Star Citizen Live: Ask the Devs - Vehicle Gameplay

So yeah, we have experimented with this internally. We did some play tests with it. And it turns out it's really hard to control. It's very difficult to work out which direction you're actually rotating, especially if you start combining rotations. Imagine you start rolling and then halfway through that you start pitching and then halfway through that you start yawing. All of a sudden your rotational axis is completely different from what you think forward is. And then the by far easiest way to stop rotating is just to hold space break and just stop and start again. So we've tested this and tried a couple of approaches and stuff. For now the plan is not to add one of these in with the normal decoupled mode. We feel coupled rotation is more controllable on average and a more intended experience, but we could have - just spitballing: It could be used as like a malfunction of IFCS in the future. All of your rotations get completely unlocked and then you're just spinning. And then the thrusters start firing and you have to manually fight against it. That could be quite cool. But yeah, no plans for that at the moment.

[It] was really difficult to fly. And it made the experience quite jarring. But that could be a case of us not going to implement it quite correctly. But we can relook at it in the future. But for now we're going to focus on the kind of core flight experience that we have.

No. That came from a push internally from our arena commander team. They really want the scoreboard to be on tab to match how lots of players find that in other games as well. To sort of match what the industry ends up doing. So they had a real hard push for this. If we do this, what would it mean? Where could we put other things that make sense on the keyboard? And there's so many controls already that we have to move something somewhere else. So instead of tab being the ping wave, the decision that we landed on was to have tab open the scoreboard in Arena Commander. Match that kind of expected behavior. And then that moved to V or hold V. I've forgotten exactly what they did. And then because there isn't a scoreboard in PU, there's now just tab that doesn't do anything. So what PU specific feature could we stick on tab as well? We thought about it for a bit and we're like, MobiGlas works

That's a good question. It's basically our reference ship internally. Because it's the most popular ship for us. It's our baseline ship. And it's got a specific handling. It's got a broad sense of skills and purpose for that ship. It's a really good ship from a handling perspective. Because it's got a mix of fixed thrusters, rotational thrusters. And the speed of it just meant a sense of where we wanted to test combat. We did pick the Gladius, but we also picked other ships from different categories as well. Tested at the same time. But that's just been the main ship we've used.

It's the most well set up ship with Master Modes in mind at the moment. As Rich said, we've tested a bunch of other ones. We've had some tuning set up for a Hornet. We've had some tuning set up for 300i. And then a few bigger ships as well. We tested out the Vanguard, the Constellation. There was a few others. There was a bunch of them after a while. And trying to fit what the niche is for each individual ship. What the max speed can be in this specific Master Mode. What the thrusters can do. The Constellation has a bunch of different turrets on it. How does that affect it? We ended up doing playtests with... What happens if we have two fully manned Constellations against five Gladiuses? And see what happens. And then does that match what our expectations end up being? How does a 300i fight against a Gladius? What should it be doing? Those kind of things. Right now the Gladius is the core example. It's the core example as well because it's the main ship in Squadron. Master Mode was developed for Squadron. So that's a major reason as well. There's a bunch of other ships that we've prototyped at least. We haven't just focused on just the Gladius at least.

So what we can say is we have tested quite a few multi-crew ships. And what that ends up being in the end, we'll decide at the time. But it's going to depend on what ship fits the kind of test and test purpose and the game mode we test as well. So we'll just make a pretty good guess at the time of what ship that is best fit for that game mode basically. Because as Johnny said, we did lots of tests where we had a couple of constellations versus quite a few other ships. So it depends what other ship we might use as well. Because we'll put these tests out there with a specific goal to find out information that will help us develop the future. Because we've got to a really good place with light fighters, medium heavy fighters, but the multi-crew experience is still one that we're still figuring out as well because it's quite complex because you've got multiple guns, you've got multiple armoury. We've also got the resource network as well coming in the future. And that's going to really change the multi-crew experience. So we're really figuring out what that means for the gameplay. We're going to have to make some choices based on what works best for those futures and our purposes with the test as well.

