Developers cover Alpha 3.15's physicalized inventory, local inventory as a placeholder, Knickknacks, server crash recovery and the new death and downed rules. They also cover overdose abuse fixes, Grim HEX, Orison security, loot boxes and bug policy.
TL;DRFor 3.15 and the latest PTU patch, using the tractor beam, medical gun and med pens on other players is disabled, while self-use still works, with a more elegant solution to allow interaction planned later.
So if you've played the latest PTU patch, you will notice that we have disabled the use of the multi-tool tractor beam and the medical gun and the dedicated medical gun and the other med pens to be able to target other players. So that will mitigate or will remove the scenario that has been described with the roving overdose squads. We sat down and discussed this, myself, Todd, Tony, Chris, about how we wanted to handle it for 3.15 and going forward. Obviously, the ultimate goal is to have green zones be that you can get anything out. We're not arbitrarily stopping you from doing those things. And then there are mechanisms in place, whether that is AI guard security to be able to... Because of where we were at with 3.15 and the cycle, we felt that the most prudent solution right now was to kind of keep the status quo, which was as it is in 3.14, as it has been for a long time, which is to prevent essentially interaction in the green zones. The main reason behind this because of the most prudent is that if you do suffer an injury in a green zone and you do regenerate at a hospital, you don't lose your gear, you don't lose your equipment, because essentially we simulate that AI security saw you and then came out and rescued you and then took you back to hospital. So even though you regenerate in a medical gown, when you go to your location inventory, all of your equipment that you were wearing is still there. So we felt that for 3.15, the safest option was to do that. We did discuss for 3.15 the potential ability to just go, hey, well, maybe you can get your weapons out and you can only fire them at criminals. But we thought that might be just throwing more petrol onto the bonfire. And I think if we were earlier in the cycle and we'd done some of these changes, because we had to focus on quite a lot with inventory and healing, they're two huge intrusive features, potentially we could have gone down that road. But for now, for 3.15 and the latest PTU patch, it has been disabled. But we will be looking into the future about how to more elegantly solve it and allowing interaction, because that's what we want. The tractor beam is supposed to be loading up cargo boxes. Although I did read one guy was like, oh, I can't send hot dogs and ice cream to people in the landing zone with my tractor beam anymore. So I'm sorry for that person. But yeah, we do want to have it in the end.
Okay, so to make sure that I understand, the intention for right now, for 3.15, for the immediate future, is to disable the medi guns and all the med pens inside green zones?
Just to be clear, that's to disable it on other people. You can still use it. You can still get the gun out, you can still get the med pens out and use them on yourself. We're just disabling being able to use it on other people.
TL;DRWith the current placeholder local inventory, party members cannot share ship items since each person sees only their own, but true physical inventory is intended to be accessible by any player.
Well, essentially, going forward, we still have the placeholder solution of local inventory. So we didn't want to put loads of engineering time into a placeholder solution, which is the local inventory, which is the temporary bag of holding. So the answer is, going forward, absolutely yes. We want org members and other players to be able to access inventories and share things. With the current implementation of local inventory, the answer is no. So that is on a per person inventory. So if I go onto a ship and it's your ship, Jared, I can open up the ship inventory and it will only be my ship inventory. And if you open up the ship inventory, it will only be your ship inventory. But local inventory, as I've said, I think on multiple ISCs and SCL live before, local inventory is a placeholder solution until we have true physical inventory, which will be lockers, compartments, weapon racks, cargo hold, so on and so forth. And that will be accessible by any player.
TL;DRShip components can't be moved because inventory spans several teams and couldn't all be delivered at once; the intention is a future hangar management app, with the current friction accepted as groundwork.
