The developers cover new forum rules and the hangar patch's client-side persistence, which will later move to the game servers. They also discuss Dogfighting Module plans, thruster ratings, distortion cannons, damage modeling, netcode, ship balance and modding.
TL;DRThe forums are getting new rules developed with community feedback, plus moderator responsibilities, mainly to deal with outsiders causing trouble while most citizens already behave well.
We're making a lot of changes to the forums, trying to get them improved. As the community gets bigger and bigger, it's more to manage, but over the last few weeks we've been coming up with a new set of rules with the community to try to keep things clean and organized and keep everybody happy.
Yeah, what we did was we set up a number of rules. We said, how do these sound? We left them for public comment and people wrote in with great ideas, changes, things they thought would be trouble. And we didn't just do forum rules, we also did responsibilities for the moderators so that we can keep them honest, because we don't want people punished for no reason. We don't want you to not understand what's going on and we want you to be comfortable with the rules.
When we started out a year ago, we had some very simple rules that were basically be good to each other. And honestly, 99% of citizens did exactly that. You guys did an amazing job over the past year. It's people from outside coming in and saying, oh, I'm going to screw with these guys, I'm going to cause trouble. And that's what we want to get rid of, really. But our serious forum users are doing an amazing job contributing, helping us make Star Citizen.
TL;DRThe patch adds client-side persistence as a first step: changes to the ship or hangar are saved locally, with more use planned and a step toward full persistence.
It's the first part of persistence overall in the game. On the game engine part, we've added basically the interface that the game engine will use for persisting things when we have the persistent universe later. And it will interface with the rest of the universe cluster. But for now, we actually have it running on the client. Paul Reindell, the lead engine programmer in LA, implemented this where basically, when you change things on your ship or change things in the hangar, it will save some data locally on your system to remember where you moved the weapons or things. And we're going to make more use of this in the near future.
That's step one, right? A lot of the things people wanted to do, there's a couple of reasons. One is they want to be able to customize or make things their own, and this will allow them to do that. We've got some stuff coming up next week, which we won't talk about, that we'll be able to test this with. And we're going to need your help to test it. And then also, it is, as you said, the first step into the big persistence.
In the full game of the Persistent Universe, that persistence will move out of the client and that code will end up being used on the server instead, in the game servers. And then that code will talk between the game engine and the game code and the persistent services in the universe cluster. And they will handle the saving and loading of it. So it won't actually be on the client anymore.
They do look cool. But also, if you think about it, convergence is a big deal. Where you're shooting and how far ahead of you you're shooting is important. If you have your ship guns right in the middle, then they can't point at anything close. They have to point way out in front of you. If they're out here, they can converge on a point closer to you, so it's more accurate.
Distortion cannons are different from regular lasers and other weapons in that they are intended to target the pipes of a ship rather than the actual equipment on the ship. So they reduce energy flow or increase heat or what have you. In this case, these are energy reduction weapons.
Part of our plan is that if you create some amazing mod, some new ship, something that improves Star Citizen, and you bring it to us, and we say, oh, that's awesome, we want it in the Persistent Universe, we're going to work out a way for that to happen.
That is true. It'd be really fun. And that's something that is important to us as we create the tools for making the game, which is what we're doing now. We're keeping an eye on making those very moddable and mod-friendly for people. So that's high on our list, because we want you guys to help us create the game, not just help us test it. If we do it right, it goes forever. We're looking to do it right, so we want you involved.
Warned. There's a funny thing about events like that. You figure if we've developed space travel, then any time anything like that's getting ready to happen, all the scientists will be like, I need a ride to Tyrol right now because I want to go watch the star go supernova.
So when the scientists start gathering, go the other direction. There are going to be a lot more cataclysmic events and interesting things happening in the Persistent Universe. And we'll have game managers that constantly change and update things over time.
I think we can make that happen. In fact, this afternoon I will put up a little gallery with all the full-resolution art from those recent chairman posts, and you guys can do what you will with them.
That is actually the prototype of the 12-inch model that some of the higher-end packages will be receiving with their ships. And we are certainly thinking of making models like that available for sale in the future, because we saw that and it's just really cool in person.
The truth is, the aliens they've seen have been very human in form, and a lot of that has to do with piloting the ships. You want to be able to get in the ships and fly all these things. You need to be able to reach the controls, unless you look like Short Round from Indiana Jones trying to reach the pedals or something. And we know you guys want to fly the alien ships, based on a number of Vanduul and Xi'an and Banu questions.
Yes, actually, some folks who backed early in the game already have repair bots, which are going to be showing up in the future, and they will be around to help repair your ships. Maybe your Greycat buggies too, if you manage to mess those up sufficiently banging around your hangar into your own ships.
