The developers answer fan questions on hangar customization (paint schemes, movable furniture needing persistence, expandable hangars, guest ships), piracy and stolen-cargo tagging, smuggling, armor penetration, mining, capturing Vanduuls, and UEC in the dogfight module. They also cover Jump Point, brochures and CitizenCon.
Typically, the military actually is stronger when there's more unrest. So if you think about it, if you start messing with the economy too much, I'm guessing the UEE will actually come after you a little more.
Well, like a Hornet, where would you put a player? You're obviously not going to be able to do it in a Hornet. Now, maybe in an Aurora or ships where there is some extra space where somebody could camp out.
I think it's going to be a limited set. So there'll be some, you'll be able to choose where you're going to be, or at least put something that this is kind of the area I'd like to be in, maybe. But our early backers will have one more system to choose from than players who start on day one.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend? That's a tough question, because it could be two pirates attacking, and then you feel like you're the white knight hero, and then it could be two bounty hunters attacking a pirate. So how do you figure that out?
I guess it all depends on who's involved. If you jump in on the side of, call them bad guys, as far as the UEE is concerned, then yes, your reputation would take a hit. If you jump in against them, then it shouldn't hurt your reputation.
Well, it depends on if there's space in the hangar. But the hangar will probably be expandable. We'll lock in what your initial hangar is for all of your pledge ships near the end when we're in beta. But then we'll probably give you options to expand it. So if you want a little guest space, or if you happen to have one of your ships out somewhere else, yeah, you might have some guest space to put somebody in. It's an interesting question, though. I don't think we've actually gotten to that point of figuring that out.
We are still working out exactly how that technology is going to work, but yeah, you're going to have the option to change your paint scheme on some of your ships. A lot of the variant ships, with their different paint schemes, people tend to like one paint scheme over another, but they don't want that variant. So we'll let them change the paint out at some point, yes.
Well, yes, I do want to take that one. And yes is the answer. We are working on the technology to allow you to really customize your hangar and have a personal space that you can be proud of and show off to all your friends.
Persistence. Because right now, the stuff that you have in your hangar, it's there, and then we populate the hangar immediately, and it's got a set place. And we eventually need persistence to be there, to where the things you place will still be there the next time you log in. So it's coming.
Well, that's a very simple question, but a very complicated answer. So yes, actually CryEngine does have a concept of penetration, and so you have a certain ability to penetrate versus the thickness of the armor. So in the cases where your armor is thicker than the penetration ability of a weapon, then it will damage the armor, but won't damage all the soft, squishy components underneath. Projectile weapons typically have better penetration on shields but not on armor, and the opposite for lasers. So yes, it does play a part.
All the things that you have on your account are going to work the same way: they'll all get parceled out to some player when you're ready to assign them, until they've been used, basically. They don't have to stick on one player, I believe is what Chris has said. But yeah, skins will work just like the ships. You'll pick one player to carry it. Now, you can move that skin from ship to ship for that one character, but it will be bound to one character.
So we're still kind of in the middle of design on piracy and stolen property and things like that. We are planning to have some sort of tagging system so we can identify stolen cargoes. That doesn't mean you couldn't take them somewhere like, say, Spider and get them scrubbed. But yeah, if you take stolen cargo and it's identified as stolen, then yeah, you're going to get dinged. So be careful out there.
Well, for the basic economy missions, yes. That's precisely what it is. The economy is running itself and saying, hey, this place needs this thing, and this place has this other thing. So they'll sell that to you, and you can take it somewhere else that needs it. Or you can take it and just kind of speculatively trade it. But yeah, that's the economy missions. Now, there are going to be other types of missions, too. So that's not all there is to it.
We've talked about it. I don't know if we've made any progress one way or the other, but certainly we have had quite a few discussions about how involved players can be in the politics of the universe, and I think it would be very interesting for players to be able to get involved in that. I don't know what level that will be yet.
Sometimes I don't know is the answer. We're going through this, so if you have an idea on how you'd like to do it, throw it up in the forums, it might inspire some discussion and thought on that.
I think when he's talking about less civilized here, he's talking about frontier worlds, less developed worlds. Maybe camp areas, or things that are being terraformed or just starting to be colonized.
Yeah, and right now a lot of what you've seen is the big cities, because those take the most work to build. But yeah, there are going to be outposts and barely occupied planets. At points when we discover new planets, we'll be bringing settlers and then starting those places out. So yes, absolutely.
Why yes, in fact, we've done a lot of work on smuggling, other clever things like that. So there are going to be several different ways to disguise what's in your cargo bay. Either disguise the individual contents, or actually mask the whole cargo bay or reduce the ability of it to be scanned. That doesn't mean there's not technology to get through that.
The simple answer is we are planning to do it at some point. The cost of that, as far as development, is you have to build out the entire planets then. And that means, with the hundreds and hundreds of planets we have in our game, that takes some time. So I can't give you a timeline, but yes, we do plan to do it at some point.
Not exactly, but what Chris said, obviously he's linking the two because there are going to be similar elements to what eventually is the arena mode final in the game and what we start out with in dogfighting, most likely. But it's all going to grow over time. Every part of this game is going to continue to grow over time. So there will be some similarities, I'm sure.
Yes. But if we tell you, we'll have to kill you. No. The truth is, it's one of those things, don't ask us, we'll ask you kind of deal. We generally look for people that make good posts on a consistent basis and are well respected by the members of the community. They're mild-mannered. They're able to have intelligent discourse without flaming or getting mad at each other all the time. And we're very picky about who our moderators are going to be, and Ben does an excellent job of choosing them.
We're talking about it. I can't give any hard numbers or anything right now, how often or how much, but yeah, there will probably be ways for you to earn money. I know Chris has talked about doing that.
David LadymanJump Point and brochure editor, Incan Monkey God Studios
I get credit for doing Jump Point and the brochures. I don't do Jump Point and the brochures. A lot of very good people put all the material in there. It's a team thing. But I take all of the stuff that is given me and put it together into the brochures, into Jump Point.
TL;DRLadyman explains the company name came from a Dilbert cartoon about an Incan monkey god, which matched their experience of writing game manuals before designs were final.
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David LadymanJump Point and brochure editor, Incan Monkey God Studios
This takes a little while. Back in the day, you had to release documentation with the game. And the disk could be printed in about a week, but it took about three weeks to print the manuals. So that meant we had to turn the manual in two weeks before you finished making the game. And sometimes we just had to make it up. And sometimes we would have it exactly right, and in that two weeks the team would go in and change it. And it stuck in us mightily to have to call it errata when we had done the right thing and then gotten it changed. But we had to release errata. So we're having to do documentation before the stuff is designed. And there was one time we had a game releasing and we just had to make some stuff up. And there was a Dilbert cartoon.
David LadymanJump Point and brochure editor, Incan Monkey God Studios
I've been working for five days without any sleep to finish this report. At first I had a mental block, but on the fourth day I was visited by an Incan monkey god who told me what to write.
So this is how you named your company, then? Like the Dilbert cartoon?
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David LadymanJump Point and brochure editor, Incan Monkey God Studios
We named ourselves Incan Monkey God. We realized that we were servants of the Incan Monkey God, that the only way we could get our work done was through devotion to the Incan Monkey God. And as far as we know, there actually were no Incan Monkey Gods, but that's where we came up with the name. Incan Monkey God Studios.
They're going to be doing a little presentation of everything that they've done in this past year and what they will be working on for Star Citizen and what they're excited about. So we're going to kick that off at 6:30 p.m. Central.