fact, if you look at the Aurora brochure, there was a cooling system on one of the Auroras by default. So yes, we do have coolers. They are part of the engine modifier system that's getting moved into the generic upgrade space. So that may even be what their modifier bonus is that they got from the stretch goal. So definitely a yes on that question.
I mean, if the ship fits, right? Not all ships fit in all hangars. I mean, a Constellation in that discount hangar would not be very cozy. But yeah, we've talked about that a lot. I'm not sure if we have a definite plan for how we could do that, but maybe let you look at the ships that fit in the other hangars if you have a higher hangar. We still have to strategize on that a little bit.
So, yeah, I don't think we're going to make you go to prison. There will probably be fines and penalties of some sort. We haven't really figured out exactly what they're going to be, but don't get caught.
That elevator. How many days did we go back and forth on that? All that craziness with trying to actually get it set up, but having the character falling through it all the time, having issues with animation, oh, now it needs to be flow graph driven, back and forth. So it was touch and go, especially a few weeks out, right before we were about to ship, and we're still collaborating on this elevator and trying to get that set up. And not only that, I was also working with Paul on this holotable as well. And Paul can tell you guys a little bit about that.
TL;DRPaul Reindell says the holotable was decided about two weeks before release and he built its interaction code in a rush, finishing hours before release while also supporting ship interactions.
Yeah, actually. You decided, I think, two weeks before. They were like, hey, Paul, finish the holotable. And I was killing myself to build up the whole code behind it. The whole interaction, it's not an easy thing. There's nothing standardized. We could use a normal 2D menu, but Chris was always like, oh, I want to have this awesome holographic 3D model-driven table with animations here and transitions there. So I really killed myself to build this out. I think I finished it at 5 in the morning, one day before we released, so it was really super close to get this in. And besides that, I always had to support Dan for all the interactions, like entering the ship and opening doors and sitting down in the seats. I also wrote a lot of code to actually make the interaction of the ship happen. So I always had to switch between, okay, more holotable work, and then Dan was like, oh, and I need this door to have functionality to go on and off. We don't actually have triggers for that. Hacking something in really fast to get this working, then back to the holotable, and just a crazy two weeks.
TL;DRThe speaker worked on the build system and patch creation for the Hangar; the CDN arrived only two weeks before it was needed, yet patching worked well with strong download statistics.
K
KyleBuild Engineer
So I worked on the build system, which takes the code and generates the actual game that you're going to play, and then we need to create a patch of that, which then gets distributed out. And we didn't actually get the CDN until two weeks before we needed to actually use it. It was right before you guys were going out to Germany, and we were uploading the patch and making sure you had it on the computers. And then we weren't sure if it was going to patch or not, because we hadn't really tested it internally. And it's amazing how well the system worked. It just started to work for you guys. You guys were getting the patches. We were making builds here internally and then uploading them, and you guys were downloading them just fine. We had some pretty awesome statistics coming off of the CDN, like how many terabytes of patch data people were downloading once it finally came out.