Star Citizen Live: Ask the Devs - FPS and Flight Teams
FPS and flight devs cover radar ping tuning, IK button interactions, looting screens, pouches, ammo repacking, time to kill and gadgets. They also discuss master modes and Nav Mode, atmospheric flight, turret gunnery, armor and capital ship combat.
TL;DRThey say the shown ping was deliberately the strongest version and is still being balanced, with tunable parameters and possible low-emission suits, decoys or jammers as counters, and they don't want radar to trivialise PvP.
Where to start? So definitely a concern internally too, right? So I would say visually very strong at the moment. If you ping someone, as you saw in the video, you see them and almost nothing else because it's such a strong visual. So definitely that needs tuning. There's a lot of work left to do on that. There's the time it takes to charge up the ping. There's whether you should be able to see through all types of occlusion. Can you have thicker walls, stuff like that, to make encounters different. Then we've given tons of parameters for designers to tweak, like pierceability, range, signal-to-noise ratio. My radar or my scanner better than your anti-scanner, whatever you want to call it. I think those are the kind of things we can do on the technical side, the engineering side. But then at the end of the day,
Yeah, so obviously we don't want to make it busted. That was a very strong version that we showed off; we said gameplay balancing in progress, I believe. But it's the case of how emissions tie into this, right? So for example, we have the idea of decoys and jammers potentially in a suit. Those could be components inside suits that essentially make your emissions much lower, maybe practically invisible. That's obviously going to be down to gameplay balance. And if you're in a heavy armor, maybe you have heavy emissions. But there's always a forward and backward with this, right? So if you're light and you're invisible and you scan, for example, a Heavy, you should be able to see him in theory. But if there's a Heavy, for example, and he scans you and you're in more of a suit with a much lower emission, or you're in a state with much lower emissions, you potentially might not come up. So there's so many things we can do to balance it, and we essentially showed it at its strongest, right? When we communicate something out like that, we always want people to see it in potentially its strongest state and things like that. So gameplay balance, all of that is in flux, it's tweakable, it's changeable. So obviously we don't want PvP to be trivialized by anything like radar becoming a crutch, essentially, right? We're completely aware of that, and obviously we're conscious of that. We play the game ourselves and we wouldn't want that happening to players.
First of all, I don't think it should go without saying, but we always get new people every week, every month, every year, so it bears repeating that nothing you've ever seen on any ISC, SCL, CitizenCon, Pillar Talk, we've done so many shows of this, is ever final. We've never ever showcased anything that's final. That's not what we do. We are always showcasing our work in progress. We'll wait until it's presentable. We'll wait until it gives an almost complete picture of what we're trying to do. But we're not the people who wait until it's done to show it to you. We're not the people who wait until it's done to put it in the game for testing. That's just not who we are at CIG. So it's always important to remember that whatever you're seeing, wherever you're seeing it, is always this work in progress. And for something like scanning and radar, it's much easier to take it all the way to the max, and then prune it down like a tree. It's harder to add twigs back to a tree after you've cut them down. So you start with as big a tree of features as possible, and then you start pruning it down through the anti-scanner. So it's just much easier to bring it down and find all the ways to impact it and stuff.
I was going to mention one more thing. If you think of it from a PvP point of view, it's more like if you do a ping to find people, like Zach was saying, you might see people that have the right thing, but they will see you, right? So you're basically going, it's like a taunt. I'm saying I'm going to check if there's anyone here, but I also know probably everyone's now going to know that I'm here. So it's a bit of a tricky beast for PvP that I feel is definitely tuned more towards PvE.
I think anybody that's ever worked for any MMO in the world is going to tell you that PvP tuning is never done. It's just this constant, ever-evolving, ever-changing beast.
That's a nice thing, right? Because if you really, really dislike radar scanning, it's like, okay, you can put the armor on which is heavily resistant to that. So you will be able to have the player expression that you want, to be able to get the gameplay that you want to facilitate.
Yeah, so we didn't show any, but we do have a version that we're calling for now Bluetooth, and the naming is still not [final]. I wanted like Luffy, you know, like Rubber Man, like you actually go and touch the buttons, but no. So the version we have is the player will play an animation of interacting with his mobiGlas, and we have an animation on the screen as well telling that he's interacting with the object, and then we trigger the interactions.
TL;DRComplex touch-screen interactions on ships aren't planned for now, since they're hard to balance and a hand would obscure the UI, though hand poses at terminals and kiosks are still being discussed.