The short answer, and I'll give a long answer to give at least some exposition. The short answer is because inventory is larger than just one pillar or one team. And to have all of that aspect of the ship side, which is kind of all physicalized cargo and things like that, we weren't able to deliver it all at once. So that's the short answer. The long answer is that there is going to be an intention that, like we did with the PMA to the inner thought inventory system, we'll be moving away from the VMA towards more like a hangar management app. And that hangar management app then allows you to manage all of your items and gear at the hangar, and that's where you then go and go, I want to take my repeater or laser cannon or whatever out of storage and put it onto a ship. And then NPCs would come out essentially and do that. So essentially there are two kind of separate systems in terms of the vehicle management and the player management, the personal management, and there is a gray area in between, where this is the pitfalls of working on a live game, that not everything always aligns up due to just the amount of work. And this is one of those cases where, okay, in the short term, it might be a more painful process, but it's moving us closer to the final goal of where we want to be. And that's the case with a lot of the systems that we add live. Sometimes people go, well, why have they done X, Y, Z? That's worse than what we had. And then they realize, oh, that's because that's the groundwork for this next piece of functionality that allows us to move forward. So in the case of ships and personal inventory, we had to remove global inventory, which is where everything was stored. So in global inventory, all of your items were stored, all of your weapons, all of your ships, your ship weapons, and we had to move everything into local inventory. And because we had to do that step, that has created that friction. But the intention is you will be able to do that in the future. But for now, yes, that's something we unfortunately have to accept.
So it gets moved to the new player's list. So there will be obviously probably edge cases, and there's a difference in terms of ownership. But the premise is that if I drop a gun and you pick up that gun, that gun is then moved to your Knickknacks app and then you can then track it. But there will be further rules around that probably in the future around the legality of whether you have stolen that or whether I can mark it as stolen and so on and so on. We've talked a lot about that in terms of moving that forward. But for now, it is the simple matter of you pick that gun up, that gun's yours.
TL;DRIn 3.15, looted or destroyed subscriber items are lost to you but stay on your account and are re-entitled in 3.16; a longer-term way to recover stolen items is intended but unresolved.
So specifically for 3.15, if you die or if you go into a downed state and somebody loots those items, or your ship blows up and you can't get back to those items, you will not have access to those items anymore, whether the new player has stolen them or whether they've been vaporized. So you will lose them in 3.15. They are not removed from your account. So when 3.16 comes around and we re-entitle all the items, you will be re-entitled all those items. So that's the short term, what will happen in 3.15. The intention long term is that we have a mechanism in the game that allows you to kind of associate yourself as a player inside the game with those items. And if those items are then stolen or taken or whatever, we will have a mechanism for you to be able to get those back. Now, I don't think it will be a simple matter of just an insurance claim where you just put the insurance claim and then you get it back, because first off, real life insurance is incredibly complex. Lots of people do insurance fraud. So it's like I die and then I claim my insurance back and then I just go and loot my body and I'm duplicating items. So we might have a system where that item is associated by me. I've registered the item if I've got a special weapon or whatever. And then if that person gets picked up by UEE security or it comes into the hands of the law, then it's given back to you. Similar to if my car got stolen and the police found my car and it was still drivable and usable, then it would be returned to me. So there will be mechanisms in the future inside the game that will allow you to potentially get these items back. There's still lots of questions that we need to resolve on our end. But just to be clear, for 3.15, somebody loots your subscriber items, that player will take them, but they were not removed from your account. So come 3.16, they will be re-entitled to you.
We are trying to add it. So it's something that has been on the list for us to add. Obviously, these systems are quite complex. So there's been lots of bugs that we've been going through, and the engineering teams have been trying to get as many bugs as they can fixed. It is still on. I actually got an update today from one of the engineers. It is something that we want to do to try and help. It's basically the gravestone in other games, right, that you can go back and find it. Obviously, your body is still there, so if you do remember where you did die, then you should be able to go back and retrieve it. But we're trying to add a marker. Whether it makes it into 3.15 or not will be dependent on how many bugs we get.
It'll more than likely be, in terms of the lore, some kind of mission marker that is associated with you, and then it's your scanner kind of thing that is able to pick it up. But yes, it's something that we do want to add to the game.
