Developers preview Alpha 3.6: the new law system with 19 laws and jurisdictions, the reworked Merlin, Archimedes and Vanguard, the return of the acceleration throttle, and FOIP/VOIP ship hailing. They also cover delays of the Banu Defender and 890 Jump, loadout persistence, and server meshing.
I think on the gameplay system side, obviously, the law system would be a huge win to get that out the door with 3.6. It gives a pretty large foundation on which to build for the future and a means to serve as a counterweight for all of these undesirable player actions that in the past have been largely left unattended. It's been up to other players to deal with them. And now with 3.6, we're delivering the first iteration of something that we're going to continue to do extensive evolution and development on, this feature, for the next several quarters.
TL;DRZurovec says 3.6 brings 19 laws and limits what players can do with stolen goods, which must be sold at salvage yards or fences for much less, with security risks.
One of the first things that they'll see is a greater breadth of laws. We've got 19 different laws on the books, everything from murder, possession of stolen goods, transportation of illicit products. Previous to this, you bought something and the only reason it was technically yours was because we stowed it on your ship. But if another player blew your ship up and took the goods or snuck on your ship, took them, did whatever, there was no repercussions. They could go sell it, get full price. Now, with 3.6, when you buy something, unless you actually grant it to someone else, if someone else has possession of that, they're very limited in what they can do with it. You can't go to a normal law-abiding shop and unload all of this stolen cargo. You have to go to salvage yards, or you have to go to fences, and obviously...
We're still playing with the exact location. Right now, we're debating whether it's one or two in each planetary system. I like the idea of making them a little bit more rare. And part of that's because I want there to be fewer places where you can unload illicit merchandise. The prices will be a fraction of what you get for legitimate goods. And of course, you also have to deal with the risk of any security agents that come across you during your travels. Every player is going to have to do the mental calculus.
Run, and then this whole security apparatus comes in, where more security reinforcements, interceptors, et cetera, pull... you've been dampened so that you can't basically jump out of the area, et cetera, et cetera. Prisons, which is where we want to go, somewhere within the next couple of quarters: once we've arrested a player, then we put you on...
That's always a recurring theme with this game. It's such a big, extensive, open-ended sandbox. We're doing everything possible to give players the freedom to play the game however they want. But with all of this stuff, whether it's your equipment or your action towards other players and NPCs and stuff like that, there are always very definable consequences, repercussions to the actions you're going to take within the game.
Violations are just like, well, this is like a parking ticket, right? You've got to pay it. And then certain violations are like, yeah, people are coming after you.
Well, we've introduced the concept of a jurisdiction, which is really just an area of space that specifies what laws apply within that area and the associated penalties.
Content-wise, we've got the Merlin. Not a full rework, it's just bringing it up to modern standards; it's quite an old ship. We've got the Archimedes, which is a variant of it, so that's sort of the racing version; it's got a really nice white clear coat finish to it. We've got the Vanguard rework that went from 'we'll just tidy up a little bit' to pretty full rework. Pretty full. So the Vanguard owners will now actually have something that looks like the concept. I think about 10% of the interiors are left from the original and about 20% of the exteriors.
The Vanguard that was in-game didn't really match up to the concept, which was much more beefy, this sort of heavy, long-range fighter. We went back to the concept to try to really nail it. We got all the cool little bits, like a turret coming out or even headlights popping up.
TL;DRYes: Crewe says some vehicles and ships will be unannounced surprises, and Roberts says the long-term plan is to move toward ships that are playable straight away, as staffing grows.
Absolutely, yeah. As we did last year with the Valkyrie and Arrow, our first two ships that went from concept straight through the pipeline. The Valkyrie people didn't know about until they walked through the doors at CitizenCon and saw it plastered on the walls. And then they saw it in the demo. Almost certainly there would be more things like that.
Our long-term goal is to sort of move towards more straight-to-playable stuff. Obviously our vehicle team is decent-sized, but it's not enough to get everything done, so we're still going to have a balance of some stuff that's sort of a bit more longer term and then some stuff that would be playable. But as we move forward and as we get the vehicle team staffed up a bit more, our plan is to shift to basically, nope, here's a new ship, you can play it in the game right now. So there'll be a few surprises this year.
TL;DRRoberts is excited that voice and face communication should let players hail ships and use squad channels in this release, with most earlier crash problems hopefully sorted, while multi-crew won't be fully there in 3.6.
I'd say the other thing, which we don't call out as big of a feature, but the FOIP and VOIP stuff. For this release, finally, you should get to the point where you can hail other ships. So when you're out in space and you see someone, you can talk to them. And you will have a separate channel to talk to your squad mates or teammates and stuff. So I think there was one patch where we had the FOIP and VOIP and everyone had a great time, but then we turned it off because we were getting crashes that were kind of hard to track down. This release, we should have most of that sorted out and taken care of. So I'm hoping to see a lot more use, because the feature's great as long as people are using it.