No, we do have some physical interactions with some UI screens, like we showed for the elevator panels, but any more screens with more complex interactions, we are avoiding it at [the moment]. It's a bit hard to get the balance. We want to do some search or do certain operations in the screen, so having that doesn't really work very well. We talked about maybe having a pose on a player, having a bit more connection, so maybe we actually see the player with the hands on the sides, not for ships, but at the terminals and kiosks around the game. But all this is still, we're still discussing options, but at the moment we're not thinking of adding [it].
I would just quickly say that one thing for me that was important is that if you start putting the hand onto the UI and it's quite a high-fidelity UI, then you start obscuring the UI. So I always felt that would kind of lessen the... you kind of want to bring the UI in focus, right? And you want to use your screen space and you want to see what's going on there. You want to see all the little interesting transitions and interactions. You don't want to see a big hand covering everything interesting happening.
Trial and error. I think a lot of the time, the elevator ones we used in the video are a great example, because they're a list of very large, friendly buttons, I would say. They are perfect to press, right? Because that's all there is. And you go to something like a shopping kiosk and there's a lot going on.
TL;DRInterrupting a reload should be possible and is a planned example of the Action Matrix work, which aims to make actions cancel into each other fluidly, though it's hard to implement and will keep being tuned.
I mean, it should be possible to interrupt it already, but it's definitely, like I said, going through... now we got a lot more features, going through them and increasing the interactivity is really high on our list, or wish list, just to make everything feel smooth, and what you want to do is what you can do and you're in control of what's happening. Obviously, again, from the engineering side, it's challenging. It's not always a very easy thing to implement systemically. A lot of the times you have to go into each type of feature and put in: where do you interrupt it? How do you queue it? If you've queued it and then you decided to do something else while it was queued, do you then unqueue it? All these things like, I was jumping, then I land, should I reload because I pressed reload while I was jumping? And in the middle of the heavy land animation or something. So yeah, it's not as easy as perhaps design would like it to be, because they like to give us a big spreadsheet and [say] make this.
That's the whole thing we're working on at the moment, right? It's called the Action Matrix. So essentially this thing is basically supposed to make Star Citizen extremely fluid like you'd expect. If you're doing actions, they have the intended result of what you think. So when you're playing a game, if you have to think about something, that usually means there's not the level of fluidity you'd expect, right? So for example, with our slide, if you switch weapon during the slide, if you press one as soon as you go into the slide, the expectation would be, as soon as I regain control of my character, I switch weapon. And that's something that we have to manually put in, because we have to basically author and dictate which actions can go into which other actions. So the whole idea of the Action Matrix work is essentially that a designer can go in and say, well, if I'm reloading and I want to be able to cancel out of it, I should be able to. And obviously that's something that we've specifically talked about a lot. We've heard it requested a lot as well. And it is something that we are planning on doing, obviously that being the biggest example of how the Action Matrix will come in handy. So hopefully once the Action Matrix work is done, you'll have this very fluid experience that you expect in most contemporary FPSs.
And it'll never be done. They'll get the matrix, we'll implement it the way it is, and then someone tweaks it, we'll reiterate on it, and it's back and forth, back and forth, sit and play it.
Yeah, because it's sort of the case of when can you exit out of stuff as well. For example, if you medpen, right, when you go [makes a sound] like that, as soon as you pull out, is that when we give control? And obviously there's a lot more layers and depth that we can go into. How much expression of fluidity do we allow versus how much do we control and punish an action? So if you medpen, that's obviously quite a defensive action. You're getting your health back. Should we allow you to break out of that early? Does that allow skill expression by breaking out early? And there's all these fun design questions that we can propose and easily put in now. Well, we say to you, can you please allow us to do that?
No. I see this pop up every once in a while. I'm always very confused about it, because Sataball was a thing that allowed us to test zero-G mechanics when we didn't have the PU. It was a 2015 thing that was being developed back with our partners at Illfonic at the time, because we didn't know when the PU was going to come online and we wanted to get some zero-G testing. Once the PU came online, there was no real reason for Sataball anymore, because we could just do all our zero-G testing there in the PU. So I'm surprised in the year 2023 this question still comes up, but it comes up enough times that every time I see it, I'm like, oh, I should really address that.
TL;DRThe looting screen will be extended to armor and clothing in the PU version via a secondary view, but it needs rework for the persistent universe and they won't give a release timeframe.
It will. We're working on it. So yeah, the PU version will have armor and clothing. Basically, we'll have two views. So we have the main view, which will be very similar to what we showed at CitizenCon. And then the secondary view that the player can go to by using a keybind, a shortcut, that will bring up either clothing or armor depending on the context, and all the similar operations we currently have for the other ones.
