Developers cover the 2.1.1 balance patch, Vanguard shield changes, the Xi'an Scout concept sale and ship pipeline (Cutlass, Sabre, Starfarer, 890 Jump, Merchantman). They also discuss HOTAS pre-orders, time-based insurance, and the next landing zones.
We're actually filming a segment for ATV soon with Patrick Salerno, who's currently working on LODs for the Cutlass. So you're going to see some of the continuing work on the Cutlass very soon.
Nope, they're a little bit further in the future. But I can tell you the Caterpillar is getting some good work from Gurmuk right now. Xi'an Scout is in its final flailings of grey boxing. Sabre is really close.
I'll be honest, I have no memory of what that is, but I will check. Pull that up, that's a good question.
24 million. Public transportation system.
Oh, yes. That's in the game. Not in the game today, but it's coming. That's the system by which you'll be able to travel from system to system without owning a ship. And you saw a lot of that in the... I want to call it the Orion space plane, but it's not. The Genesis Starliner. Genesis Starliner is the nucleus of that system.
I think we need to have multiple systems before we start building public transportation between them. So we're a ways away from that yet.
No, too soon for that.
It's not a safety concern, otherwise we'd all be with hard hats. It's just we don't want you to see part of the place, and then we finish it, and you're like, oh, I came too soon, I didn't get to see all the other cool stuff. Delaying the tours until March is more about us wanting to have everything there is to show you so we don't waste your time, or so you don't feel like you missed out on anything.
The office is in grey box right now, and it's going to be hangar ready real soon. But maybe we can have a segment where we show people some of the progress in ATV. Maybe make that happen.
Yes.
Yes. Is that not happening? It should be.
There's not a place on the Squadron 42 landing page for videos. So it's something that we can add, though.
Usually we update the character once we have an image of them published. John Rhys-Davies or Gillian Anderson.
We usually go around the room, see who has ideas.
We also ask our fantastic mod team, because they've seen the best and the worst of the forums at any given time.
Generally, the final call usually comes to me, unless there's something that Ben really likes.
There is a patch on the PTU right now. PTU patch is available right now, 2.1.1b. This is a, I don't know what you call it, a flare patch or something, where we just put up a PTU to make sure it doesn't break the world, and we will go to live with it. If everything is good, and so far everything seems good, by the end of the show we should be able to have a go/no-go for live. This is mostly a balance patch, balance and bug fixes, so nothing like a new ship or new game mode or anything, but it's fixing a lot of the issues with 2.1 that have been discovered by our backers, and it's going to make for a better experience.
Not yet, because it's going to depend on the venue.
Looking at Sunday, October 9, I think, or Monday, October 10, although it's kind of a weird day. I think we have, yeah, Saturday or Sunday, 8 or 9.
Nobody wants to party on a Monday.
We'll know the specific day when we have the specific venue.
I would recommend checking out the recent two-part interview with Tony Zurovec that we did on ATV just a few weeks ago. That's about as high level as you can get. Also, 10 for the Chairman every Monday is really as high level as you can get.
Essentially, we're just going to continue expanding from the base we built in Crusader. So you'll see more mission types, more gameplay types, more locations. It's going to be a big moment when you make your first jump to another star system. Crusader is the center of the meatball and we're just going to keep adding meat. I don't know how you make meatballs, but I assume that's...
We do not.
No announcements yet. We talked about doing one in January, but we want the big livestreams, where everybody takes a day off of work to make them happen, to be something special. So once we have a really cool Star Citizen event, we'll build a cool livestream around it.
TL;DRThe 890 Jump isn't being built now because limited staff are assigned to other priorities like mining, cargo, salvage and Squadron 42 ships, though it remains scheduled to happen before they're done.
Just because it's a matter of assigning resources where they're needed. We have 20 ships to work on and we have the staff to work on three, four at a time. It's just not a win right now to do the 890 Jump. It's still on the schedule. It'll happen before we're done, but it's an assembly line, you build one at a time, not all the cars at once.
And there are other ships that are linked to various game mechanics that I think are probably being prioritized more, like mining and cargo and salvaging and stuff.
Squadron 42 ships as well.
Squadron 42 is a huge focus.
Maybe not the biggest priority at the moment.
But the good news is that once the artists and the designers who are working on the Squadron 42 ships are done, because that project will be released before the whole of Star Citizen, we'll have all sorts of super experienced, talented people working on the ships you're waiting for.
No, nothing to do with us yet.
Yeah, they should come, we're hoping, next week online. So the HOTAS and the keyboard will come first, and then later on will be the headset and mouse, if you want those. The more expensive, or the more... well, yeah, it is more expensive, but more complicated, a grander HOTAS, I think we're making an announcement for that come E3.
The high-end.
Yeah, the high-end.