The answer is yes. So we'd like to use the tractor beams to move the vehicles over but we've basically just moved the ground vehicles to a new set of physics. And basically this has meant the old system we had to correct the back of the wheels doesn't work anymore because it's a completely new set of physics. But we do definitely have plans to be able to use the in-game tools to rewrite the vehicles because it makes no sense to be able to get stuck in the middle of nowhere and have nowhere to create a vehicle back on the wheels. So that's definitely something we're going to look into in the future. It's just quite a challenge now because we've got some new physics that is much more based in reality. Where as before the physics were quite simple. We had a very simple suspension system, a very dampened body system where the body didn't really move around that much. Whereas now we've got a proper vehicle where you move it up it's got a real feel to it and it's got a real weight to it. So we've got to balance the tools to be able to do that. And it's quite difficult to basically try and make a vehicle flip back over and land on its wheels as intended.

So for both aspects of this, there's the player who's firing the QED or using the QED and there's a player who's going to be on the other end of it essentially being pulled out or dampened. So for the person who's using it, the idea is it's going to be or the current idea anyway will be in SCM mode along with a bunch of other things. So that you're in SCM, you've got the QED active and then that's when you can use it and along with lots of the other like the combat stuff is all in SCM. That's the intention at the moment. So you can still do all the same, everything else, you have the dampener, you have the snare, everything works the same way from that end. And then on the other side, the person who's being pulled out or dampened, the current working plan will be that when you get pulled out, essentially the quantum drive will be disabled or restricted somehow because a lot of the internals of Master Modes doesn't necessarily care about which mode you're actually in directly. It's if your quantum drive is active. That's what quite a lot of the things are. So for example, if you're in Nav mode, but you've turned your quantum drive off for some reason or it's been blown off or damaged or distorted or whatever else, you will still lose, you won't have access to those top speeds because the quantum drive is off. So that's what the restriction is. So if you're in Nav mode and you get quantum dampened or quantum snared, your quantum drive is going to be off and you're going to be limited to SCM speeds for that time period. And then you can swap back to SCM mode yourself and then go try and defend yourself. That's the current plan. We still need to test all these kinds of PU-specific things because there's open questions about things like in a pirate versus cargo hauler situation with QED, for example, what kind of, like, how often should the pirate be successful versus how often should the cargo hauler escape? Because historically we've gone back and forth in balance a lot of the time where the cargo hauler is always able to escape so the pirate can't really do much. Or the other way around and the pirate's always able to catch the cargo hauler. So we want some middle ground between that and we're still working to get the exact, like, balance of where everything fits.

So we've got to kind of move the physics engine. So we had quite old physics with our old ground vehicles and that hasn't really been touched for a long time so we had to go in there, figure out what needed to be changed and we've got a baseline, as you can see now with the new ground vehicle physics which you're going to play soon is it's going to feel much more realistic but that's our first step in terms of feel so we're going to get the feel right but we don't have that on the Drake Mule and we don't have that on the Never Tank so we've got to move the ground vehicle physics to those vehicles as well first and then basically it's just time and resources as always and we've got to make that call when we can work on a new vehicle because it will be not a completely new vehicle because we used a time model and suspension physics and all that stuff for it but that kind of vehicle is quite difficult to do because it moves from four wheels to balance and that's really hard to do but that's also Johnny's problem as well.

Yeah, going from a stable four-wheeler or six-wheeler or whatever to trying to balance on two wheels is very difficult to make fun so it needs to have a lot of iteration time to make sure that you don't just constantly fall off, for example and if you go too far the other way and you never fall off making that also fun so we need to find where the balance of all of that across the scale of sim through to arcade of a motorbike should land I think people still don't really know how a bicycle stays up anyway so how are we going to succeed?

We don't just want to build a car and just animate a bike because that's what a lot of people do to get a bike in the game is they'll just make a bike a car and it'll just be animated but we want to do it properly because we believe that experience is a much better experience for the final game.

So yeah, so we basically moved the ground vehicles to new physics vehicles already and that's our first step to really improving the ground vehicles up to the same specifications as the ships So our next kind of ground vehicles V2 as we kind of call it that would mean the ships run on fuel They've got a power plant, they have a cooler and it all works just like the ships Obviously it might be a different power style but it will have power, it will require cooling in the same way that ships do And they'll generate signals as well in the same way that ships do even though it'll be different radiuses and stuff But yeah, we're going to convert the ground vehicles to use the full vehicle systems and that we have, including resource network as well.