Yeah, I think our main concern at the moment: it's very clean because for Squadron, we have a very controlled limit of items that a player can carry. The PU can go wild with heavy armor. So I think, yeah, we are in talks with UI and the experience teams to try to balance it out, get the best experience, but try not to clutter as much.
We touched on it with the UI team. We had the UI team on last week, but it bears repeating here because not everybody can watch everything that we do. These Squadron 42 technologies, these UIs, these features and whatever, they're not just brought over to Star Citizen by checking the multiplayer box. A lot of these things have to be reshaped and reformed to work with the persistent universe, with a persistent universe that's continuously evolving. When they were first developing Squadron, they might have included the way the PU was working then. But it's always this thing of them diverging and then bringing them back, and then diverging and then bringing them back. We're in the process of bringing them back right now. So those adjustments are what's going to take some time, and why we can't say that this will be out in January or February.
The one thing I think of when I see that question is always, so for me, you have the two screens, right? So you have the first-person screen, the loot screen, that's all about, I'm in the middle of combat, I need some ammo, I need some grenades. And I got the big screen where I'm a paper doll, I'm in the middle, I can dress myself, I can move things between bags, I can have, here's a bag with all the helmets I've collected, here's one with my favorite knick-knacks and whatever. And it's funny when you say that, the first thing people ask me is, where's armor? It's like, in the middle of combat, I need a quick way to completely change my outfit, because this encounter will not go well unless I'm wearing that pink helmet.
When you're panicking, you need to grab a medpen, you just have that. Again, it's that fluidity, right? It's like, you've gone in, you grab the thing, it's done what you'd expected, and it's like, yes, I'm in the zone.
Grabby Hands isn't in development anymore either. We surpassed that with our interaction system years ago. That's one of those things when we do weekly recurring docu-series behind the scenes every single week of a game that's in development. You're going to see things that we try, and some things that we try work and some things that we try don't. Grabby Hands didn't work. We've got the whole player interaction system since then.
Well, I have something, I printed this especially. I don't know if we get it, so I might have to go to the camera. Well, if you look at the UI talk or the Life in First Person talk, you will see that there is an FPS compass. So you can go watch our panel or the UI panel, and it's here. So for the people who missed it, I've drawn a big red box and an arrow for you as well. So yes, we do have an FPS compass.
Obviously, we've got our new scopes, and that is a good step in that direction. We've been talking to graphics about it and using the filter stuff that we have now. It is possible. And it is something we can look into, potentially. So no confirmations from us yet, but we've had those conversations. We're talking about it, and we need to figure out how we can do it and where we do it and where we put it on and how it looks and so on and so forth. But you'll have seen in the ASCAV sniper rifle during the talk how there is a tint, for example, on the sniper scope. And things like that are the sort of things that we're looking into, and having scopes with potentially different shadings depending on manufacturers and things like that. So to slightly dance around the question, yes.
We're still working on those, stuff like deployable shields, and you've seen some laser trip mines, I believe they're in the PU now, and that's an example of a gadget that should hopefully be coming to the player. Some also more contemporary FPS things like flashbangs, smoke grenades, things you'd expect. The idea is we want to nail the core FPS experience before we move on to crazy sci-fi gadgets. So once we've got that stuff nailed in, it's looking great, then we can move on to more crazy space things. So Black Hole Grenade or anything crazy, you've got to wait for that.
There will be pouches. They are in concept. They will work with the inventory we're showing. There's some concepts to be on the looting as well. And that's all I know.
We did, yes. It's probably a bit quick. It hasn't been balanced at the moment. So we call it the ammo repacking. So the player can trigger it for the different magazines using the looting screen, but the player can also trigger it outside of the looting screen. So if he's holding a weapon, he can trigger the ammo repacking using the same keybinding for the looting, and that will trigger the repacking for the magazine that we're currently holding. But yeah, the skill balancing at the moment is really quick, so there's really no consequences of using it.
TL;DRThey didn't directly address hitbox abuse, saying they like procedural animation and inertialized blending to time stand-ups, while sliding costs stamina and can't fire immediately, being meant mainly as a way to get to cover.