To clarify Sandi's statements, we're expecting the pre-order for the standard edition HOTAS to go online next week. They're not going to ship next week.
No, they won't ship next week.
Just for pre-order.
Well, I need to ship all of the promised ones first, and then we can kind of go from there. But the silver Constellation collector's boxes are going to ship first, probably June or July, hopefully. And then after that, I'll ship the Freelancer boxes and the Hornet boxes.
TL;DRYes, no HUDs are finished, and the UK team is working on bespoke manufacturer HUDs, with a Freelancer mock-up that looks good but isn't available to show yet.
Absolutely. None of the HUDs are finished. There's kind of a generic HUD spread amongst all the ships right now, but I know Zane and the entire team in the UK are working on bespoke HUDs for all the different manufacturers.
In fact, that's one of the specific reasons we shipped Zane off to the UK, to do more with HUDs.
He was working on it when I was there in the UK and did a little piece for the BBC on it.
It's the side effect of putting the game out while it's still being built. You're going to see a lot of things in temporary transient states, and HUDs are definitely one of those. They've got some cool stuff. I've seen the mock-up of the Freelancer HUD. It looks very cool.
You're such a tease. We should get that and show it to people.
I will ask Zane. He's not always the easiest person to get a hold of. And that particular image isn't checked into Shotgun. I've tried to show it before.
I'm waiting to hear from our head of PR when that's going to air, and as soon as I find out, I will post that online. We'll post it on our Comm-Link and everywhere.
It's Click, right?
Yeah, it's Click, and then there's also another part of the BBC that are doing a bigger piece. So there's more than one piece, basically. But I'll definitely give all the links when I have them.
Click is shown on BBC America.
Yeah, so you'll be able to see it here. And then the other ones I think we can definitely get links for.
And aren't we going to get the full interview, the full round table that we're also going to do?
Yeah, so they give us the full footage, so if they cut anything out we can use the footage for our own purposes.
Benoit from Turbulent was here this week and I got to talk with him quite a bit about it and even see the mock-up for what they're suggesting. I can tell you it's very cool. It will take some time still, but I'm really excited about it.
It sounds like they have a system we're going to try out next week. We're going to give everybody a token to use store credit once. We'll have details on that next week once they launch it. But we should have some more answers to your pleas then.
I'm pretty sure you can order more than one. I will double check, though, because the box is big and kind of heavy, so I'll find out how that works.
This first run is limited, though, it's the signature stuff, is that right?
Yeah, they're all signed by Chris.
So it is a limited first run for you guys.
Right. So it's basically only sold on our site. And then later on, Saitek will be selling HOTAS in their stores and their third-party outlets. However, they won't have Chris's signature or the numbering on the bottom. So it'll be one of 2,000, two of 2,000, et cetera.
2.1.1 has a number of fixes, specifically to the CPU issue.
Some things are bugs, like the CPU issue we saw recently, the frame rate drops people saw with the Constellation and when AI spawn and stuff. That stuff will get fixed much earlier. General performance enhancements and everything, that happens much later in the process.
They're probably talking about my hat. What I did is I just bought the patches and then I went and found my own hat and had a nice elderly seamstress put it on. I think that works best. If you just buy the patches, you can put them on whatever kind of hat you want. I think that's probably the best solution, rather than us trying to figure out what hat.
They may be talking about the officer's caps, though, in Squadron 42, the Navy-style ones with the little visor.
Like the one that Forrest has. Potentially. I'll look into it. I need a good sample, though.
No updates on the lobby system just yet. We are all very aware of the lobby system. We do an internal playtest here in LA every week now and we deal with that every single week trying to get in. We're aware. It's on the list.
No.
I don't think so. It's going to run close to our dates, is the issue. I think it's the end of October.
It's really close to all the other stuff.
We were very ambitious last year. We were like, yeah, we're going to do CitizenCon, and yeah, we're going to do Paris Games Week.
We're just so few people. Gamescom kills you, and you never recover. We're doing it a little bit differently this year.
Yeah, we can do that. That's a good idea. I'm going to put up the other Comm-Link that has all our minigames.
People keep asking for ship updates.
No update on the Herald.
Yeah, the Herald's being worked on.
The next ones you'd likely see: Sabre, Xi'an Scout, fuel potato.
Fuel potato?
Starfarer. I thought there's a fourth one that's imminent. I can't remember what it is.
Reliant?
Oh, Reliant soon, yeah. We carpool with Daniel Kaminsky. He was here late the other night getting the final materials pass done. So it's coming.
The loaner system does not apply to the hangar system right now. We are exploring our options for getting you the regular Starfarer.
We will be able to do it. It'll probably be some crazy spit-and-glue system, but it'll appear that you don't have a Gemini or whatever, but we'll make it work, because the fun thing about the Starfarer is that it's a big ship to explore and we want everybody to see that.