TL;DRSuch deaths happen because physics collisions deal huge damage, exceeding the threshold that skips the downed state, and these are bugs they say they will eventually track down and fix.
Same with trolleys. So interestingly, the reason why you die is because you take massive amounts of physics damage. It's the same with ramps. It's the same with trolleys. And the way that the downed state works, and I think I described this in one of the ISCs, is that if you take more damage than your entire health bar, essentially times two, you go past downed and straight to dead. So essentially, if you get shot with an Idris railgun, you're dead. There's no, oh, I managed to survive for a little bit and somebody can rescue me. It's like, no, no, no, you die straight away. Whereas if you only take a certain amount of damage, you go to downed. So in the cases here where you're dying because you're falling down the stairs or a trolley's hit you or something to do with the tractor beam, it's generally because something's gone wrong and you've taken a significant amount of physics damage because you've intersected something. Do you remember old games like Hitman or whatever, where the ragdoll would get stuck and then just explode into the air? It's because there's been a physics collision.
Exactly. And that's basically what's happened. So there's these collisions that happen. I think I saw one where it's like 80,000 damage or something. You basically just get insta-gibbed. So that's why.
So to the external viewer, it looks like the wind just knocked you over and you suddenly died, and it's like, thanks wind. But what's actually happening is the physics is causing you to impact the ground so many times, or whatever surface you've hit.
It's whether the player gets desynchronized or something. These are complex problems to solve. Generally it's lots of different ones, but we'll eventually get them.
TL;DRThey say random deaths must be tracked down and fixed, but features can't be held back for existing bugs because releasing them live is how issues get found.
Yes, I suppose this comes back to a live game in development. I'll touch on this later, but we've obviously put in the server crash recovery to allow us to reset. Obviously, client crashes are more varied in their manner because lots of different things can happen. Or, for example, just the random deaths where you just walk up the stairs and you fall through the floor or whatever. Fundamentally, we need to track them down and we need to fix them. But if we prevented releasing features to the live game because of existing bugs, we'd never be able to release anything. So we need to kind of push them live to see how they all interact with each other. Trolleys is a good one, for example. We uncovered quite a few issues with trolleys. We ended up fixing a lot of the times where the ramp would destroy the ship because of trolleys, because people were squashing trolleys and opening ramps onto trolleys. It's just one of those cases where we need to get feedback on them, we need to highlight them, and then we need to make time to fix them and go through. But there's just so many of them. But we can't slow down the development and trying to get these integrated systems in there, because we need to get feedback on those systems as well. If we don't release the features, we wouldn't be able to test them, but it is what it is.
TL;DRThey argue every release tier is a testing environment and that fixing all bugs wouldn't help, because ongoing feature work keeps creating new ones until features are complete.
This is a good chance to remind folks that every tier of Star Citizen Alpha is a testing environment. You've got the Evocati at the base, the testing environment. Then you've got the PTU, testing environment. But even when we release it, it's still Star Citizen Alpha, which is still a testing environment. So it is all for testing. The whole pyramid there, or the whole ladder, as it were.
The other thing to understand, I think, is: imagine I could click my fingers and we went to zero bugs. So I just did that, right? Zero bugs. That's it. With three months development of a 500-man dev team adding new stuff, we would generate loads more bugs, because generally, I remember hearing somebody say game development is you're basically working on a broken game 95% of the development until the end, where you fix everything and then that's it. But then the game comes out, they stop adding more stuff, right? So for us, we've still got fundamental systems going in, like inventory and healing, and they touch a lot of systems. So even if we fixed all the current bugs, we'd still generate new bugs.
And that's why we're trying to get all the features in there, until we can get to where we go, okay, we're content complete from a feature perspective. Now let's close that out, polish it, 1.0, and then go from there, the full release. But until then, that's the nature of live releases.