I mean, I can only talk about, if I flip the question and talk about the second half, I would say I love procedural animations. It's one of the things I really enjoy about gameplay. I definitely like it more than night vision, for sure. Inverse kinematics like we're using for the buttons, anything that makes you feel like your character is actually touching the world, it grounds them into the world so much more than an animation that ends up halfway between the intended target and where it should be, or having to author a unique animation for every situation or every metric you might have. And in general, trying not to force people into very specific metrics. These are all super important to me, so I can go on a long time. And then the other part of that was the inertialization. So inertialized blending is something that I'm also really, really keen on, and we're definitely going to be exploring, because I think it will allow us to blend between situations without traditional transition animations, and we can use the inertialization as ways to tweak the timings, like Zach was talking about. Do we punish you because you just did three slides in a row and your stamina is, your heart is mega pounding? It'll be like me standing up, like old man standing up, instead of Zach, young man; he'll be up jumping on your desk before I even get out of the seat, right? That side of the question, that's 100%. The whole animation side, I'm super, super excited about, super keen to get a lot of that stuff into the game.
Yeah, just while we're on the topic of sliding, obviously the sliding is a high stamina cost. The more you slide, the stamina cost is tied to the aiming idle sway as well. So while you're aiming, if you're exhausted, it's worse as well. And currently you can't fire immediately as you get into a slide, so we're treating it as more of a getting-to-cover tactic than it is an aggressive tactic. So we're wary of how our KD sliding is, but we're also conscious of the fact that we want it to be a function that exists more for getting into cover. Currently that's the intention of sliding.
TL;DRTime to kill has had a first balancing pass, with more shots needed to kill in PvE and PvP and more injuries as the trade-off, and it will keep being iterated on community feedback.
Yes, so you'll have noticed how it's now in the PU, I believe. We've done some balancing, and the health has, well, there's been tweaking of the overall combat experience at the minute. That is essentially step one of the further work we're doing. So the new AI has gone in, and you take more shots than you did previously. And if you're in PvP, you currently take more shots than you did previously. And this is an overall step forward to the balance that we talked about in the Life in First Person talk, where we want to increase the TTK and make an experience which is fair and engaging in both PvE and PvP environments. Because obviously there's been a lot of talk of frustration of, Star Citizen's a lot of prep work, right? Before you fly down to a planet, before you fly down to a bunker, then if you just walk out your ship and there's a guy hiding in a corner with an assault rifle and he beams you down, you've lost all that time. It doesn't feel overall fair. So we've done some changes and we're going to continue working on them. This is the literal first iteration that has gone in, and it's something we'll be iterating patch to patch, receiving feedback: this feels too long, this feels too short, this is unfair. Even tying into the injuries as well, right? Anyone who's done a lot of bunkers will have noticed they're getting a lot more injuries now, for example. So obviously we take the point of realism, bring it back to fun, right? So the cost offset of increased health is that you get more injuries. So you are not punished, but for engaging, there is a consequence. And the consequence isn't death. Now it's basically injuries, the medical system, medical gameplay, giving that more purpose, life, breath, death.
Yeah, I mean, it's a barrel of fish, right? It's one of those things where we don't just go in and tweak a number. We have to think of all the other cascading consequences and effects of all those things. But overall, the feedback has been quite positive. I've been annoying some Twitch streamers, I've been annoying people on Reddit saying, how do you feel about that? How's that going? Reading Spectrum and just getting an overall idea of what people think about it, how they feel about the current direction. Because it's a very contentious issue when people talk about health, because it's always one of those things where, in gameplay, it's such a big thing that everyone has preferences as well, which obviously plays into it. And it's one of those things where we take a wide variety of feedback, and we want to get somewhere where we can land that the community's happy, everyone's happy, and it plays really good.
And this is so much more than just health. Health is just one aspect of this overall time to kill. Shields, health, armor, injury, medical gameplay, all these things.
And yeah, we're obviously all very conscious of that. And we're giving it to you now, and then you can give us feedback. And I think that's a good direction for us.
I didn't see too much from CitizenCon actually, because when we thought the build was working, the water wasn't working and panic broke out. With help of Ali and Will, we got it all finished up. So it was okay. And then we had a really good Saturday night rehearsal. And then on the next day, the stick broke while the demo was on. It was stressful, but it was very fun. I love these times where I'm on the receiving end of so much love from the community. It just keeps me going every day.
Okay. So I'm not going to say how long. The VTOL engines will be more efficient in that, because a good chunk of the main thrust is being used to hover. So VTOL-capable ships will be able to hover longer before the engines overheat. But in general, the engines of all ships will not overheat fast. You will always have enough time to land. Otherwise, it would be pretty frustrating.
