Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Weather, EMP and Evocati

Yes. Now, we haven't determined how far we can take it. We have talked about asteroid showers. We have talked about space clouds or those types of things that you can mine. But as far as solar flares and how they affect the player and the player ships, those are things that we'd have to actually try out. I think at least for the short term, meteor showers and everything like that, it's easier for us to work out. But when you see how far Carsten can take the cloud tech that he's working on and just that overall weather tech, and see, all right, this is how it's applied to planets. Are there things that we can do in space for nebulas besides the Coil that we've shown off already?

I was going to say, I imagine there's quite a few lessons learned from the Coil that we can apply to the Persistent Universe.

Yeah, but then it's figuring out how we can use it. And then also from a single player perspective, that thing is very, very carved out, versus from a multiplayer perspective we want to have those dangerous elements of people hiding in the clouds, and you need to go in there to mine it, but people want to possibly take you out, or those kind of booby trap moments kind of thing.

I believe Todd mentioned this on ATV. So obviously the environment is still in development in a lot of areas. It might keep changing here and there, but there are definitely options we can look into to make darker areas a bit more accessible and a bit easier to see and be able to get around a bit better. So whether or not that would be on the helmet, we don't know yet, but we've definitely discussed things like that for weapon attachments, which is a system that we're currently working on as part of the Weapons 2.0 system. So the ability to swap and change out attachments, and with that will come investigation into things that we can do there. So infrared, heat, night vision, things like that, but nothing written in stone just yet.

Yeah, when we were talking with Todd on ATV, he mentioned it's one of those things. We've certainly got options, but it's one of those things where you want to wait until the environmental team is happy with their work, because you don't want to have to cut this and then this, and then they change this and you've got to change this and then you've got to do this. So obviously we've seen lots of lighting passes on things like Port Olisar and Grim HEX, and that applies to everything. So when we have the environment probes and everything where we want them, then we can certainly look into something like that.

Good question. Timely question, I think, because everyone's having a big problem with this one, aren't they, in Arena Commander? It's something obviously we're aware of, and it's been around for a while, as you say, but it's been made worse with the new ship, with the switch from, I think, Item 1.0 to Item 2.0. A lot of the items on all the ships have been set with a very low distortion damage protection, so they will get wiped out really easily. I mean, yes, it used to happen just the same before, but now that it's been switched over, those values are low, but we're in the process of upping them and testing them and addressing this problem. It's very much something in flux for 3.1, but we couldn't be more aware of the problem. I'll say that. It's hard to talk about the eventual design of EMP, but I can say that we are aware of the problem and that we want to look and fix it as soon as we can.

I can attest. I'm on that same email thread. I've seen the conversations. They're already kicking around a couple different ideas. Nothing we're ready to share with you yet. We're going to try some stuff.

I'm not so much involved in the design side of that, but I can tweak the numbers. For me, it's getting and looking at all those items and seeing what distortion damage these EMP charges do and then trying to balance that out.

Yeah, because right now what's happening with distortion is it's just taking out your power plant, but because Item 2.0 now powers everything, you take out the power plant, you've essentially taken out the entire ship.

Yeah, it kind of powers everything.

So the Polaris, there's good news and bad news there. Unfortunately, we haven't actually put it further into production ever since the concept sale. However, I can tell you that it is currently the absolute next priority within the ship pipeline right after we finish up the 600i. And that is basically scheduled to start probably around April, May is when we're currently estimating that to begin. So hopefully all goes well on the 600i, everyone can get that as soon as possible, and we'll start on the Polaris.

I do want to stress the operative word there, guys, was probably. These are artistic creative endeavors, so you do your best to estimate, but you never know quite how long it's going to take.

No, exactly. And I think that's the key for it, right? We have a date, what we aim for. We would ideally like to hand off work on the 600i to other disciplines, but we do end up still supporting other disciplines. Tech art might come on and go, oh, well, there's something wrong with the damage states here, we now need to look at it, we need art support. Then we go back onto the 600i. But ideally, we hope to start it April, May.

So the answer to how far along is the Polaris? It's where it's been. It's there at the completion of concept, and we're hoping to push it forward into whitebox in April.

Exactly.

Yeah, Jared, that's a great question. And the real answer is really participation in the game and on Issue Council. So we are actually about to double the Evocati size in the next couple of weeks. People don't know that yet. It's brand new. You're finding out right now. No, we're actually going to double the Evocati size. We're finding that we continue to use Evocati in our publish process as we leave internal testing. It's important to get it out to a controlled environment with external players on it. So we're actually really excited to grow the Evocati in this. And the way to get involved is really playing the game and participating on Issue Council. So out of the thousand people that we're going to add, 600 are the top Issue Council contributors. We're also taking the top players from Star Marine, Arena Commander, the racing module, and the Persistent Universe, because as we put out new content, we need people that are specialists in each of those areas. So we're really excited about it. We think that this is going to be a great addition. But if someone is interested and wants to know how do I get involved, man, that is exactly how you get in: playing the game and participating on Issue Council. That's how we choose it. It's pretty simple.