And there are things you can discover with this many testers, and things that you can discover with this many testers. And there's things that you can only diagnose with all of the available testers that we have in the Star Citizen community. Again, that's why the live environment is very important. Never forget it. The live environment is still Star Citizen Alpha. It's still a test environment. It's why we have the wonderful Issue Council, so folks can still help us identify these things and repro these things and help us to determine the actual cause of these things. Because just like the wind knocking you over and you dying, you go, oh, the wind just killed me. But it's actually not the wind. It's the thing that it knocked you into.
TL;DRServer crash recovery periodically saves ship state so after a server crash you get back your ship with its cargo and inventory, though anything gained between saves is lost; it's a stopgap until persistence and server meshing.
So in a nutshell, if the server goes down, previously when you log back on, you would have to request your ship to come back, the ASOP terminals, and essentially you'd be given a brand new ship. It wouldn't be the ship that you were currently flying around with. So anything that you had on there, like cargo, would be gone. So with server crash recovery, what happens is essentially we run heartbeats to determine the state of your ship. And essentially if the server then goes down, when you request your ship when you log back on, it will actually be the ship that was recorded at the previous heartbeat. So you would actually get the ship back, and probably in 99% of cases it would be the ship that you were just flying. So it would have all your cargo in it. And fundamentally as well, it would also have all of your ship inventory. So if you've put all of your armor and things into the ship inventory, you will retain that. So that's a really big one: if the server does go down and you log back on, you should be able to request your ship to come and it will be the ship that you essentially were flying previously.
And when we talk about heartbeat, just to be super clear for people, obviously we can't be continuously writing every single player, every single millisecond of playing to the database; that would just destroy the performance. So there will be an interval. And I'm not going to give you a number right now because it's a thing that's in flux and will be continuously changing. But there will be an interval where it goes write, and then you'll play for a while, write, and then play for a while and write.
Exactly. So there will be occasions where you die between the heartbeats. Like if you just got 70k cargo between the heartbeats and then you die, that 70k is going to be gone. So it'll be important, when it comes online, and it's already kind of working on PTU right now, to recognize whether it was broken. Like, oh, I didn't get my stuff back. No, it could still be working. You just might have lost your thing between the heartbeats. So it'll be an interesting new reporting challenge.
To be clear, this is a placeholder solution until full persistence and server meshing comes online, which will remove this all together. But at least this is a really good stopgap while we have personal inventory go live, so that you should really be able to play with confidence that you're not going to lose it based off a server crash. Obviously, you might be unlucky, but for the majority of people, it should be a vast improvement.
So essentially there's been some tech changes in the background, which caused some changes in the distribution in some of the biomes. So they've slightly changed. We are aware that some biomes are missing some of the elements, but the art team are working feverishly to try and get some of those back. So that's pretty much that in a nutshell.
Yeah, if you've watched some of the SCLs where we talk about the procedural application of biomes, as the tech grows, some of the configurations change. And it's one of those things where you don't want to constantly go back while it's evolving and just keep changing the same number over and over again every time. So when the tech gets to another kind of threshold, it goes, all right, now it's time to go back and make sure all those other things that kind of got lost along the way go back.
Yeah, essentially the way it technically works is obviously there's a height map, and that height map gives you a solid ground, and then it has a distribution of all the assets. So things like rocks, trees and all that kind of thing. And then obviously we have buildings that are placed, and they're placed to fit onto the height map that's been generated. So essentially any time where there's been some slight changes in the technology, such as when we did the different variants of the terrain, it slightly changes that height map. And then that just creates that cascading effect for all the others. So it generally means the artists have to go back in and do a bit of jiggery pokery to get back to the status quo.
TL;DRRichard Tyrer says feedback on inventory and healing has been generally positive, with inventory improving through quality-of-life additions and bug fixes, though more work remains and live play will reveal more.
