10 for the Chairman: Special Edition (2014.09.02)

Yes, that's all correct. So we basically have several levels of inventory that work in the game. So there's your personal inventory, and your personal inventory is influenced by the [...] So for instance, a pair of trousers may possibly have some pockets that could hold two items of size one. And then if you have a jacket, a big jacket could have a big pocket; a T-shirt would have no storage in it at all. So those will all add up into your slots and what your slots in terms of sizes can hold in your personal inventory. So if you wear a big combat armor suit, on top of it it will have some slots for ammunition clips or grenades or something, in addition to being able to have some small items. So depending on how you dress will affect the level of personal inventory you can have, and then on top of that you could also have a backpack or something like that where you could put [...] So it's the items that you buy or how you dress yourself that will determine what you can have in your personal inventory, and then of course your ship has its own inventory and then your hangar has its own inventory. So pretty much most entities in the Star Citizen universe that are what we call game objects or game elements, so a player character would be one, a spaceship would be another, a location, a room would be another, all have inventory, and the inventory is specified in how many items they can have and what the size of the item is. So there you go.

That's actually a really good idea. So obviously right now it's an ongoing balance thing. So the stuff that you see in Arena Commander is still super early stabs, very rough. We've still got a lot of the stuff you could even use now that hasn't even had a balancing pass. Some of it has, some of it hasn't. And we've got a lot more items that we're actually going to make a concerted effort to roll out over the next four or five months to try and get a good base and do the balancing. And so I think we'll be ongoing balancing it. And in terms of once the Persistent Universe is playing, if we've released something into it that feels overpowered, I do like the idea, if we decide we want to balance something, we come up with a newer model or something that's going to be improved, that the old models stick around and the new models are the upgrade model, which is very much the way the real world works. And then I do actually quite like this idea that if you needed to change something because you had to nerf it, you could have a recall because there's a fatal flaw. So that's actually a really cool idea. And it's a good fictional pretense to be able to do stuff. So if we get to that position, which I'm sure we will, because you always do in these kinds of games, maybe we'll use that idea.

Okay, so when the shields go down, ship components do not all have the same level of health. It depends on the ship and the components they have. So different items have different amounts of, whatever you want to call them, damage points that they can take. And different sections of the ship also have different damage points they can take. And if you have armor that's on that part, so you can have armored parts basically, then the armor becomes a modifier to the damage you can take. So if you've got heavy titanium armor on a wing, for instance, maybe that wing could take 100 damage points, but with the titanium armor it could take 200 before it's destroyed, kind of thing. So that's the way it is: armor is actually a plug-in item that just becomes a modifier for the damage that the part it's plugged into does, and it comes with its own weight. So when you plug in the armor, hopefully you'll see it visually and it'll get damaged as you hit it, but it will also bring in a certain amount of weight. So you could armor up your ship, but then you'll be adding weight to it, which means how it would fly and how it will handle won't be quite as good. If you put weight on the ships in Star Citizen, it will definitely not handle quite the same way. In fact, one way to check it out is to play the new Capture the Core game mode that we have, and you get the Core, which is a lot of weight, and try and fly around with that. Your ship doesn't handle the same way. And that's the advantage of having a properly physically simulated flight model where mass, inertia, thrust to power, acceleration all come into effect.

The idea of the Caterpillar is there's different modules that can plug into the main hull carrying section. It's a bit early for us to talk about the different modules because we haven't really shown all that stuff fully off. But you would think that, okay, one could potentially be a good module for carrying boarders on, right? So soldiers that could board. One could be a good module for carrying more cargo, or one could potentially be a medical module or a salvage module. So the idea is that these things will plug into that main section, separate from where the flight cabin is, not too dissimilar to say maybe something like a Starfarer, but obviously a lot smaller. And obviously the Caterpillar's built a bit more to slug it out in a battle than say a Starfarer is. But that's kind of the concept of the modularity, and we'll have a few other ships that have some of the same concepts.