Yeah, we definitely want to unify all the kinds of vehicles we have in the game to all sort of work roughly in the same kind of way So yeah, adding fuel tanks, adding power to them even things like updating the HUD to be new HUD because some of the ground vehicle HUDs have been untouched for a while Yeah, there's definitely intention to do that kind of thing, for sure.

Yes. So at the moment we have kind of our base terrain. So we kind of generalize it that it's a mix between kind of high grip gravel probably. But with this brand new model we've got the ability to kind of change the tire curve a little bit So we can model driving on ice, we can model driving on tarmac But we've got to build a system where the tire model communicates with the game So when you ride on the textures of the different planets and stuff it tells the tire model what kind of format to use So we've got to build that for the future but that's definitely part of the development of the ground vehicles It just requires a lot of cross team kind of work to do because we've got to change the levels to send the information to the ground vehicles and then the ground vehicles will appropriately handle for those.

I don't. So, the tank has a lot of mass and the mass is actually quite low on the tank. - Not according to this person. - Yeah, well it is physically But one of the problems that you have in physics is So in real life there's a lot of dampening with collisions Because you're hitting terrain, you're hitting objects that move And the collision in a kind of output kind of varies a lot Whereas in a physics simulation you can have quite high spikes of collisions Because it's two interconnecting solid objects And we need to do a lot of work on how the ground vehicles feel and interact Because that's not how real life collisions happen But that is the output of the physics engine And basically that causes the vehicle to react in a way What makes it look like it doesn't weigh very much Or it gives you a really high impulse so the vehicle can roll over And it isn't that it doesn't weigh very much or the center of mass is too high It's just the collision impulse is so high That it's got the force to kind of tip the vehicle over But that's definitely something we're working on And we've already done some work on the suspension physics for the ground vehicles When you hit rocks and stuff If you had the old physics and you basically reduced the dampening The vehicles would flip over 13 times But now we've kind of really worked on the ground vehicle collision physics When you hit a rock like this for example It just kind of rides it, it doesn't go like this And that's something we've worked on the first stage And then the next stage that we'll be working on the general output of the physics engine To not generate these really high impulses that are just not accurate But it does create a perception issue, we are aware of that.

Yes.We did a big change, when was it now? 18 months ago, 2 years ago I think it was Yeah And that really increased the speed of the hover bikes on the ground So before they were quite limited I think you could go like 68 mps max I think with the old ones But then we made it so you could go really quick with the new ones But obviously that means you can hit a rock And if you travel at that speed you hit a rock it's quite an impact But we can definitely improve that from our side And also we can improve the levels as well So we can instruct the players more where to ride these things Because at the moment our terrain, you've got rocks everywhere But it'd be cool if you could have areas that are intentionally made for these bikes and stuff like that That'd really help along with improving the general collision detection again You get really high impulse of collision And that just means the recoil would explode.

There's already some assists in Gravlev that are trying to help with this kind of thing I can't remember if the current one is just like it sees a thing in front of it and it slows down Or it tries to ride over it It's one or both, I forget exactly But there's a bunch of things that we tried to help the problem when we initially did that remake But some rocks are very big and come at you really fast The speeds can be deceptive sometimes Because 200 metres a second is quite fast if you're on essentially a quad bike So if you drive a quad bike into a rock at 200 metres a second, it might explode It comes down to another perception thing You want the fantasy of flying this hover vehicle over terrain and really cool And trying not to crash into things

I feel on the spot now I should have picked this one It's one of the questions So, you know, I'm really protective to our community feedback And that's a general feeling across the team here We really like hearing from the community So, to answer the Fury question So, we've tried to balance the Fury for the current game that we have now And where the ships currently fly and where they fit And we've tried to give it a little bit more of its personality in the current game But we've got the game we're working on next You know, for us, you know So we've got Master Modes coming Which is going to allow us to kind of use more of the unique ship identity And, you know, with that, and as we move towards that We're going to move the ships more into the identity So, you know, I can definitely see the Fury moving more to where its main thrusters contribute to more, you know, of the axes on the ship But it was just where the rest of the game currently fits Because if you have a big game, we've got a hundred and something ships in the game If you add one in there that's really different. It can cause problems for the current ships And also kind of not really fit the game So we have to kind of move everything together So we move the ship as much as we can in the baseline that we kind of have in the current game And then we look at where we want to be And then we start moving all the ships as this big, you know, package of ships that we kind of tune together So we tune the light fighters together, the medium fighters, heavy fighters And move those all together And then we kind of create more personality on those ships as we go And then we see how far we can push those limits But yeah, you know, I can definitely see it flying more in its mains in the future