I think my biggest takeaway is that I think people have been generally happy with the features that have gone live. I think going back all the way from Evocati to now, if I treat them individually, if I look at inventory, I think when inventory went live, it was fairly rough. We had some really big issues with the timings and the performance. I think I saw like 89 minutes to be able to change a helmet. And the scaling of the icons was not scaling correctly to the resolutions. So when we were making it on 1080, it's fine. And then somebody was going to 4K and the icon was going like five times the size. It wasn't going small, it was going huge. So people are playing on high resolutions, which you'd expect, people who are playing Evocati to have decent PCs. They've got, like, I can only see one icon, and then I'm scrolling for hours and hours because they've got lots of subscriber items. And it's like, what is this? And so I think we had some significant bugs that really had a large detriment on the experience. We also had quite a lot of quality of life that was kind of missing, that we were still adding, and based on the feedback from Evocati that we did add. I think in the version that went in yesterday, I think since Evocati, we've added sorting, we added filter categories. We should be adding instant filters so you don't have to apply them. I saw that yesterday. We've added interaction points for consumables, so like med pens and magazines and grenades, so that it moves the interaction points away from the character. And you also get tooltip comparisons that correspond to the numbers, so you can quickly see, okay, is that full? Is that half capacity in terms of magazines? So we've added a lot of improvements in quality of life between now and then. We've also been fixing a lot of the bugs that we've had. The biggest priority ones where we've had items being eaten and so on and so forth. They're super critical, right? We don't want anybody losing anything. So I think inventory is starting to get to where we want it to be for our tier zero at least. And I think that's good to see. We still want to do lots of improvements and we'll be rolling straight onto them. So I'm happy in terms of the progress there. And I think I've seen some feedback threads now where people are still giving us feedback, and it's great. And we're reading it all and digesting that and taking it down for improvements. I think for healing, other than some people don't like beams, and that's some people's preferences, I think that has gone down well. I think we've seen lots of people being really engaged with the healing and medical gameplay in terms of the different drugs, in terms of the masking of those drugs and injuries. Obviously, medical beacons are going live as well, and we've seen quite a lot of usage in that, so that's good to see. I think I'm really looking forward to seeing both of these go into the live environment to see how they play out in a more natural environment, because obviously on the PTU, people are jumping on there to try and test the features, which is what we need. It'll be interesting to see how they percolate to just general play over a period of time, because it's kind of like when we released actor status T0. They take a long time to really get a sense of how the player base is going to play with them at scale. But overall, I think the feedback has been fairly positive across the two features. And we're not finished. We've still got a long way to go. But yeah, it's been good.
Yes, I think for 3.15, there's not much we will be doing in terms of if you do get an injury in prison, which is unfortunate. The one thing is that we will eventually add medical facilities to the prison. As you can see now, for example, where we've linked the space station to the landing zone, because not all landing zones have a hospital, we've had to basically create a few stopgap solutions for us to solve those problems. But the goal is to add medical facilities in all locations you would expect medical facilities to be added. And the prison should be one as well. So for now, it's an unfortunate... But it is something that we are discussing and we do want to see if we can get something fixed.
That's the next step of personal inventory. So if this is personal inventory T0, personal inventory T1 is the removal of local inventory so that it becomes physicalized inventory. And that's where lockers and gun racks and armor cupboards will be used properly. And then those armor cupboards will be used to save loadouts. So you'll be able to say, okay, this is my exploration suit. This is the armor, also ammo and backpack and guns and med pens that I want on this suit. And you'll be able to save that in a physical locker. And then you'll be able to interact with that locker and quickly put that on. So that's the next iteration of personal inventory.
TL;DRInventory is meant to be believable by volume, so for now you can drag or tractor-beam bodies back to your ship to loot, with other options like a hover trolley wanted later.
So the goal of the inventory right now is to make sure that it's a believable system in terms of the actual volume and items that you can fit within that space. So for example, if you've got a 120 litre backpack, the description I always give, and I think I've said this on one of our shows before, is I can't fit the snooker cue in there because it's so long, but if I put it through a wood chipper, I would be able to fit the volume in there. So we take into account the item dimensions and the volume. The intention right now is that you can either body drag those enemies back to your ship, or you can tractor beam. I'm not sure many people have been using the tractor beam, but you can actually tractor beam dead bodies. You can tractor beam a dead body back to your ship and then loot it that way. We do want to offer other abilities down the line, other features that are around that, whether that's a hover trolley or whatever that you can take out and then load up and then take in. It's the old Ultima Online pack horse. But yeah, that's the further iteration onto the iteration we have now.