TL;DRPlayers should generally need to own ships to fly them in the Dogfighting Module, but early on only one or two ships, such as a test Hornet, may be flyable.
The concept with the Dogfighting Module is you should be able to fly the ships that you have in your hangar out there in the Dogfighting Module. So generally the answer would be no, you need to own them. Although I will add the caveat that in the very early stage of the Dogfighting Module we are not going to have every one of the ships at the stage where they can actually dogfight. So yes, you can climb in them, you can see them in the hangar, but there's a lot of extra detail that goes into the ships. There are all the different items, the thrusters, the damage states, the damage models that have to be done for the ships, and that just takes a lot of work and effort. So it's probably going to be a case where we will maybe only have one ship or two ships at the beginning, and then it will increase. The Hornet's the one we're focusing on right now, and obviously things like the HUD change for different ships and all the rest of it. So there may be a case where at the very beginning everyone basically can fly the same ship, and we just put a temporary sort of test Hornet in the hangar and they get into that and they do the Dogfighting Module. But longer term, the ships you can take to play in arena mode against other people would be the ones you own in the hangar.
We're definitely really interested in second screen support. We're looking at being able to do that on, say, a tablet, where you could put one of the VDUs from your cockpit on it. And I think it would be interesting to explore it in a multiple monitor situation. Although, just to be clear, this won't be functional in the dogfighting, and it's a longer term goal for the game, so the idea would be we'd have some of that when the game's fully done. Maybe it would roll out as part of the dogfighting as it improves over time, but not at the beginning. But yeah, we would like to do that. We think it would be great.
I'm not 100% sure what the specifics of the question are. NPCs definitely can fly on their own. I think the question probably relates to: if you have some NPCs flying, working for you, what do they do? If you're online, if they're flying on your wing or manning your ship, then yes, they're definitely doing their stuff and their functionality. If you have logged off, no, the NPCs that are working for you aren't off there running a business for you. I think you need to be online to have the NPCs you've hired actually doing their stuff.
TL;DRChris Roberts leans toward building the proper MMO-ready backend rather than hacking something in, even though it may delay release and upset players who want early access.
This is a good illustration of some of the things that are going to crop up in the development stage, where when we get to a certain point, we can make a choice: do we do it right, the way it's going to be in the final game, or do we hack something in right now just so we can give it to people? And my preference generally in that case is don't hack it, do it right. Because if you hack it in, you do work that you're going to have to throw away. And really part of the whole idea of the Dogfighting Module is to get it out there so we can test the back end and see how many people we can have in one area, see how fun it is flying the ships around, see whether the weapons are balanced correctly. And it's not really that useful if you're putting it out there with a back end that won't be your final back end. So I think I'm probably leaning towards doing it the proper way, although that potentially has an impact on when everyone gets their hands on it, and I know there will be a fair number of people upset because they just want to play early, which is cool. But I think let's do it right, because the goal is to build a great game. I'm more focused on the final goal than the details leading up to that. And things change as you go.
TL;DRThruster ratings are power bands, not exact values: higher ratings generally exceed lower ones, but progression isn't linear and quality varies within a band.
TR1, TR2, TR3 and so on are what we're calling the thruster rating, and the thruster rating is really a power band. Not all TR1s are the same. Ones by a better manufacturer, ones that are overclocked, ones that are a slightly higher grade could probably put out more thrust than, say, a cheap low-end TR1. But you are pretty much guaranteed that a TR2 will be in a higher band than a TR1. So if you step up to a TR2, even the low end of that will put out more than the highest end of a TR1. And when you go from TR1 to TR2 to TR3, don't assume that it's a linear progression. Especially on some of the later thruster ratings, those can be geometric, where you're moving up to the capital ship sizes. A TR6 could be double what a TR5 is, for instance. So think of TR1, TR2, TR3 more like a car engine, where you have a V8, a V6, a four-cylinder, a V12. Obviously the ones with more cylinders probably put out more power, and they can easily put out more power than a four-cylinder. But a four-cylinder can still be fairly powerful, and obviously there's a lot of variety in the power that four-cylinder engines can put out. And that's kind of the idea with the thruster ratings: a TR1 represents a band of thrusters of a certain level, TR2 is the step up, and TR3 is beyond that.
TL;DRThe first Dogfighting Module is a best-first-guess test release with limited features, nothing set in stone, and it will grow over the following year, so its schedule may not be exact.