Stealth, anything? Well, I'm going to go stealth right now, but I'm going really quiet So we kind of see, well like personally I see stealth as A ship that is, you know, its main ability is to mask itself So you can hide and you can be sneaky, you know So it's got that more kind of tactics to it Where you can use the environment to hide You know, and you can move your resources of the ship to kind of manage that So you can kind of control how much you're seen in the universe So you can plan something, you know, plan to sneak up on someone or just plan to attack someone And that's where I see stealth in the game You know, and it's going to become really quick, well it's going to be a really cool resource network Because that's going to give you really good control over how, you know, kind of stealth you go Because you can take it much further than you can now

Yeah, for sure, yeah On the resource network thing, there's already talks of like how heat and cooling can influence stealth and emissions With ships, the emissions is going to be really what the stealth is, I guess So if you can hide, like I guess there's two kinds of versions of stealth You're either not there, or people think you're not there Or people think you're something else So you could have like emissions that pretend you're some casual cargo hauler But you're actually a fleet of Idris's And just to try and pretend that you're not for a while Like there's stories of like stealth fighters who like Because of the way the stealth fighters emissions profile is set up When they get hit by a radar signature and it deflects off all the different faces of the plane And then it comes back and the radar sees it and is like, oh that's just like a pigeon That's nothing to worry about And then suddenly the pigeon turns into a stealth aircraft for like two seconds Because it's opened its bay doors and then closes it again and goes That pigeon turned into a plane for a bit Maybe we should shoot something at it So something like that You can have the two different versions of like we hide it completely Like clamp the emissions completely so you can't be seen in a big radius Or you can just blare out like noise and obscure whatever you want And so like with resource network if you have If that gets tied into heat and stuff You can have coolers that are like blaring out loads of IR for example They could pretend to be something else And then if you want to go the other route and then like hide all of those emissions Turn all your coolers off or like have some kind of thermal shielding around it And then you just slowly cook in your ship because it's heating up Because that heat is supposed to go somewhere That's what the emission is normally And if it's not emitting heat I guess you're just going to steam slowly

Yeah It would be really cool if you could drop your ground vehicle off a ship and it would feel like it was floating because aerodynamics and a ship is a ship And then we've got much more race in the game now so it would be cool to have a draft You could draft it behind people, catch them and pass them because you're in the draft That'd be really cool.

I don't think it's currently in the plan at the moment but it would be

Yeah It'll be part of our goal of moving the ground vehicles to our next version That'd be our next step So we'd have aerodynamics in that And maybe we could mix them with moving the ground vehicles to the power plant systems and stuff and have full aerodynamics But it would be quite limited because we don't want to go full simulation where we're trying to model the aerodynamics and downforce on the ships and on the trucks and stuff like that But it'd be nice to have the feature where you can draft.

The aerodynamics of the rover being a brick The downforce of that You'd get quite a draft on that ship If you go down the full sim route of aerodynamics you can get very complicated very quickly If we have drafting behind someone and then you pull out and suddenly you get hit with a whole bunch of wind And then half of your vehicle is in the wind, half of it's not in the wind What does that do to the tyres for example? Does it affect the grip? Does it torque your vehicle around a bit? You get flying cars, yeah Where suddenly all the downforce turns into upforce

Really excited for it, it's a great place to do combat and I've been really pumped about it And also it's given us a chance to test master modes as well so that's been really cool for us So we've been really excited to get that out there