TL;DRClothes not fitting in backpacks is a bug; cloth items should have a very low volume, and a fix is intended for 3.15, though bulky suits still won't fit.
Well, actually, that's a bug. So this is something that's happened. I spoke to the guys. We've actually done a full pass now and it should be going in today. I saw an update on it. Essentially, anything that's like cloth or clothes, even though you see a large icon, it should have a very low micro SCU value. So an undersuit should easily fit in a backpack. I know it doesn't right now, but that was a bug. There's something going wrong with the size of this. So if you've got a backpack and you've got clothes or anything that you think should be able to fold, that should fit in. And we will be making that fit in for 3.15. It's when you've got, hey, I want to be able to put the Caldera suit in my backpack. It's like, well, you would never fit that. I mean, it's like a giant space suit.
So we talked about Grim HEX, and it's still a topic of discussion. Unfortunately, Grim HEX doesn't have all of the facilities that all the other starting locations have. So obviously, when we take into account new players, and new players come into the verse, we have to make sure that you can get your ground vehicle out or you can get access to your ship and so on and so forth. So it's not to say that we won't add Grim HEX as a starting location in the future. For 3.15, it won't be a starting location, but it is something that we are actively discussing, Todd, myself, Chris, Tony, about Grim HEX. So all you criminals out there, we do want to do you a solid, but for now, you'll have to be UEE until you go criminal.
Yeah, I think there also needs to be consideration for the beginning player experience. For the first-time player of Star Citizen who doesn't know any better, is Grim HEX the place we want them to start that journey if they've never experienced the PU before? That's definitely got to be factored into the conversation.
Yeah, there's always more considerations than people think about. There's lots of different angles that you can take on it. But yeah, like I said, it's definitely on the table. We're discussing it, but I doubt we'll be adding it as a starting location for 3.15.
TL;DRThey want your character to persist for a period after logging out, as ships do, to stop log-out escapes; whether it makes 3.15 depends on bugs and other factors.
That's a really good question. So what we want to do is essentially what we did with the ships, where if somebody logs out, if somebody's around you and still fighting you or whatever, your character persists for a certain amount of time. A lot of MMOs do that.
Yeah, so that's what we want to do, that you persist for a certain amount of time, so you can't basically exploit the system to get away. We're looking into that, essentially, to see what we can do in the meantime.
Yeah, because right now, if you just ninja log, then you can escape. And that's not the intention. And that's people exploiting the system. So we are looking into a way of doing that. Whether it makes 3.15 or not will be dependent on bugs and other factors.
TL;DRThe speakers say new features always bring new bugs, so CIG sets aside time each quarter for bug fixing, but releasing features versus fixing bugs is a balance and bugs will persist until content complete.
I touched on this in one of the previous questions, in terms of these are large systems and complex systems, and we want to get them out in terms of the player experience. Obviously we want to try and fix as many bugs as possible and make it as polished an experience as we can. But obviously when you're adding to a significant code base like Star Citizen, there's always going to be new bugs or old bugs that reappear. So we do have an initiative at CIG that's been in place for probably the last two years, since I can remember, where we've been essentially making more time every quarter to fix bugs or technical debt, so we can go in and basically fix as many bugs. Previously, if you look at the graph, teams were essentially just accumulating bugs every quarter. And we were like, that's not acceptable. We need to start bringing them down. And so now we're starting to see some teams... other teams are flatlining, so they're trying to add more time so they can fix more bugs. But fundamentally, it's always a balance. It's a balance of when do we release new features versus fixing bugs. Some people were like, well, why don't you just fix all the bugs and then add new features? Like I touched on before, anytime that you add anything new, it generates new bugs. Even fixing bugs generates bugs. So there will always be fixing bugs until we get to content complete, and then we can go into more of a release cycle. But for now, like you said, we are Star Citizen Alpha, and we're still getting in some of the fundamental systems like inventory, like healing. And there'll be other big systems coming like server meshing and the hangar management app and how you manage your ship loadout. So there's lots still to come.