TL;DRMixed flight controls between pilot and co-pilot are unlikely, but a planned controller change should let weapons like a Cutlass Black's forward gimbals be handed to another seat.
It depends what co-pilot actions are. If you think about one person takes the stick and the other one the rudders or something like that, then not, because we usually only have one dominant seat that flies the ship. However, we're currently looking into, or will be looking into, changes to the controller system soon so that you can freely distribute what kind of weapon goes to what seat and all that. So you can basically distribute what item you want to control and you can hand off. For example, in a Cutlass Black, you can hand off the forward-facing gimbals to your co-pilot behind you, and they can use it then. So stuff like that. But not mixing flight controls; that would be too hard to achieve.
TL;DREssentially every ship still needs converting; master modes will reach the PU in stages, starting with speed tuning, then archetype handling, then per-ship differences, with no timeframe given beyond pointing to the public roadmap.
Well, the proper answer is all of them. I can't check how many flight controllers we have, but it's definitely in the triple digits. When we're going to move this stuff over to the PU, we will not do it all in perfection at once. So we're probably going to have the speed tuning first, so basically limiting how fast the ships can go. Then we're going to implement the actual handling changes of the ship archetypes, meaning streamlining all the ships so that they feel similar, bespoke to the archetype that they're supposed to be in. And then we're going to go to the individual differences. So this will be a multiple-tier thing, which basically will take some time. I don't know how long that will take. This will be on Rich Tyrer's team, so he can probably give you a better 'when' answer, but it will come in multiple stages.
It's one of those things where we invite people to always look at the public roadmap. That's your best indicator about when anything is going to come to a particular patch.
Okay, so don't misquote me here, but I don't think there's a lot of difference between combat ships and non-combat ships in Star Citizen. All ships are, first of all, they're ships. They have thrusters, they have shields, they have weapons. The civilian ships, they might have a little bit more protection than others, but they will all play by the same ruleset. So we did a little bit of testing with Constellation-sized ships, but the bigger the ships are, the more unique they are and the harder they actually are to put into a pattern. So we actually did not test too much on the really large ones. But long-term, in terms of the combat gameplay, you can expect that fighters will not have an easy time around larger ships. So that's all I can say about this at the moment.
Yeah, that's still the same tech below it. I mean, certain alien ships, we'll make them unique, but when it comes to combat, balance and gameplay, it's not just about the maneuverability, it's also about the shape of the ship. Some of the alien ships have a really large profile, so they're very, very easy to hit, versus an Arrow that looks at you and basically disappears. But also here, the same rules will apply. So in navigation mode, they will be faster than they are in SCM mode, and they will have maybe slightly different SCM speeds. But how exactly this number is going to be, this is up to, first of all, the tuning process and also then up to player feedback. So just to manage expectations, we will not get this right in the first try, right? This will take some iterations to get right.
TL;DRLarger ships follow the same master modes ruleset, and the stated long-term intention is that they should be much less vulnerable than they are in the PU now.
They will have the same ruleset still. When they're in navigation mode, their shields will collapse, their weapons will be off. For them, it's more like if they want to escape from a fight, it's more about how long they take to spool up the drive and to align themselves and to get out of there, and how long they're going to be vulnerable. But at the moment in the PU, the larger ships, they're very, very vulnerable. That's not the intention in the long term. So as an example, if you fly a Hammerhead and you're getting attacked by six fighters or something like that, in a Hammerhead you shouldn't worry too much, unless that group of players or attackers is coming at you with very specialized equipment to take down large ships. That's the moment when you need to worry. So the ruleset in general about how larger ships benefit or don't benefit from master modes, there's not that much depth in there. It's mostly to make sure that combat stays close to each other and that we're getting exciting combat environments.
I want to follow up on that Hammerhead thing. You're not talking about the game as it is today. You're talking about where you want it to go. Obviously, we have a huge international community, English is not always the first language, some people could only just be half listening. I want to make sure we're clear. We're not talking about how it is now. We know how it is now. Everybody knows how it is now. The work of the Taking Flight presentation, the work of Yogi's team, the work of master modes and all that stuff is about where we're going with this stuff. And obviously, it's not just your team's work. It's Torsten's resource management system. It's Maelstrom with the physicalized damage system. It's all these things that come into play with increasing the time to kill and changing the ultimate experience of flying a Hammerhead from what it is today to what we want it to be tomorrow.
