Dan Trufin · Refueling DeveloperSo yeah, you're right. We're in the early stages of this. We have a general high-level idea. And at this point, one of our senior designers is hard at work on pretty much ironing out every little detail that's going to come into play for refueling: from how does the UI look, how does the flow of the UI, where is the UI positioned in the ship, how exactly does the Starfarer boom arm function for refueling, stuff like this. So I'll try to take you through a bit how this works. Players will be able to go to a station and, using the refuel, rearm, restock UI, which will need to get redone for this because it was very simplistic and only doing little things, they'll be able to fill up their Starfarer with either hydrogen fuel or quantum fuel. They'll be able to also equip their Starfarer with various tanks that are purposely made for quantum fuel or hydrogen fuel. And then they'll have a UI to select how much they want in tank five, how much they want in tank three, which type of fuel, stuff like this. Once that part gets done, they'll pretty much have to fly and find a guy that has run out of fuel, didn't check his fuel meter and made a bit of a mistake. We're foreseeing this will be much more of a problem once Pyro kicks in, because refueling opportunities there at the station are really minimal. So this will come into play a lot more. So for a tier zero, we're kind of looking right now at the players using chat, global chat, and going like, "Dude, I ran out of fuel. Is anyone with a Starfarer here that can help me?" Or, "Hey, I have a lot of fuel. Anyone need it?" And you guys meet, you form a group, you meet the old-fashioned way. In the future, we're thinking of using the beacon system to actually create the beacon. We could do this at the beginning, but it will just take us longer to release, and it could be a separate part that comes in later. So we thought we'd rather get refueling out to the players as fast as possible. And then we're going to do the part where you actually have a way to contract fuel being brought to you, or "I'm selling, I need buyers," basically. So once you reach that person, we're going to leverage the existing docking stuff that's coming online now. You'll be using the same UI to dock basically your Starfarer's boom refuel arm with the ship that's out of fuel. The ship that's out of fuel obviously has a fuel intake port that you'll have to pretty much, pin the tail on the donkey type of thing. It's a very precise maneuvering thing. If you mess it up, you either break your boom arm or you break the guy's ship. So there'll be a lot of challenge in doing that docking. Basically, you're flying tons and tons of metal and fuel into trying to very precisely insert that nozzle in there. Once you manage to do this and the ships are pretty much connected, similar to how the docking operation works, you will have a fuel transfer UI where you'll be able to set a price, which type of fuel, which type of tank do you want to transfer from. The receiving guy will be able to say, "Well, I only want half a tank because I'm low on cash," or something like this. There's pretty much a trade interface where you have a bit of management of what you want, how much do you want, and from the Starfarer side, where do you want to deliver from? Because you might have a tank that's completely full, a tank that's completely empty. We're looking into gameplay here of how the pressure in those tanks actually speeds up the delivery of fuel, so we want to insert a bit of gameplay here where, if you know what you're doing, you're going to be doing this fast, and it might be in a few seconds, like a pit stop Formula One thing. And if you're just an average player who first has a Starfarer and doesn't want to be bothered, you will still do it in about 30 seconds or one minute, depending what you're refueling. It might be a few minutes if you're refueling, I don't know, an Idris; that might take a few Starfarers. But you'll still be able to do it, you'll just do it slower. At this point, both of you guys are sitting in space, so if someone finds you, you're in a lot of trouble if they're a pirate. So we always want to do this risk-reward thing in our gameplay. We just don't want to get you guys to go there, you push a button and then you wait for everything to refuel. That being said, refueling will take time. Refueling at the station is going to take a lot longer than it does right now. Refueling between two ships is going to take time. It's not just going to be you push the button and you fly out. No, it just takes time. So that's the big picture of how this works. And hopefully we'll get to release it soon. It's still early, but we're getting there.
Jared Huckaby · Host, CommunityBut it is still early, and I want to clear that statement up. We have been talking about refuel and repair and many of these systems throughout Star Citizen's development for several years now. When we say it's early days, that means active development on this feature has now begun.