TL;DRNothing super rare is believed to be in the current loot boxes, some items there shouldn't be (like the two-handed tractor beam, to be removed), and rarer exclusive items are intended for the future.
There are things in loot boxes that shouldn't be in loot boxes, as well as things in loot boxes that you can't find in stores. Loot boxes right now, I don't think there is anything super duper rare, but this is just the T0 of loot boxes. With loot boxes generally, I think when we did Evo, people were getting Squadron items and flares, and the intention is that you should be able to find rarer things in the future. But in 3.15, and this is about 3.15, I don't believe there's anything super duper rare, but you never know.
So I want to reiterate the answer there. Some things that you're currently finding in loot boxes are not supposed to be there. But at the same time, there are supposed to be things that you can only find through exploration out in the verse, and that can be either different color variations of existing items that only exist in loot boxes, like different skins or whatever, or it can be full-on variants of stuff. Or we reserve the right to put whole things in there that you just get from the loot box and not from a store. We want to encourage players to get out there and explore the universe. And part of how we do that is by putting things that can only be discovered out there. So right now, I can't tell you which is which. When you look at one of those super weird things that you're finding, I can't tell you whether that's an intentional thing or whether that's a bug.
Essentially, they're going through the list now and making sure that before we go live with 3.15, it's all what should be in there. We've got a lot of items, so they're just going through and making sure the ones that should be in there are in there, and then we'll go from there. But I don't think there's anything ultra rare right now.
The two-handed tractor beam is not supposed to be live. So I don't think it even works. But yeah, the two-handed tractor beam is not supposed to be live. So that's one thing we'll definitely be removing.
Not for 3.15. You can't make crates. But the intention is that you will eventually be able to buy boxes that you can then put stuff in and other people can share. And the first time we would be able to do that would be the cargo refactor, where you'll be able to buy an empty box and use that in your cargo to store things. And then other people will be able to come and interact with that box.
So basically the way that they want to have trading between players is obviously going to be a different app. So there are plans to allow you to be in Knickknacks and be like, I want to transfer this to someone else. And then it will take them to the player trading app. But I don't think there's anything short term to do that. And when I say short term, in terms of 3.15, there's no plans in 3.15 to allow that, but it is a plan that will be done eventually.
TL;DRThe current magic toy box ship inventory is placeholder only and will go, with physical inventory in the world, such as cupboards and racks, being the goal.
Magic toy box ship is placeholder. That's it. The magic bag of holding, local inventory, the version that you just magically open and see items in an ethereal box or an ethereal space, is placeholder. So I'm just going to say that again. Magic toy box ship is placeholder. That will go. It will always be physicalized inventory. You will have your inner thought that manages your own items, looking in your backpack, and then you will deal with external inventory, interacting with a physical cupboard in the world, and you'll have physical inventory, which is interacting with things that you actually see. I can see that armor. It's in that armor cupboard. I open the door. I can pick up that armor and put it on myself. Any time where that is not the case, it's placeholder. And I think I've said that like a hundred times.
I know we said it in the whole segment dedicated to it, but not everybody watches everything. Not everybody takes in everything that they watch. And it's one of those messages that's worth repeating over and over.
Ooh, final. That's a harsh word. But no, this is the T0 for the inventory and looting system. We will keep iterating and continuing on it. Obviously, if you've played Evocati through to now, you've already seen a huge amount of change around that UI. So we're always going to be iterating and working on it. But it's the one that is going live for 3.15, and hopefully lots of people enjoy it, and then we'll take further feedback and then continue to iterate it when we do T1 and T2 and so on and so forth.