Yeah we interact a lot with the player experience team, the vehicle guys in the player experience team Who are really interested in Arena Commander and the way you can test out how ships behave in 1v1 combat or PvE Like Pirate Swarm and stuff and you get all that kind of really interesting interactions in ships There's only certain ways that you can actually really tell what the ships are going to do in those kind of interactions And that's from really testing in that isolated environment Because a lot of the time in the PU you don't end up having that very often Because of the size and scale and loads of different roles and stuff that people can do So you get a really focused environment on that So that really helps us And we've been in contact with a bunch of people in the community about ship balance and stuff in the past as well So increasing the playability of Arena Commander and all the different lobby stuff that they've been doing And the experimental modes, we finally get the players to test out master modes And then we can see what the feedback is from that And then the best way to make a feature that the players really enjoy is to take player feedback basically And then you can iterate back and forth and come up with something really cool So yeah, we're really excited

I think it begins to finally allow us to realise that original potential of it To be the symbiotic testbed Well obviously we have the PU and the Alpha and then we have the PTU and stuff like this But Arena Commander, the promise of it, the true promise of it has always been this focused testbed for the PU And we got away from that for a while, like all things, the only constant game development has changed So this return to it in recent months as we've been waiting for it to go out in 3.20 And as it will hopefully soon Is exciting, especially with all the specific modes to drill down on things like the tank And drill down on things like gun game and stuff like that.

There's also that renewed focus that helps us with ship racing that has become a real focus as well They've remade the maps, right, or added some new maps to Arena Commander So adding that kind of stuff into it as well, that helps a lot with vehicle handling and stuff Because it opens up really tiny precision bits of the balance That helps us hone in on, why does this vehicle feel slightly different to this kind of vehicle?

I mean, it's kind of appreciated that, because I was playing it about an hour before I came here So now I've taken a look at it, see what we can improve on it Because it definitely can fly better in atmosphere Its atmosphere flight is a little bit bad right now It's got those great atmospheric wings that go like this And we did some changes to the way the... So we did some changes to Fury, and that had an impact on some of the other ships in the game And unfortunately Gladiator was one of those ships that is kind of impacted I'm taking a look at that now, of what we can kind of... Basically improve it, because it's got the Mavs that move at the top of the ship.

That was to support the Fury, like the AT thrusters That needed a rewrite of some of the thruster rotation code And so that had some unintended consequences In all the ships that have rotating thrusters I think there was some... Was it like the Hornet or something had that as well? Yeah, there was a bunch of them that we had to check and try and get as close to what the shipped version was

So a big focus for the Terrapin is actually, it's going to be making the most of its VTOL mode So we've generally tried to make the ships fly as normal with... In like normal mode that you'd be able to fly In atmosphere, on the various planets we have But we're definitely looking at ways we can make the most of those ships with VTOLs on them And give them a little bit more power So when you're in VTOL mode you really feel the power of those ships And to give you more control in VTOL mode We have some exciting... So we've got some exciting aerodynamic changes in the future as well That's going to help kind of reinforce that as well So yeah, there's definitely some scope to improve the Terrapin Because it's a cool little ship, it might be a floating brick but... Yeah, it's pretty cool

Richard:So when we have a ship in concept in phase We basically outline what the purpose of that ship is And then from that we discuss what loadout it should have What weapons it should have What size components it should have And then the ship gets concepted So we're in control of that And then when we go through like concept of phase and the visual art style The art starts to lead some of where the ship goes as well So we've got like the purpose of the ship But then the look of the ship It needs to feel a certain way to match its kind of visual appearance And then we've got like a really good kind of matrix of like Where our current ships are Both in terms of the flight, the combat power As we learn more about the game as well And how we move all the ships As we learn the systems more and more And improve the core features of the game We change the balance So we're moving all the ships together Then we look at where that ship should fit And we don't just want every ship to be the new best ship in the game That does everything the best There's always choices And that can be manufacturer based choices That can be visual kind of choices on the ship And where you put the thrusters Where you put the wings And how they look So it's really a lot of different factors That come into this And it's where we put the weapons It's where we put the turret Well if a ship doesn't have a turret It's where we put it And that defines how good that turret system is on that particular ship And then there's just We've got kind of core numbers of health for example So we've got a really good idea of where the current ships are So we go right, well we want the ships for here So it requires this But it depends how the ship's built So the different parts on the ship And how the damages propagate throughout the ship So we have to work with all these factors So yeah, that's kind of how we balance And then obviously we put We do do some testing internally To make sure the ship kind of fits What we originally set out it to be And make sure it fits in that particular area But it's not I don't like to say This ship's just better than the Vanguard You know for example I like to go Well it could beat the Vanguard in this situation If you did this If you did this particular thing And that's the difficult balance I guess Hopefully that's a good enough answer