This kind of goes back to the question I answered from Obsidian, but the whole point of the Dogfighting Module is to get it out there to test a whole bunch of things: our back-end system, whether the flight control model's fun, whether the weapons are balanced correctly, or whether it's too overwhelming for our system design and we need it smaller. As part of that, yes, nothing is really going to be fully set in stone. It's going to be our best first guess of what we think is fun, and we want to refine it from there. If something's really broken, obviously we're going to fix it. Hopefully stuff won't be too broken. I would like everyone out there to realize that the first Dogfighting Module they get, that's not it. It's not going to have all the features, it's not going to have all the functionality. It's going to have a limited amount of features and functionality, and then it's going to grow over the next year while we're working on the game, so by the time the game is finished, the dogfighting will be finished and honed and everything. That's the process. We're just sharing the process really early with all of you out there in the community to make a better game. And so, as I was answering to Obsidian, that also means the schedule for it may not be an exact science, because there's not much point in testing something if we feel, okay, we're not ready to test the multiplayer now because we want to put it on the proper system instead of a hacked-in system, so we'll give it to you later to test that.
TL;DRRoberts calls the worry silly because the game is deliberately designed with no single best ship, only different pros, cons and roles, such as bigger ships turning slower.
I would say that's silly, because I don't think there is a best ship in the game. They're all going to have different pros and cons. We're deliberately designing things so there is no best ship. Something like the Caterpillar, for instance: if you are more into trying to board a bigger ship and take it over, a Caterpillar is definitely better for that than a Constellation. But also, all the different ships are going to have different pros and cons. For instance, bigger ships are cool because you can have multiple people on them, you can have people walk around, but bigger ships, just like in real life, won't be able to turn as fast or be as maneuverable as a smaller ship. There isn't really a best for anything. There may be a best for a particular role, but I think that's the beauty of Star Citizen. There are lots of different roles, lots of different things you can do. And we're very focused on having different roles and functions for the ships, so there'll be different kinds of play styles, all based on what you want to do. And that's what I'm most looking forward to in the game, having this whole variety of ships. Some people may just want to fly single-seater ships and focus on dogfighting. People may want to do multiplayer co-op in bigger ships, doing exploration or trading runs or whatever. I think there's going to be a vast amount of play and it'll be a lot of fun for everyone.
I kind of answered this in a previous subscriber question in last week's show. But essentially, you start in your hangar. Our entrance point to the game is the hangar at the moment, and you'll be able to adjust your loadout on the holotable, and you climb into the cockpit of your ship and fire it up, and as you fire it up, you're basically entering the dogfight mode. The hangar, holodeck style, disappears and then you're in space, but it's really sort of a holodeck version of space. And when you finish, you come back into your hangar.
TL;DRDamage modeling will be very detailed, with projectile angle affecting penetration and internal systems physically modeled and hit if a shot penetrates, so knowing a ship's weak points should give an advantage.
Damage modeling will be very detailed. Actually, one of the issues with getting everything ready for the dogfight is that there's a huge amount of assets that have to be built besides just the ships you've seen. All the different pieces have to have multiple damaged parts at various levels of damage. There's a whole bunch of really cool graphical stuff that we're going to do for that. And we're modeling it in a pretty detailed way too. So the angle of incidence of a projectile hitting the armor of a ship will definitely count in terms of the damage, the penetration ability, all that. My goal is to have the base level of the game physically detailed, to a level that I haven't done in any of my past games, and then have the high-end ship control stuff make it easier to fly around and use. But underneath it all, it's all physically correctly modeled. So we're actually modeling internal system damage. If you have a targeting computer, an avionics system or life support inside your ship, we actually have a physical place for it, and it has its own geometry and rendered geometry. And if a projectile penetrates through the shield and then through the armor, we actually trace that projectile, and if it hits that system like it would in physical space, then that system takes damage and potentially gets damaged. So we're modeling all this in an extremely detailed way. If you know where the weak parts, the critical parts of another ship are, you should have a bit of an advantage.
TL;DRLatency and packet loss will matter because ships carry a lot of data, which the Dogfighting Module is meant to test, though predicting a ship's path is easier than an on-foot player's.
Obviously high latency affects any of this stuff, and with packet loss, we definitely will be going back and forth with a lot of data, because the ships are pretty heavy data-wise and have lots of moving parts, so that potentially could be an issue. But that's all the sort of stuff that we want to be working on and testing out, and that's the whole point of the Dogfighting Module, and also really why we would want to have the final back-end MMO, at least a rudimentary version of it, working for the dogfighting. There are advantages to the space sim part of Star Citizen or Squadron 42 in terms of multiplayer and netcode compared to an on-foot first-person shooter. Now, of course, we do have an on-foot first-person section, so that will have the same problems you have in a Call of Duty or something. But the problem with a first-person shooter is I can be here and I can step here and I can step here. So the movements of your avatar can be fairly random and not very easy to predict. Whereas in a ship you can't do that. You've got to turn. So essentially in the spaceship scenario, you can actually do a much better job of predicting where the player's ship is going to be.