So we don't have the armor system yet, but the long-term design, or direction, that we got is that if you basically come with a ship with anti-fighter weapons against a large ship and you shoot at it with anti-fighter weapons, the big ships won't care. It's similar to when you take a pistol and shoot at a tank or something like that; the tank doesn't care. So we'll have similar situations there. So what exactly these numbers are, whether there's going to be a threshold or if it's just calculated based on the physical properties, I can't answer at the moment, because we're still waiting for the system. We don't even have any idea yet how exactly to tune it. This will come up when we have the first implementation from the physics guys, and then we can look into that.
TL;DRYogi is working on adding gimbal control and precision targeting to turrets, and the new aiming system could boost turret weapon performance, with differences between ships' turrets seen as tuning that will be streamlined.
Right now, I'm actually working on the gunnery experience for the turrets. You've seen the precision targeting, sorry, I need to think about names here because we called it ADS in the past, but it's called the precision targeting system on ships now. That doesn't work by itself on turrets, because in turrets you're the gimbal itself that kind of leads the shots, right? So the thing I'm currently looking into is adding gimbals on turrets themselves, so that even in turrets you can go to the precision targeting mode and you have a little bit more gimbal control, and you can theoretically use manual and auto gimbal modes. That will all add to that. Also, the new aiming system has enough flexibility built in so that we can exaggerate the performance, or the weapon performance, of a turret. We can, for example, easily say, hey, this weapon, if you use it on the turret, has 50% higher projectile velocity or so. So there's quite a lot of stuff that's happening right now in preparation for moving all these features over to the PU. I think you said, why is a Scorpius good, but a Vanguard bad on the turrets? I don't really understand where the difference on the turrets is, because they basically are top-mounted turrets that go all the way around. So if there's a difference in, I don't know, gimbal speeds or something like that, that's just tuning. So I would assume that over time, these values will be a little bit more streamlined.
TL;DRPhysicalized damage is the umbrella system, Maelstrom is the destruction and breakup part, and armor is the material values, with piercing a further part; a primer is hoped for around March or April.
Well, the physicalized damage system is the overarching umbrella. That is everything that is involved in a systemic, physics-based damage and destruction system of your ship. Ship, vehicle, outpost, whatever. Maelstrom is the destruction part. It's how those items break apart into physically based pieces and fly all over the place. Armor is the value of the materials. Everything has to have an assigned material. Is this part steel? Is this part concrete? Is this part sand, whatnot. And then the third part that's not mentioned in there is piercing, is ammunition and weapons being able to pierce through those things to damage subsequent layers and stuff. All those things, and one or two more things that are escaping me right now, all make up what's called the physicalized damage system. And we're actually hoping to have a big primer on this, which is why it's off the top of my head here, in the new year, probably not until March or April, quite honestly, because there's still a couple more things we want to come online to be able to show you, but to answer that very question. But you can get the ten-cent version here.
Switching into Nav Mode, no, but it will block the positive effects from being in Nav Mode. So if you run a QED device, you will not enjoy Nav Mode speeds, but you will enjoy the lack of shields. So yeah, you can always switch the modes, but the effects are the ones that will be inhibited.
TL;DRShips without wings, like the Aurora, will still fly in atmosphere, though how they will be tuned is undecided; ships with proper wings would probably be only a little better.
Yeah. They will still fly. We haven't completely discussed how well they will fly, but similar to the current aerodynamics model, it would be unfair to lock out complete ships from that experience and basically make it super, super realistic. It would also be very punishing if somebody buys an Aurora. I mean, the Aurora is the shape of a brick, right? It doesn't have any lift at all, but also those will fly. Not sure how we're going to tune it. Theoretically, we could give them a higher stall speed so that people need to fly faster for prolonged periods of time to keep their altitude or so, but I don't know yet. If a ship is sufficiently fast, it will always fly. But ultimately, also here it counts that the play experience is important, even if you have an unaerodynamic ship. But ships with proper wings, they would probably just be a little bit better. Not that much better, though.
I've seen this amazing picture by some backer, which was basically parts of the Aurora popping out and becoming wings. I really love that, but I'm not sure if the ship team is up for it.
No, I'm talking about the wings have these little circular fans in them, just like the Connie does. Do they really do anything with control surfaces? Are they going to help?
Well, these look more like hover things, not like control [surfaces]. Control surface mode is for control surfaces. They're only active when you're actually fast.
TL;DRQuantum boosting shake is likely too strong and will probably be dialed down, but whether players can turn it off is undecided and a director-level decision, though Squadron 42 allows it.