Right, and in this functionality, there's loads of areas where we want to start expanding the use. Service beacons are one, where it's an implied contract between two players, and so it makes perfect sense that if you're requesting fuel or requesting combat assistance or whatever it may be from another player, that you want a dedicated communication channel so that you can tell him the specifics of what you're after. A lot of focus is how can we make...
...players work together better? How can they communicate better? Because in an online game, playing with other people, that's the fun. Not necessarily just doing it by yourself, or else you'd just be playing a single-player game, right? So the FOIP and VOIP is an example, but there's a lot of stuff like the multi-crew. You and your crew will have to operate a ship. So you're in combat and fires are breaking out, or you've got to replace fuses that are broken or fuel rods that have gone out. Your crewmates can run around and keep the ship going in a way that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And that's the advantage of a multi-crew ship versus a single-seater ship. We're working as hard as we can to get all the bits in place, so all that sort of starts to work. It's not going to be quite there with 3.6, but there'll be still more stuff happening with that.
TL;DR3.6 brings back an acceleration throttle alongside speed limiting, a VTOL hover mode, and shields that keep distinct behaviors; the first Banu ship slips to 3.7 because quality wasn't there and they won't rush content.
A really cool thing for me on the vehicle side is we've brought back the acceleration throttle. So we talked about this at CitizenCon. It's essentially a throttle that controls your acceleration, and thrust directly drives how maneuverable your ship is.
Because the variable thrust was my suggestion. Previous design was cruise control: you set the speed you want to be at and then the ship tries to achieve it. In the real world, I don't get in my car and set cruise control to 20 and then 30 or 50 or 100. I use the accelerator and I'm adjusting the power that my engine's putting out, which is the equivalent of the force that my thrust is putting out. And also if you're flying an aircraft, you're not always at 100%. So I wanted to have something that was more first order, so you'd be more affecting the thrust, which was the original design and setup, which is what we had at CitizenCon. But then in the playtest, in combat, which tends to happen, everyone just basically has it at 100%. So we had a debate, and I was like, okay, well, I'll let you guys go with this. But then there's other reasons to be able to have the adjustment. And then I was like, look, why don't we have both? Insert appropriate meme right now. Because there's no reason why you can't set, OK, here's what my limit is and here's what my thrust is.
You can do some really nice little things with it. You can do soft landings. Just reduce that thrust and you just gently pull out rather than slamming down.
Speaking of soft landings, the new VTOL hover mode. We all want to make a game that reminds us of what we see in movies, which is there's a little bit of a wobble and it moves around. So below a certain speed, if your ship has VTOL, it switches into it. You have this sort of hover mode that's pretty cool.
Instead of this weird-looking motion we have at the moment where you're strafing around up-down, you're more accurately tilting, rolling. If you pitch forward, you'll move forwards. We've slightly changed the way shields work in 3.6. I won't get into the deep details of it. Essentially, it allows the behaviors of the shields to come through. So at the moment, most ships come with two of the same shield. But if you wanted to change them to have two with radically different behaviors, before 3.6, they just sort of summed their behaviors together. You just end up with this weird hybrid that didn't have any character. Whereas now, if you put one that has really fast regeneration but low health and the complete opposite, you will notice those behaviors from those two shield generators. That's really cool. Unfortunately, a few things aren't going to make 3.6, so Defender's moving to 3.7. It's our first Banu ship, and we tried to apply our current pipeline techniques to it, and it really didn't work.
We don't feel like it's getting there. We're not pushing it out there, because I think that's one of the defining... it's quality. That's what we want to do. So it's OK when we're putting stuff out that we're iterating on. There's definitely stuff that we're not happy with, but we need people to play and give us feedback. And also some things, like we talked about making the UI good. We still have to have UI in the game, so it's better to have some older, slightly broken UI than no UI at all. But in the case of something like a new ship, no, we don't want to put out the ship unless we're happy with it. Going forward, we don't want to rush features or content.
All of us want to make it perfect before we release it, but at the same time, we want to keep giving the community a reason to come back and play the game on a regular basis. So you're trying to find these intermittent points where this is a complete game experience. We can ship that, then we iterate, then we iterate, et cetera.
We've done enough ships now. We know it's a small ship from this manufacturer, it's going to take this many months, we've got this kit to do all the kit bashing. We didn't have any of that for the Defender. There were just so many challenges with it that almost every single step of the way, we were hitting roadblocks on the outside. It's the first Banu ship. The guys working on it have been very mindful that it's not the only Banu ship, so they can't just build it as a one-off. So the extra time we've had to spend here is going to benefit the Merchantman as well, and then all Banu ships.
890 Jump. That's also not going to hit 3.6 on release day. It just needs more time. There's a lot of stuff in there; it's like 199 meters, a lot of party places and places for doing all sorts of other business.
I mean, we've been talking about a pass that goes beyond structure, which is kind of what it is now. How do you have more rich and luxurious materials? What kind of props can you put in, the paintings on the walls? Make it feel like a superyacht, which is what it is.