The Morrow Tour was shown during CitizenCon, and there's a video cutaway version of it available on our YouTube. We had talked about doing a cleaner version of it, but ultimately those people all have other things to work on, like Crusader at the time and the game and stuff. So it's just not a huge priority. But you can see the Morrow Tour as it was presented at CitizenCon on our YouTube page.
Yes, we would like to make it available again, but we don't like to just make ships available because it'll make money. We can certainly look and say, hey, everybody, here's this ship. We want to do it in coordination with, oh, there's some news about this ship, or, oh, there's some event. Like our tenuous connection between the X-Files and the Xi'an Scout for today's sale. No, but the Scout is actually very, very close, and we've got some grey box images up on the site, which will be up just after this presentation. But yes, we'll do something with the 890 in the future, but we want to be further along, closer to when it's coming out.
We do try to have rhyme and reason behind the things that we do whenever possible.
TL;DRThe 890 Jump work is just updating its component specs to fit the coming stats and component overhaul, and it isn't fast-tracked or coming within a couple of weeks.
Yeah, I saw some of those. Just so people don't overestimate what's actually happening: when the 890 was first unveiled at CitizenCon 2014, it was all done with the original component spec that had been working for a while. And since then, we've changed that. So it's really just updating those spec lines to make sure it's all going to work nice with the new system. It's not super fast-tracked or going to be coming out in the next couple weeks, guys, so it's not that high a priority. Just making sure it's all going to work when its time is up.
Because we do have a revision to the entire stats system coming. So that's rolled into that. It's one of the ships that we have to revise the stats for.
Yes. It's the big component overhaul that we first started talking about, I want to say it was like last May. The whole system is that pervasive. It just takes a long time to make sure it's going to be exactly what we need for the long-term game.
No info about the Banu Merchantman.
Well, I will say one thing about the Banu Merchantman: I sat down with Sandi, Erin, Chris and everybody and we talked about priorities for ships, the ones we want once Squadron 42 is squared away, and Merchantman and Carrack were at the top of that list. Nothing today, nothing tomorrow, but there will be a point in the future where it's a priority.
We just had our January subscriber flair award. It was the armored suit from Gluglisi. Looks very cool, sitting there, and it's floating in its capsule. Suit hole.
We also updated the Vault today. Sorry for the delay.
TL;DRVariants won't appear in Crusader or Arena Commander until all base models are completed, since building base models first yields reference knowledge that makes variants more efficient.
The current philosophy is to build all of the base models first and then take the knowledge that we glean from building all the base models and apply that to putting together the variants. So do not expect to see the variants in Crusader or Arena Commander until you see all the base models completed.
Yeah, there's also a big reason for that, because, like you guys got to see over the holiday livestream with the MISC ships, the more base models that we do get built for any single manufacturer, the better reference guides that we have, the better and more efficiently we can get all of this stuff built up. Whereas just trying to cram it all in at once, especially if there aren't that many ships of that size, if there aren't that many ships from that manufacturer, it is absolutely putting the cart before the horse and we just lose time on that.
Which is one reason why you're seeing so much work on the Aegis ships, because we have this totally finished toolkit, we have all the reference work. It's very easy for the folks doing those ships to pull it together and get things like the Vanguard and the Sabre.
They've gotten really good at that whole profile of ships.
TL;DRThe Xi'an Scout is on sale as a concept with CCUs coming online shortly, but it isn't in the current patch and is slated for a later 2.x patch.
Some folks have discovered that the Xi'an Scout is already available in the store. Good work. As far as the CCUs, those will be online when the actual post goes up. You just discovered our other secret surprise for right now, but there will be CCU enabled. CCUs will come online shortly.
But I should stress right now, the Xi'an Scout is not going into the game today. It's not in the 2.1.1 patch. It's still a concept sale. It is one of the next ships coming in a 2.x patch. But we think it would be fun to make it available today.
It's because in our disease-addled minds, we went Gillian Anderson to X-Files to aliens to Xi'an Scout.
But the Scout is really, really cool. We've got the specs, or at least a good chunk of all of its core parts, locked in now, so even what you guys see on the specs page for it, it's actually going to be a little bit beefier than that. The shielding on it is really going to be a hallmark thing of the ship where, more so than any other ship in its size class, its shielding can take a punch, but the hull, eh, not so much. But it's going to be a great one.
Obviously, this is the first iteration of it. But 2.1.1 actually makes some balance changes to it.
Yes, it does.
But it will continue to be balanced and tinkered with as more ships come online. We start readjusting so that everything has its place within the new norm.
Well, even with the Vanguard, it was one of the first ships where, when it initially went live, it was under the new component system where it had multiple shield generators installed, but that wasn't fully set up and working. So already, I want to say for 2.1.1, it's more of a stopgap fix for right now, but it should be back to where that shield health will end up being now.