Dan Trufin · Refueling DeveloperThe scheduling is done for it. We are just ironing out the details in the design. We already talked with a lot of the dependency teams, all the guys that need to provide the art, change the boom arm for refueling, how do we do the fuel ports. Gears are in motion for this. This pretty much needs to come with Pyro, because if it doesn't, then a lot of people are going to get stranded in Pyro and there's going to be no solution for them. So yeah, it needs to get there.
Dan Trufin · Refueling DeveloperI think maybe not lessons, but there's also lessons. But mainly, I kind of like how the team started doing a lot more than just programming or designing: we started having our guys know how to build UIs from scratch, and that helps us, for example, now with the refueling UI. We can just build our own UI. Art is just going to come at the end and make it pretty, but we can build it completely functional, get all the gameplay done without having to depend on external teams and kind of waiting for them to finish. All of these external teams have a backlog of tasks till next year, at least. And if you have to wait for them, it's slow. So we kind of streamlined, and we learned a few tricks that we didn't know before. So now we are a lot faster in iterating. We did the mining UI, we did the refining UI. So now we're pretty much at the point where we can just get the ball rolling as soon as we have anything with UI that needs to get done. Other than that, stuff from mining that will apply here, lessons we've learned: we'll have to see how we deal with economy. Mining has had a lot of ups and downs with economy, and we'll have to see how we do this without getting the players into a state where basically refueling this patch is profitable, next patch is not so profitable, and they stop playing refueling-type gameplay just because it's not a profit thing. So this is something that's probably going to be a bigger thing that we have to do throughout the game. That economy needs to be good every quarter we release, and it needs to be good for all the types of gameplay, not just the new one we release. But yeah, it's a work in progress. We're still learning here.
Dan Trufin · Refueling DeveloperThere's two ways you can mess up refueling. First of all, if your pilot is crap, he will collide with the ship he's trying to refuel. He will hit it with the arm. There's so many things that can go wrong here. He will either damage the arm or damage the ship or damage the Starfarer. The other part where it can go wrong: if you're trying to do it faster, as in speed up the process once the ships are connected, and you don't know what you're doing, that nozzle can either burst, it can eject fuel into space, it can ignite, it can cause a lot of problems. We're also looking now, as a higher tier, at how to store more fuel. So you might not want to fill up your tanks all the way to the max and high pressure, especially if you're going into hot areas, unless you have a tank that is made for those high temperatures. So there will be certain conditions in which, if you have a highly pressurized tank, yeah, you will refuel faster. But if you enter a hot zone, if the pressure starts increasing, that fuel becomes unstable. You might blow your ship up. So we're looking in this direction too, but probably not for the first release. First, we want to do the basic stuff. And then, same as with mining, we keep building and building. That being said, with mining and refueling, while not directly connected, the idea was always that you mine, you refine, and then you can use whatever you refine to refuel. So that is kind of the entire chain, but that will be coming also a bit later.
Dan Trufin · Refueling DeveloperOh, yeah. I'm looking forward to the video. The fuller it is, the bigger the bang. And also, the fuller it is, the harder it will be to do anything with it. Chris was very adamant on this thing where, if you fill your ship up with a lot of fuel, it will move like a slow boat in mud, basically. So there will be choices to be made there. Do I fill it up all the way, or do I just fill one tank, or each tank 10% only, or something like this.
Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems DesignerSo yeah, like you say, we're in earlier stages at the moment. We're still firming up the design. So everything I say here might not make it to when it actually arrives in the PU. But yeah, essentially salvage and repair. It's kind of like the first version of salvage that we're actually doing, so what we're calling it internally is more like hull stripping. So you're actually going up to ships and vehicles and you're stripping away parts of the hull, which lowers its health, its integrity essentially. Visually as well, because it uses the V2 damage map, or that's what we're intending to do. It basically burns it away, takes that material away and stores it in the canister. The multi-tool has a material canister, and the larger, dedicated salvage tool that we're going to be doing has an even bigger one, so you can store even more of that stuff. And basically, yeah, you can either strip away from the hull and use that material, or you can buy full canisters of material to use as a repair resource as well. So if your ship takes a few hits in combat, you'll be able to pop out of the cockpit, EVA over to it, get your repair tool out and kind of fill it in. The idea is at least, if you come across something like a derelict and your ship's damaged and you don't have any repair resource, you could strip away some of that ship and spray it onto yours. So it's not going to be 100% like, "Oh, I've just sprayed this magical metal substance into the ship again and it looks like it's brand new." It's going to look a little bit more battle-scarred. And the idea is we want to use a different material on that to show, like, look, you've patched this up yourself. It doesn't look like a pristine ship anymore. If you want it to get back to its pristine state and 100% health again, then you're going to have to take it back to the shop to get someone to properly repair it for you.
Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems DesignerYeah, so there's a lot of technical considerations that I don't want to write checks for at the moment, because we have to talk with the graphics team, we have to talk with a bunch of different people to make sure that that system will work. But that is what we want to do from the design side, if we can, because it does give you that nice visual feedback of, like, I've been through a few battles, I've had a few scrapes and I've patched it myself, because I want to keep going while I'm out. I don't want to go back to a landing zone or anything to get fixed up. It feels cool, right? Like you've been flying around for a while, I've taken a few hits, but I've scraped through and I'm patching up myself. I think it'll make a few ships look battle-scarred and awesome. And it also kind of ties into the fact that you might not necessarily be able to restore that part back to its full health again, unless you go and either get a replacement for it or go and get the proper repairs for it as well. So it gives you visual feedback on both sides: I've been out and about and had some scrapes, and also, this is a little bit weaker than it was to start with.
Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems DesignerWell, to be honest, it's been a long time coming, and it's a system that's basically been needed. And the more persistence that we get inside the PU... Well, we've got the health system coming in, for starters, soon, which obviously makes caring about everything you've got and taking care of all of your items a lot more important, because it's all persistent. So if you do get into a few scrapes in the PU, you're not going to just abandon your ship and die on a planet somewhere. You're going to want to have an option to be able to repair it and fly out of there. So I think it all just ties into all the other systems that are coming into the game at the moment, and the fact that it's a system that's been looming for a long time, and this is the starting point for it. Obviously, it expands out when we start looking at ship salvage. There'll be similar systems there where you might be able to use hull-scraping lasers to take that stuff off, but then there's things like the Reclaimer with the claw, and you just kind of progress from what we're doing down here all the way up to that. So yeah, this is a really good starting point for us to just start noodling around with, playing with, seeing what works, what doesn't, and then go from there, basically.
Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems DesignerYeah, absolutely. It's a lot more remote and barren, isn't it? And you're going to want to be able to be a bit more self-sufficient than you can be at the moment. So yeah, and I think it even ties into a few things that we want to do down the line too. We've not even mentioned where we want to take this beyond the hull stripping: eventually, when we get the physicalized ship items inside the ships too, we want this to be able to tie in with that as well. So if someone does target your power plant or whatever and take it out, and you end up just about managing to land your ship somewhere, you want to be able to repair that power plant back up rather than being completely stranded because you've got no power plant left. So that's to come later. That's probably not going to be in the initial release, but later down the line, that's certainly something we want to do too. And it does tie into that whole self-sufficiency thing.
Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems DesignerSo we're still early. We've got the design stubbed out on paper, which we've been going through with game directors like Rich Tyrer. So we've been working on that with him. We've been trying to come up with what we call a functional design as well, which is essentially a fancy name for working out the numbers in Excel for a first balance pass on the stripping rates and stuff, and how it degrades the health on ships and everything. So we're just working all of the details out at the moment. There are other teams that we're obviously very dependent on to get this working. So we've been talking to the graphics team, the network team, because obviously if I've drilled a hole in my ship with my salvage tool, we want that shown over the network, and that comes with its own problems. So there are a lot of things to factor in. And then it also comes down to things like, we've been in contact with the VFX team. At some point, we're going to need to see what the salvage beam actually looks like in situ, with what it looks like when we're burning away the V2 damage on the ship too. So it is very early stages, tech investigation being done by several teams that link into this. And then also, very similarly to what we do with a lot of our design work, we're kind of working with the teams that work on the concept of the visuals to see what this looks like, whether it be UI or VFX or anything like that.