TL;DRShip loadout persistence was pushed into 3.5.1; insurance deductibles based on equipment value are calculated but still lack UI, ship rental isn't quite in 3.6, and wipes should stop once server-side persistence is working.
Well, a big one in 3.5.1, we snuck it into 3.5.1 rather than holding it for 3.6 where it was originally planned, was basically the persistence of your ship's loadout. That came about specifically because one of our designers, Rob Reininger, was making the point that there was just tons of chatter from the community, that that was one of the most often requested features. And so we basically slotted that to the top of the list. And then the next step of this just didn't roll out with the initial feature. The initial thing was just whatever your configuration is, it will persist that. So when your ship gets destroyed, lost, you go claim another one, you get a carbon copy of it. In the future, it'll look at the base value of your ship...
The accounting service part of that is done. We're already calculating the appropriate prices. What we're really missing is all the UI, the player-facing feedback. Once we've got those elements, we'll roll them in, and then players will start to see, oh, well, I've got LTI insurance on this ship up to this amount of value. And so if I add additional value beyond that, then I pay some percentage of that on a recurring basis in order to guarantee that all of that extra stuff will be outfitted on my ship when I go...
Yeah, and I think what we'll do is, because we were originally thinking, well, you'd buy additional insurance for the extra weapons, but it's better to do it this way, which is your insurance covers whatever your ship's on, but there'll be some adjustment in the deductible or the expediting fees based on the value of all the equipment. And then on the cargo insurance, what we really should do is you would have the opportunity, just like if I buy something online right now, do I want to have travel insurance? So if I'm at the commodities kiosk or whatever, and I'm going, give me 100 SCU of... It's that player choice again: do you want to basically live on the edge, take the chance, go out there?
All of that value. Speaking of rentals, it's not going to be quite there with 3.6, but we'll also have ship rental. Kind of cool, because ships just inherently are expensive. They have to be for the economics to work. But that means it's a fair amount of earning money in the game, which is always problematic when we reset.
And to be clear, that will be fixed. Server-side OCS, when that is working, then you'll have true persistence. To have server OCS, we have to have true persistence in the game, because the server has to know exactly the state when it throws it out of memory, and then it restores from that state. So once we're persisting the state of the universe to a database, when things are going on a server, that means we have true persistence. Probably around about that point in time is where we'll stop resetting everyone's database, so people can earn money towards accumulating ships and everything. But until then, ship rental is pretty cool because it's a way to get into an expensive ship much sooner. And even in the final game, it will be useful because if you're playing a game and you want to try something, you could rent it, or you could get into a bigger, better ship and have a higher earning potential before you have the money to necessarily buy it outright.
TL;DRServer meshing and persistence depend on server-side OCS, a big effort that requires adjusting game code because servers will no longer hold the full universe state; once in place, account wipes are planned to stop.
As I said, server-side meshing and persistence go together. That's a big project. Server-side OCS is fundamental for the meshing, with static meshing and fully dynamic meshing, which is where we want to end up. It's a big development effort because the core team's implementing it. They do their stuff, but there's a lot of game code that has to adjust to make sure it works with the new paradigm, because with client OCS the server always has a full authoritative state of the entire universe, or the entire star system, at any one time. But the moment that we move to server OCS, it won't, because that server may only have a portion of the star system, for instance, in its memory. And that means that different variables have to be classified differently to persist, because you can't always count on the server having a definite record of it. So some of the game code has to be adjusted to make sure that it's safe for that kind of setup. Once the persistence and the server meshing is in place, that's the last piece of the tech. And once the persistence is in there, we're going to stop wiping accounts. And so people can actually be playing, earning towards something, accumulating wealth, accumulating items and ships.
TL;DRTony Zurovec says meshing will end the isolated-island feel by putting thousands of players together, so players meet more people, and consequences like criminal ratings and bounties become much more meaningful.
This will completely change everything, because all of a sudden you're playing with thousands of people. In other words, you're no longer confined to a little island universe. Like right now, ironically, the more points of interest we add, the more separated the player community becomes. In other words, we doubled the number of areas, but we didn't change the server cap. And so all of a sudden the players are just spread out more. And so now, for the foreseeable future, you may not be able to put a gargantuan number in the exact same area. But that doesn't really matter with 3.6. What really matters, I think, is I go to the asteroid field, and there's a lot of players over there. And then I go to Port Olisar, and there's a lot of guys there. And then I go over to ArcCorp, and there's a lot of guys over there. And so wherever you go, you run into new people. You form relationships, or you trade things, or you go off on adventures together. And all of a sudden, you've got people that have a criminal rating. Having a criminal rating when there's a relatively small number of people on your server is not particularly threatening. In the future, having a big price on your head when there's thousands of other people that can basically accept the contract to bring you in and basically get paid for it, now, all of a sudden, you're really at risk. And this carries through to everything. The entire game becomes infinitely more interesting.