That would be better for Calix, because I know he did a lot more work on getting those new flight modes set up.
I would suggest tuning into ATV next week for our interview with Calix about the flight modes. But the answer is it's still a work in progress.
TL;DRNo numeric hull health is shown; damage appears as regions of the targeted ship discoloring on the HUD, which they consider better for immersion.
Not as a numeric representation. It's more when you have a ship targeted and you start to see the different regions of the ship discolor off of either the stock green or stock blue outline of your HUD. That's how that damage is being represented. It's not just a health bar that you see chipping down.
I think it's better that way, for immersion's sake. It's not like you'd get into a fighter plane, you're in Top Gun, you're chasing down the MiGs, and you can see how many hit points they have left.
That was this specific thing that Chris was famous for in the original Wing Commander. Before Wing Commander 1, that was exactly how it worked. It was like, oh, the enemy's at 5%, 2%, 1%, and then instead he came up with, oh, you see the damage on the ship, and you have your VDU that shows colors. That's classic Chris Roberts immersion.
So that sort of comes back to a long-standing contention with some of the general control and interface improvements for the game, where a big part of that is sorting out what you would think of as an action map, which is just the big list of what actions the player, the pilot, someone in whatever specific seat, needs to take at a time. So something like that is definitely something that we'd explore, but we need to really get that whole list built out before we can start saying, okay, this gets a discrete keybind, this gets a shared keybind, this is like a nested action. So it's still just building those things out.
So a comment I had made, I think a month or so ago, in the chat was basically regarding the time duration insurances. The current working plan is that it would be based on your played time and not just real time going by. So six months of our time, like from January to June, that wouldn't be your insurance wiping out. It'd be how many hours are you putting into the game, playing the game, and that's ticking down against you. So you don't get penalized for taking a break.
I should stress again, the insurance doesn't matter. You will be readily able to insure your ship in the game. It is never a secret way to punish you. We're going to make sure it is that way.
Again, if you check out the Tony Zurovec interview from ATV a couple weeks ago, he states the next likely landing zone after Nyx is Hurston. Tony Zurovec lays out an entire roadmap in that interview. It's about 32 minutes long, split between two different ATVs. He states that the first one that we've got is ArcCorp, then Nyx, then Hurston, and then possibly Crusader. But it all depends on what gets developed and what comes online. But that's the thinking right now.
The great thing about Tony is that he has this all thought through before he says anything. It's never, oh my god, we have to do that. It's always, this is going to work. And he knows exactly how.
By and by. We're working on that. The grouping stuff is coming. No release date yet, but it is coming. I will say I had an email with Chris and Sandi over the weekend where we were listing out our priorities for what are huge wins we could do near term. That was one of them. The funny thing was another one was character customization. Get some character customization in there so we're not all the same bald guy. And then two days later, the guys in Germany had the whole plan for it ready. Yes, they're impossibly fast.
I don't know what the middle rack is. I'm not sure what they're referencing. I do know that the Vanguard currently has its own missile racks that are size 2 and are lovely. They also fit on an Avenger and a 325A, and you can actually load up a 325A with them and have the ability to fire 8 missiles at once, which makes the 325A pretty devastating right now. Those probably aren't the final racks. I was talking to John Crewe about it. So they'll probably be changed at some point. That's why they're just Aegis Quad Rack, and they'll have a fancy definitive name. But while they're in there, you can have some fun.
This may have been the very specific answer to their question, now that we think about it.
Actually, in the long run, the old system was going to drastically inflate beyond seven sizes for internals, so it wasn't actually that bad. I worked a lot with Elwin just in getting the size standards set for these components, so it's something that can scale really nicely across all our sizes of ships, all the way up to something gigantic like an Idris or a Javelin, or even up into the Bengal and Pegasus.
TL;DRMissile lock times are a first flight-ready implementation still being tuned, and players will be able to improve them by customizing the stock Freelancer's components.
First flight-ready implementation. Plenty of stuff is still getting tuned and changed, especially when it comes to things like missile locks, targeting times. A lot of that is just long-term balance.
And also remember that this is the stock version of a freighter version of the Freelancer, and you will be able to customize the components on the ship to improve things like missile lock time. So don't look to the stock version of a ship to be the answer to all of your prayers. You will be able to customize and kit it out.
Every single ship that we've sold so far is going to have plenty of different component and loadout options beyond the stock equipment. There's going to be plenty of options where we're not selling you something out of the box that has no room left to upgrade because it's already the best at what it could ever possibly do.
I would actually have to see the exact quote or interview that Todd mentioned that in, because a lot of dev comments will just be taken as a small snippet of a larger explanation, and you need all that context to really make sure it all makes sense.
Basically, we haven't seen the thing Todd Papy's talking about yet. So we don't know yet.