Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - NPC Nature and Seat Stature

It's definitely still the plan. Each NPC will have a schedule. They will have a schedule that says when they're on duty, when they're not on duty, when they will practice at their turret. So let's take the turret example for a second. I am expecting a turret gunner to not spend all his time in a turret. He needs to eat, he needs to shower, he needs to sleep. He will go through his entire life cycle. He will have some exercise time where he's at the station. If you have, let's say, six turret guns, a few of them will always be at the station and they'll have a rotation. So one of them will sleep between these hours while the other is at the turret while the next one is eating and doing R&R stuff. Once the ship goes into combat, you will have all the guys switch schedule and they'll switch to their combat schedule rather than their out of combat schedule. And as soon as they switch to combat schedule, whether they were eating, being on the toilet or whatever, they will leave that. They will run all the way to their turret and man the station.

We're talking a ship in the PU where you actually will hire a crew to man your station. Because let's say today your friends are not online and you just want to have some fun, you will have your NPC crew that you hire and raise and train and all the lovely stuff. And they will have a schedule. What you can do as the owner of the ship and the captain, you can say, you're always on red alert, then everyone will be at the stations. What that will do, it will cause their morale to drop. If you keep them always at the station, they'll go hungry, which again drops morale, they'll not be happy, their performance will decrease. So it's up to you how you want to do it. If you want to always keep them on red alert because you know stuff is about to happen, fair enough. But at some point, you have to let them do their stuff. And if they don't get enough sleep, they get cranky and all this lovely stuff.

When's that happening?

Soon.

That's a good question. I think that it gets at this desire from the player base to have a more continuous player experience. The fundamental systems to get this done exist. There's basically two ways that you can do this. You can either, one, locally persist them. So that means we're effectively writing these in some way to some file on disk. And then if you go into the game, out and in, in and out, whatever, they're going to be there. But if you change machines, then at that point, you would lose all of your settings. An alternative is actually that we persist them into your player account and the persistence database. And in that way, if you change machines, then it would actually travel with you, which would be useful for some people. But both of those systems, both saving things to disk and persisting them in the database, exist. We have ways for game code to have access to them, to be able to come up with a set of what we call persistent variables and persist those across sessions. And so really, at this point, the fundamental systems are there. It's up to each individual team, each individual feature owner to take a look at what they have and try to figure out what they think is worth persisting and what they have time to do and what the priority for all of it is. So all of this could be done. You shouldn't underestimate the amount of work that UI is. So we may need to expose some custom interface for setting or updating these things, or maybe it's somehow in game. We like to do that a lot. Like I said, the fundamental systems are there, and now it's just up to the individual teams to decide for themselves the priority and whether or not they want to persist an individual thing in the game.

And to answer the question of whether we're going to be able to do it or whether we're going to do it would require a call to each of those individual teams. I went to you because you can talk about the tech. In general, it's there. It's just something that our individual teams have to prioritize. Maybe keep an eye on the roadmap. It's a gameplay feature I want. It's a gameplay feature I think many people want. I don't think the other side of that argument, 'oh, no, we shouldn't have settings persistence', has much of a leg to stand on. So while I can't sit here and absolutely commit that it will happen, I think the chances are in our favor.

Well, I guess I can talk about the history of why the seat positions are where they are and specifically why the geometry around the seat and your viewing area from your seat in the cockpit are where they are. So there's a big emphasis on being able to see four MFDs on the screen. That emphasis has been reduced slightly, but we still need at least two MFDs that show you pretty vital information at all times. I think we maybe pushed the limit quite a bit in ships like the Cutlass, where almost the entire dashboard does take quite a bit of room as far as your viewing screen space. And so that's why the viewing angles are where they are at the moment. Now, I know there's a request to push those seat angles up and ultimately we'd love to do that. The best way to do this would be to actually incorporate some actual height adjustment that is optional for the player. Let the player choose whatever height they want. Unfortunately, there's quite a few challenges in doing that. It's not as simple as simply adjusting the height of the seat itself.

So there are some challenges with that. One of them is UI. The HUD in the ships is actually physically placed in the cockpit. So we need some way to actually transfer it so that the HUD, especially your flight HUD that's directly in front of you, corresponds to your actual height so that it's in the same position on the screen when you do change the heights. And that's tech that we need to implement in order to get that to happen, because right now it's a little plastered in the ship. So we need some way to make it dynamic and adjust to your lens. Another issue that we have is the things that would need to be adjusted along with the seat height, which is mainly your controls, right? So the IK, it's attached to the dashboard that's in the cockpit. And so we need to make some geo changes to accommodate for the IK, because you look ridiculous if your hands went so far down that you just look terrible driving the ship, right? The most major one is that animations would have to be changed, and that's a challenge because a lot of our ships do share a templated set of animations for getting in and out of the seats. This is especially useful for the single-seat fighters that we have, because typically the animation for getting in and out of the seat actually is tied to getting in and out of the ship itself. But we need to adjust those across the board, and that's kind of a tremendous undertaking. And because they're shared, it causes an issue: if we have ships that do share that template animation, it means we can't piecemeal this change across individual ships. If we break the animation and then fix the geo so it works in one ship, then any other ship that we have that shares that template also has to be done. And it has to be done before we ship a build, so that we don't have one nice ship and a completely broken one.

One of the ways that we make a game of this size and scope possible is through the use of common elements. But the common elements at the same time make small changes into sweeping changes, because they have to now affect so much more than just an individual ship.

Right. So I think these are issues that are all solvable. It just takes time. And I think the issue that is going to be the most challenging is getting the UI to settle correctly, because we can probably fudge the heights of the seats and the IK and the animations pretty well without any new tech. But transferring the ship HUD to be dynamic is going to be a pretty big tech debt.