Yeah. So in general, when you see something in a demo like we did, or the thing that I started doing when I'm creating any kind of material for demos, I'm exaggerating the effects, because it's always easier starting small and then getting the max strength feel right, and then have somebody come in and tweak it down, than the other way around. For example, other effects like the zoom when you do a G-force boost or something like that, somebody just turned it off, although we had this in for ages. So that's the bottom line. These effects are really strong. And for quantum boosting, I don't think we actually did a shake pass. I mean, maybe we did a shake pass. But in general, it's likely that it is too strong and that we will dial it down. There's this other question about whether you should be able to turn it off or not. In Squadron 42, yes, you can basically turn this all off. There is this discussion whether or not that should be possible, because once you disable things like G-force effects or things like camera shake and so on, you also have much more stable aiming, an aiming image in front of you, right? So we need to discuss that. I'm not sure if other games, other PvP games like Counter-Strike, actually allow you to turn off camera shake. I think this needs to be discussed internally. So I cannot definitely say, yes, we can all turn it off. I don't know that. That's not up to me. That's a director-level decision.
And of course, when you talk about it might have had a camera shake pass, it could have had a shake pass by somebody who can ride 15 roller coasters back to back to back. Meanwhile, my poor self can't do two minutes of VR without wanting to throw up.
I mean, one of the most fun things that I did to Bayer at some point was let him test the camera system, the first pass of the G-force systems, and he really got sick from that, because he's getting really motion sick, which is, well, I'm sad for him. So I get it, there's an accessibility issue, but I cannot give definitive answers there. But the issue is known, and we'll talk about this in time before we move it over.
TL;DRStronger zoom for artillery ships in precision targeting is undecided; Yogi doubts it helps, and zoom strength may vary by operator mode or weapon, but nothing is promised.
That's an interesting question. I'm not sure, we'll see. So the gameplay is not about, we don't have sniper gameplay or something like that, right? If you fire from eight clicks with an Inferno or with an Ion against a target, this is not sniper gameplay, because the bullet will be traveling for quite a couple of seconds before it gets there. This doesn't really work. So I don't think having a super strong zoom actually helps. The other problem with zoom is that a zoom basically reduces the field of view to just a couple of degrees, right? Once you get down to, I don't know, 8, 10 degrees or something like that, you have the problem that the background might look really, really bad, because then things like background texture resolutions come very much into play. Also, having such a strong zoom doesn't really add a lot. But also the exact zoom strengths are up for discussion. We'll probably just ship it out with the first version. We might even have it on different operator modes, where different operator modes have different kinds of zoom strength. We might even change it based on the weapons. I don't know yet. So there is the potential, but I cannot just flat out say, yes, we'll do it. This would not be appropriate yet.
Oh, I really would like to have that, but I don't see that in the near future. You mean because these actually have wheels, right, on the landing gears? I don't even know if they're actually moving wheels. I don't know. I don't see this right now. All of our landing pads are pads where you vertically go down. I haven't seen any runways. I would love runways, but I don't see that in the near future. But with the aerodynamic system, or with the control surface mode, you can actually glide in there like you would actually land like that. So yeah, I guess we'll have to discuss it at some point.
We talked about this internally quite often, because from a balance point of view, this is also what I would like to see, basically sacrificing hardpoints for bigger ammo storage or something like that. At the moment, we do not know how to properly do it. We had some talks with Torsten and the resource network people about how to do that, having ammo belts and so on. That could theoretically do that. But at the moment, we don't have a proper plan for that yet. Long term, we absolutely would like to have that, because it also allows logistical mechanics behind that, where you can just serve as an ammo bearer for somebody else and so on. So yeah, nothing concrete yet. But in terms of balancing, it actually hurts us, because sometimes our weapons are mounted on different types [of ships]. And if I have a size three ballistic repeater on a medium fighter versus on a heavy fighter, I think on the heavy fighter it should have more ammo, right? Because it's just chunkier and bigger. And at the moment, we cannot do this. So this is actually an annoying problem for us as well.
He's not saying there's no ammo reload. He's saying, will it be separated boxes and stuff? There are still ships like the Vulcan. It's talking about just complete separation of every single ammo type from every single weapon. And he's saying he wants to do it. He's just saying there's no active in-progress thing for it.
At the moment, we cannot do it. I'm not sure if we'd actually have different ammo types for the same weapon, because usually we're balancing our weapons with a specific ammo type. But I mean, this can also change. At the moment, there are bigger fish to fry first.
TL;DRSix degrees of freedom was not dropped; the speed limit was only lowered, because internal blind tests found players preferred fairly low combat speeds, which are thought to help combat.
