Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Beard Degradation

Right, so that's more than one question. That's about four in one. I'll try and go through them. So yes, there will be a little way of sort of stemming the wear and use and repair. We've talked about repair as a mechanic and fixing up items. So yeah, repairing them with your little repair tool or swapping out some items will help stem that flow. Next up, showing wear. So actually on the power MFDs at the moment, we do have a little icon, it's a little cog, I believe, that shows your current percentage of wear. So that's sort of like an absolute: this item is worn 27%. And at some point we'll have more in-depth MFDs that give you more information on that. The tricky thing with giving a time left is it's completely tied to what you're doing, your current usage. So we have something similar on the mobiGlas for your oxygen, and it tells you how much oxygen you've got left and how long you can survive, which constantly changes based on what you do. So yes, if you're stood still, it tells you you've got this much time left, and if you start running around, that time is no longer valid anymore. So we'll have the same issues with wear. It might say you've got four days' worth of wear left on this weapon. If you suddenly get into a half an hour long strenuous dogfight where you're constantly shooting, it's going to be significantly less than that, and if you've overclocked it, even less. So yes, we will have that stuff, but it's not going to be super predictive and accurate, because we just don't know what people are going to do with it. That's why we have as the first step the absolute wear indicator. So you know this item's 90% worn, I need to start thinking about swapping it for a different one. Is that all of the bits?

That was all the bits. We've got things, early stretch goal items like the AMX repair bot and the tuning kit, so there's lots of things that will eventually come online to help you tweak and not just repair, but tweak and condition and maintain your item components. And of course, UI is the one department that touches every single aspect of Star Citizen. So as usual, the development of our features sometimes outpaces the UI for them, since they're spread all over the place. But you can see that cog, you were mentioning it, it's in the power MFD.

I would not expect that to be the case. So docking, we're going to be working on alongside the Hull C. I think I've talked about this in previous episodes, why the Hull C is not out, and there's a few big pieces of tech needed. One is docking, because you need to have it docked to somewhere with all the cargo to be able to sell it, because it can't land with all the cargo. So it's a pretty useless cargo ship without that functionality. So the first stage of docking will be ship-to-station docking with the Hull C. And then the next level or tier improvement beyond that is ship-to-ship docking. So then like the Merlin and Archimedes to the Constellations, that's where that comes in. Once you've got that basic level in, then improve it with the next one.

It's always important to remember that ship development is not always in parity with the game system development. See the Reclaimer and salvage, or the Starfarer and refueling, for that matter. So they're not always one-to-one. So docking will be developed independently of the work on the Merlin and the Archimedes.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's definitely performance concerns with some of the options that we can do with headlights. For example, if you had a shadow-casting headlight, which would make sense, because obviously if you're standing in a room or a landing zone, someone flies up and shines their headlight through the window, you want to see the nice shadows casting through. But unfortunately, it's very expensive to do that.

Four-kilometer shadow casting.

Yeah, for like a four-kilometer-long light with shadow casting, then you're going to suffer both performance and the quality of those shadows. So we need to come up with different kinds of solutions to do that. One is to obviously turn off the shadow casting, but then you have implications of, then the light will just shine through the ceiling and the walls, and it won't necessarily look good. So we'll have to find a real solution sometime in the future, but for now we're just trying to at least balance it so that it works for gameplay. There might be some rough edges, but ultimately it should be an improvement.

The four-kilometer shadow casting, it's easy to forget the scale of this game. In other games where you're looking at a jeep or whatever, the headlights only have to go X number of feet out in front of the jeep, but because of the scale of our game, if you're trying to see an asteroid with enough time so you can move and not hit it, we are talking quite a ways out that these lights have to go. And if they're casting shadows, that would be crazy.

Yeah, I mean, at the moment, I think most of the headlights were reaching a range of about 100 or 200 meters, which sounds kind of realistic as a car headlight or something. But then when you consider the speeds that you're traveling at, that's just not going to work if there's an asteroid like two kilometers in front of you. You just don't have the time to stop before you hit it or before you even see it.

So that's something that you're playing with right now, actually?

Yeah, exactly. So we'll increase the range as much as we can reasonably and give a certain amount of brightness and falloff so that it feels nice and realistic. And hopefully that will cover most of the cases where you'll need a headlight for gameplay.

It's a tough one. It's something we've been discussing in the past, and the consensus is that not really, or at least not for now. One of the main reasons is we don't really want players to bypass content. We will put dangers along the way. There'll be risks involved. There'll be opportunities happening as you travel from A to B, even if it's a long journey. We don't want players to just risk-free go like, yeah, I'm here now. Also, being there, what will you do with no ships? If your ships are not there, there are a few things you can do while you're there, but we need this logistics thing to actually be a risk-reward thing. If I need to move from point A to point B, I need to bring my assets with me in order to be able to do stuff, and it needs to be risky. You need to protect yourself. Consider if another player accepts that mission to move you from point A to point B, and that ship blows up along the way. Will you be happy with that? What will happen? You'll be really annoyed. You lost basically a life, just because someone messed up, and they can mess up just to mess with you, because they might do it on purpose. We can't really allow that stuff. Whether we will look over this in the future, we'll have to see. If there's a need for this type of thing, maybe we'll look into it and find other ways to offer the same facility, but in different ways. But right now, we'd rather have you guys at least experience the content and go through the world and move through the world realistically, rather than, hey, now I'm here, now I'm there when I get back from work. If you want to leave your computer open and step onto someone's ship, and when you get back from work you step out of someone's ship, and hopefully you don't get killed along the way and your friend doesn't get his ship blown up along the way, fair enough.

Trains. Right now I'm kind of taking over the team that right now is doing trains. After we showed them at CitizenCon, we're kind of cleaning up a lot and we're trying to make sure they integrate well with other systems. We're looking into the procedural team also working with us to get tracks procedurally generated throughout cities, or elevator shafts in truck stops getting procedurally generated, based on certain rules, and the trains just functioning. We just click the button, the station gets generated, and it automatically has all the elevators or trains built into it. So we don't have to do extra manual markup, so it's going to speed things up a bit.

I love trains. One of my favorite moments of the entire playthrough at CitizenCon was when the train pulled out of the station and you got to see Lorville. Lorville's super impressive on its own, but there's something that really puts you into a place when you can have an experience that you can relate to in real life. And being on a train and seeing something out through the windows of a train, for some reason it made Lorville seem a little more real to me.

You're actually traveling through the space. We could have done it easily, where you get into a train and you get instantly teleported to the other side, which most games do. But no, Chris was adamant on this. He was like, no, this needs to travel, it needs to go through the space. You need to look out the window and understand where you are at every point of the journey.