Good answer Now how do you build I'm going to follow up Because you did so well with that How do you do that Knowing new systems are coming down the pipe Like master modes and resource management and stuff How do you take that delicate calculus You just described And do something for the game today But also leaving yourself room for tomorrow

Yeah I mean that's That's one of the really difficult things About doing this is We've got to think about the game now We've got to think about the game We're going to have for the next release But then we've also got to think about You know kind of really long term as well So we kind of We kind of do the current game I mean you know We kind of have a base understanding Of where the current game is And where the ships are And we try and do our best to maintain that But also include a little bit of Future proofing ourself really that We don't have to go back and redo Every single ship in every single release for example So we'll try and move certain ships That's why sometimes probably You know we do get questions About certain ship balance not quite fitting But that's probably why Because it is a work in progress game You know this is a game where We can't just retune a hundred and something ships Every single you know release It's just not possible to do But we do try and keep it as one unit that's moving And then we look at You know we look at things like master modes And stuff like that So what we try and do is We try and have these things in the game Now for us And we will balance the game For the future as well And then when it comes to it We can turn those systems on You know for the players Which is what we've done with the experimental modes You know we've got the Gladius there Well we did have the Gladius there And basically what we did was We just turned it on with master modes on And the tuning was there So we're kind of moving the game towards that For the future like that But it is a very fragile piece sometimes And it is quite challenging There's days where you're like Oh my god I've got to throw all the balance out I've done over the last five years at this company You know for these new features and stuff Because we've got so much coming in the game And so much is going to change But it's also really exciting Because it's a constant challenge as well So sometimes

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the really difficult things about doing this: we've got to think about the game now, we've got to think about the game we're going to have for the next release, but then we've also got to think really long term as well. So we have a base understanding of where the current game is and where the ships are. And we try and do our best to maintain that, but also include a little bit of future-proofing in ourselves, really, so that we don't have to go back and redo every single ship every single release, for example. So we'll try and move certain ships. That's probably why sometimes we do get questions about a certain ship's balance not quite fitting, because it is a work-in-progress game. This is a game where we can't just retune a hundred and something ships every single release. It's just not possible to do. But we do try and keep it as one unit that's moving. And then we look at things like Master Modes and stuff like that. So what we try and do is we try and have these things in the game now for us, and we will balance the game for the future as well. And then when it comes to it, we can turn those systems on for the players, which is what we've done with the experimental modes. We've got the Gladius there. Well, we did have the Gladius there. And basically what we did was we just turned it on with Master Modes on, and the tuning was there. So we're moving the game towards that for the future like that. But it is a very fragile piece sometimes, and it is quite challenging. There's days where you're like, oh my God, I've got to throw out all the balance that I've done over the last five years at this company for these new features and stuff, because we've got so much coming in the game and so much is going to change. But it's also really exciting because it's a constant challenge as well.

So sometimes, John, you tell me if I'm wrong here on this. Sometimes when a ship performs one way, whether that's good or bad, it's performing that way because it's been tuned in anticipation of this thing that's coming down the line. And because this thing that's coming down the line hasn't arrived yet, it may be underperforming today or perhaps overperforming today, because whatever this thing is that's coming down the line is either going to bring it in line or it's going to bring it up to where it's supposed to be. It's not always a bug. It's not always a missing feature. It's not always just an idiotic decision by somebody on the team. It's just like the sources of the invisibility bug we talked about. It can actually be multiple sources all conspiring together to make a particular ship or vehicle perform a certain way at a certain time. And it's one of the big never-ending challenges of running a live game in the middle of our development.

Yeah, for sure. With all these features that come down the line, sometimes you need to look at the balance. What would make it perfect or really good now? And then how would we want that to be really good in the future? And sometimes the numbers are so different that there's just no hope. Or you can try and get the numbers somewhere in the middle, or you can have one set of numbers and then a completely different set of numbers. And yeah, because we have so many ships and so many different systems, sometimes some things just are how they are.