Developers answer fan questions on first/third-person view, hangar safety, ship IDs and spoofing, Banu trade, and regional cloud servers for the Dogfighting module. They also cover the FPS cover and prone mechanics, the Caterpillar's modules, and playtesting the economy as a board game.
The ever-raging debate over first person and third person. And the real crucial thing, I mean, having played a lot of the dogfighting now, it is very difficult without the radar. And if you're in third person, you get no radar. You get no HUD. You can see a little more, not as significantly as you might think, but you lose the benefit of all your equipment, and that's really crucial.
And there's UAVs flying around these days that give you third-person views of battlefields, so why 900 years in the future wouldn't we have the ability to have a trailing camera or something? Plus, we want you to see how pretty these ships are.
Quick answer on that is no. But I think the meaning behind it is your ships are safe. When they're in your personal hangar, your starting hangar, then your ships are safe, I think is the reasoning behind that question.
There'll be plenty of other places to board and to fight. Think about that for a moment. What if you're offline and somebody can just attack your hangar and you come back and all your stuff's gone? That would be annoying. It would be like, I'm part of this game and all of a sudden my stuff's gone. I'm not enjoying that. So that's a no.
So you'll definitely see a ship ID. Now, we've already talked about those possibly being spoofed. So that might not be accurate information. Whether or not you see who's inside it right away will depend on scanners most likely.
So the alien technology thing, I mean, if you think about it, how interesting is it to find something you can't do anything with? But we're still discussing exactly what we might let players find out there, and that will evolve over time, too.
So we had wondered about that. A lot of people wonder about that. What happens if my Scythe that I bought gets damaged? Where do I get parts for it? Go to the Banu. They might just have some. Not sure they'll have ships, because I doubt that the Vanduul will go around selling their ships, but you never can tell.
Right, so exactly. In case you didn't know, a lot of other MMOs will have set servers and data centers around the world, and however close you are will affect your ping, where ours is actually going to spin up shards or spin up servers, clusters in different areas around the world based on where people are. So at least that's how it's going to work.
TL;DRThe PvE/PvP slider is a preference, not an absolute, so PvP can't be fully avoided; both player types get plenty of content, and lawless areas carry more danger of meeting players.
The slider is a constant topic of discussion on the forum. So yeah, the slider is a preference. It is not an absolute, so no matter how far you take that slider, you can never prevent PvP content.
Well, if you're running your own server, then you can do whatever you want to some extent. So there will always be plenty of content for both types of players. It's not going to favor one over the other. We treat everything equally, or try to when we're building the game. But when you do get to lawless areas, there's certainly danger of you running into players. In more, shall we call, policed areas, even if someone were able to occasionally jump you when you've steered it away because you don't like PvP, they'd be constantly hunted and free targets for PvPers everywhere at that point.
So I went straight to the people we won't name. It's like the worst kept secret. And so our cover mechanic is sort of a combination of many things. There is a snap cover, a go-to-this-place-to-jump-into-cover. There will probably be some auto version of that as well where you can just sort of assume that you're going to duck into cover. We try to cover all levels of skill. But when you're in cover, you can move around. You're not stuck in a position. So you can move in cover and look around in cover and all the things you'd want to do to get full situational awareness.
The really simple, elegant answer that Chris gave to this question was, we give every part of the game equal attention. Just because dogfighting is coming to you first doesn't mean it's the only focus. So the economy will get plenty of love, and it will be very in-depth. I mean, we're running one of the most complex simulations I've ever seen in a game. So there'll be content.
I don't envision that you're going to have an 18 kilometer long Caterpillar in the game, but he was trying. But there are definitely distinct pieces that go in those modules already. We've already talked about that. So there will probably be varying arrangements of those available. I'm not sure if we're going to just let you stack them infinitely though.
Well, I'm not doing what we announced at the front of the show, which was design the economy. We're designing some of it. There's a lot of pieces moving here. I am able to discuss it with folks as other folks are designing the economy. But what I specifically am responsible for is to find a way to make it into a board game so that as the economy is being built, we can simulate it on a board game before we spend hours and hours programming it all. And we've got little ships and pretty counters, and you're looking at two of the star systems there.
To save time, to see as long as we can actually simulate the computer game with the board game. If we don't, then we're spinning our wheels. But as long as we can simulate the computer game with the board game, then we can get a much better idea of how the computer game will run. And we will know, guess we need to emphasize this more in the computer game, know we need to stop doing that. We find the fun things, we emphasize the fun things. It's what you do in any way of making a computer game. You find the fun things and you make them important and more fun.
TL;DRRob Irving says the first board-game playtest went about as expected, with the design department as first testers, and further rounds will refine the rules incrementally.
It pretty much went the way I was expecting. We had the design department here in Austin. First victims. They're very happy to spend two hours playing a board game rather than sitting at their desk working on things. And it went pretty much as expected. As a first test, it's still working out the, okay, does this work to simulate the computer game? But in fact, as soon as we get out from here, we're going to go and do another one. Round two. And I have refined some of the rules, especially through discussion with other folks who are playing. And we'll get closer to the game, and it's incremental. We won't have a breakthrough, I wouldn't expect. But from week to week we'll get a better and better idea of how the board game works to simulate the computer game, and from that how the computer game can be made better.
TL;DRRather than scaling the 20 systems to 100, they hope to move into the engine and add more economic detail, such as insurance, as they gain confidence, since the engine makes scaling easier.
At that point, I would hope that we'll be at the point of moving it all into the engine. And so then it'll be much easier to spin up to 100 systems because it'll be faster to generate the data.
And we are doing the economy simulator as well, as far as the electronic version of said things. We just can spin up features a lot faster in this methodology than the Canon.
In fact, yeah, I was going to say, rather than taking these 20 systems and going to 100, probably where we will spin up is to go into more detail on the economic systems. Last week, this week, we're not going to try to include insurance in it at all. There's lots of other parts of the economy that won't go in for several more weeks. And so as we get more confident, as we get a better handle on how it's playing, as we get that feedback we need to know on how the computer game works, we'll start adding the other things that are in the economy that just aren't there right now.