No, we did not drop six degrees of freedom. I mean, ideologically or theoretically, you could say, yeah, we clamped down a lot of the stuff, but the flight model in Star Citizen always had a speed limit, and we're still having the speed limit. We just made it lower. And with the boost phase, where the draggy stuff comes from, we made it a little bit more dynamic. The thing is that we actually tested what fun combat engagement speeds are. So I think 18 months ago, I did a blind test. I invited people from PPT and from the VGPU team and just had them play PvP scenarios in Arena Commander, but I turned off the acceleration, the G meters and the speed meter. So they didn't know how much they accelerated and they didn't know how fast they were going. And guess what kind of speeds they liked most? 120 meters per second. And I thought that was too low, so we basically pushed it up a little bit further. But I'm pretty, pretty sure that these combat speeds we have right now, that they're so low, they're actually helping the combat geometry and the fun in the game a lot.
TL;DRControl surfaces and thrusters are blended by atmospheric density, so thrusters handle turning in thin air, control surfaces take over as it thickens, and dense atmospheres give controls more authority.
I mean, high density is good for aerodynamics, because then the rudders, or your controls, get much more authority. Low density is basically the same case as when you come down to a planet, and the air in this case is so thin that you actually cannot turn your ship. So in this case, the thrusters actually help you out. The current control surface model actually has this transition period between 0 and 0.2 bar, or atmospheres. Sorry, I think it's the same. Whatever, I'm not a physics guy. The inputs, or the acceleration outputs, from the control surfaces and your thrusters are actually mixed, and they're being shrunk down the closer and denser the atmosphere is. So when the atmosphere is dense enough, then the control surfaces fully take over. Until then, the thrusters still rotate you and so on. So there's this transition period, so it should work out of the box. If you go to a moon with no atmosphere, it's your thrusters that are doing the work, not your control surfaces.
TL;DRYogi says, as direction from management rather than his own vision, that large capital ship combat will be naval-style, long-range and DPS-focused, with resource network gameplay and positioning, not dogfighting.
Okay, so far, this is not my vision, this is basically what management is giving us, or the gameplay director is giving us. But what we see so far is that we have dogfighting, and the bigger the ships are, the more the combat will turn from dogfighting into naval-style combat. So when you have big ships fighting against each other, they will not necessarily be really close, but they will fight over relatively large distances, so there's enough space in between to fight. They will fire long-range cannons, they will fire torpedoes, they will fire other things, and the gameplay there revolves more around DPS application and trying to get the shortest time to kill on the other enemy. And if you have capital ships as opposed to fighters, they're going to have very deep gameplay with the resource network. I mean, Torsten is a better person to talk about this, right? But where you maximize your damage output against other ships. The maneuvering for pilots will revolve more around exposing the strong sides of the ship. If somebody is focusing on the left side of the shields or something like that, then they would, for example, turn the ship around to expose the other side. At the same time, you also want to expose the sides of the ship that have the most working turrets, or maybe the turrets with the best loadout for attacking this or that target. So that is roughly what we're going for. So that will mostly be naval-style combat, but of course in six degrees of freedom. But it will not be dogfighting.
TL;DRSub-capital ships vary by role and loadout, with the Hammerhead having a specific role and needing fighter cover, and the bigger the ship the more combat becomes naval-style, with no formal categories yet.
Let's go bigger than the Constellation. Let's look at the Polaris. Let's assume there's the Javelin up here. Now let's get smaller: Perseus, Polaris, Hammerhead, those kind of things.
It depends on the ships and what kind of roles they have. I can't talk too much about the Polaris, but for example, the Hammerhead has a specific role in such a big capital ship battle. So it has a specific role, right? And the other ships... it would care about the fighter cover. It would not fare well against similar-sized opponents that are purposely built to take down similar-sized ships. So it depends always on the ship. Some ships rely a lot on turrets. Other ships, I wanted to say the Constellation here, because the Constellation is very forward-centric. It has these massive size five mounts which face forward. So a ship like that is obviously not relying much on the turrets to do the alpha damage against larger enemies. So there will be a transition period between the size of the ships and how they maneuver. But that's all combat details. But the bigger the ship, the more it turns into this naval-style gameplay.
Even when I said it, I realized there's going to be arguments about what is a capital ship and what isn't a capital ship, and how big. I said sub-capital and I just meant smaller than a Javelin.
We had some categories, like what is a sloop or something like that. But the thing is, we do not have too many ships of these categories. So at the moment, building a category about that is probably not that useful. We'll see how it all plays out.