That's specifically my pillar that's not doing it. So this is when we did the change for me going to Squadron to do polished features. We're like a ship tanker. That discussion was me at the front shouting to the person at the back to change heading. This is the last patch where we have the T0s, and then from now on, we should be moving to more polished features.
And again, that only applies to the actor feature team stuff. You'll still see T0 stuff from the other teams. It's just a change in direction for one pillar at the moment.
TL;DRThe speakers say how hardcore survival gets can't be answered yet and will be settled through testing and feedback, aiming for realism brought back to fun, with eating and drinking currently very light.
Well, I think it's a rock and a hard place in some respects. I think strength in numbers, but then obviously that's the premise, that you should play together with other people and that helps you out. But to answer this question specifically, we've got actor status in terms of eating and drinking. We want the game to be around resources that players can collect, obviously homesteads eventually, and those homesteads will be areas that you can store your own things, and obviously there will be raiding and pirates and all of that kind of thing. So I suppose Chris has a vision in his mind of what he wants Star Citizen to be. Obviously there are elements of games like Valheim and Tarkov and Rust that tie into that, but Star Citizen is its own game. And it will set its own boundaries with how it executes those mechanics. So a good example is eating and drinking. Really, in terms of comparisons to other survival games, we're very, very light on eating and drinking. I think it's like 10, 12 hours if you just stood still in the PU before you have to eat anything. So if you play Ark, you have to eat every five minutes, whereas it's dependent. I think we want to have those mechanics that we're moving towards, which has always been the intention since way before I even joined Cloud Imperium. It's only now that we're delivering on them. So I think it's a hard answer to talk about, because fundamentally we're still getting everything in there, and the balance will really dictate that answer, because how hardcore do we want to be? It could take me five minutes to just change all the data to say you have to drink every half an hour. But that's not the game that we want. We want a game that is more realistic, probably the wrong word, but a game that is more cohesive to the Star Citizen experience, that you're this space explorer out in the verse, and you've got ships that have all these different functions, and you have beds in there. So eventually we will want players to have tiredness. Or we have showers. So do we want hygiene? Well, yeah, that's part of actor status. I think it's on the roadmap.
There's a couple of things to dissect there. Chris has always said, you take it to the point of realism and then you bring it back to the point of fun. There will be people that chastise it as, that's not real, like eating only every 10 hours or 12 hours or whatever. It is always about that balance. It is always take it to the point of realism, then bring it back to the point of fun. And that's the thing that we discover together. That is why we have a live environment in our alpha. We don't just set out with a number of anything, like, oh, this is the picture we want to build. We are truly developing this together. I know sometimes that sounds like a buzzword or whatever. But I would hope that anybody who's been watching me for the last six, seven years I've been here knows I'm going to be frank and honest with people, to the point that sometimes makes my bosses upset, that we are making this together. Your feedback gets incorporated into this stuff, and our ideas for the game evolve along with the experience and the feedback that you give us. So it can be a very difficult question to answer today, because the answer will be discovered together through our continual development and our continual testing, is what I was getting at.
And there's also, when you take into account, are we just a pure simulation? We're not. We're simulating a universe and all those things inside of that universe, but there are things in there that are what most people would expect to happen. So a good example is, what would you expect to happen if you walk up a mountain? You expect it to get colder. And the closer you get to outer space, people think, well, it should get colder. But if you actually look at the real science behind what happens to temperature between leaving the ground and entering space, it gets colder, then it gets hotter, because the atmosphere thins, and then it gets colder again and then it gets hotter again. And it's like this crazy graph that's hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold. And if we had implemented that as an absolute mirror, a pure simulation of temperature, which, to be fair, would have been incredibly complex, most people would have come back and said it was a bug, that that was happening. And we would have had to explain, no, no, no, that's real life. So we have to take into account that we want to simulate real life, but it's what people expect. It's people's expectations of what real life is. And I think that's a balance that we want to have. And we want to push for as much realism as we can where it makes sense. And by the way, 10 to 12 hours was 10 to 12 hours of our world time. That's not 10 to 12 hours of in-game time, which is much longer in-game time.