Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Alpha 3.5 Discussion

Biggest technical challenge of Alpha 3.5...

Is it making a planet entirely covered by man-made structures?

Yeah, dealing with making that look good. Right now, they've been working on that for a while, so I think there's nothing in there right now that scares us. But obviously then there's just the tech challenges of getting missions up and working over there, getting the content working, getting the no-fly zone, which is different than the no-fly zone at Hurston, working, and just the technical challenges of building a city planet. And then from there, there were graphical improvements that they wanted to improve on, like the day-night cycle and how the planet glows at night, just like a city does versus the countryside kind of thing. So working out those types of things.

This week's ATV had a feature with Luan from the UK environment team. One of the things that we were discussing, it didn't make it into the show, we're going to have it in a segment later on, was the glows. Hurston doesn't have to emanate its own light. I mean, it does from Lorville, but not on a planet-wide scale. So figuring out how a planet can emanate that light without building a million light sources that just kill our GPUs is an interesting challenge.

And it's the transition, too. So basically what we showed at CitizenCon two years ago was kind of canned, meaning we knew what the establishing shot was going to be from that space station. Versus once it goes live, then the planet's rotating, so therefore you're going to be dealing with the twilight zone and that transition.

It depends on what you consider restricted. So the idea behind it is that we have a minimum flight height for the planet, just because it's a city planet. And in particular, the way that we're building things, it makes sense from a lore standpoint, like you just want to be able to land anywhere. One of the tech things that we are building is the ability to have that planet-wide and then be able to have kind of minus zones, so basically subtraction areas. We will have buildings that extend above the no-fly zone, so you'll still be able to weave between those and fly around, and then you'll also be able to land on those buildings. In the future, we're working on being able to actually enter into those buildings and have meaningful outpost combat or outpost missions associated with going in there and dealing with whatever is put in front of you.

We were actually talking about this a little bit before we went live. Today, in 2019, you can't take a Cessna and fly anywhere you want over Los Angeles or New York or Frankfurt or whatever. In civilized society, suburban society, there are flight restrictions. There are places where you can fly. There are places where you can land. And when one extrapolates that out a thousand years from now into the timeline of Star Citizen, where everybody has a Cessna essentially and is flying around, you have to imagine those restrictions have to be more stringent in that regard. And then when you're talking about a planet that's covered in man-made structures and stuff like that, it has to be an interesting challenge in balancing what realistically makes sense for the society in fiction, because we love to make everything diegetic and in lore and in fiction, technical needs, and then of course for gameplay purposes, griefing, people not just crashing ships into everybody running around down below and stuff.

Exactly. And the reason why we didn't have to create this with Levski is obviously because everything is encapsulated and you land in the hangars and everything like that. There's nothing that's open air. But that's obviously the problem with Lorville, is that that's open air and theoretically people could crash. And from a gameplay experience, running around these social areas and then all of a sudden ships running down on you, you're being shot, nobody wants to experience that. So that's why we worked on the no-fly zone. There's still a lot of stuff that we feel we need to do in order to improve it and make it better. But now we need to take it to a planet level and move it that way.

Now, that's not to say that every planet is going to be this. Every planet's not covered head to toe in man-made structures and stuff like that.

And I think even when we talk about Lorville or we talk about these planets, when we build villages or towns or these outposts that are around there, those don't have no-fly zones. It would be the major landing zones that have that.

Yes.

Do you want to expand on that?

So basically what we have in the schedule, from an internal perspective, is working on villages, working on towns, and building out the planets. Right now, again, what we do is we put out a first iteration on a planet, and then from there it's about continuing to build the tech and build the way that we do things. So a lot of the way that we're doing our space stations now, which is what we consider a modular building set, we will take that and put that onto towns. But we need to make sure that the tech gets built up a little bit more. And obviously there's other space stations that we want to build as well. We're going to focus on that and then from there the team will roll onto towns and obviously derelicts, outposts, underground bunkers, so on and so forth. So yes, that is the plan. It's just time and resources.

We've been doing some prototyping on that. So one of our guys here in Frankfurt has been doing some very, very early prototypes and seeing how we can build that from a modular standpoint, and then design and art will have kind of a powwow sync next week and see, are there certain no-no's to stay away from, if you get the ravines, or kind of visual language of can you get lost in these things? And right now the answer is yes.

Oh, yes. I saw the same prototype that you did.

Yes, you could get lost. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It really is just going to be us going through a little bit more R&D on that and figuring out what works, what doesn't work, and then seeing, okay, what are the different tile sets that we need to create? Rock, ice, magma, whatever.

I think it looks very promising. And then from there, it's figuring out metrics. Does it look like you can actually jump up there, and then you actually can jump up there? What are things that happen with the AI in there? What if you take a vehicle in there? What happens if there's water in the cave? Do you transition and swim? What happens if you drown? So on and so forth, all these systems that we just kind of walk through in our minds that a lot of times the artists don't think about the same way that we do. And so there is that back and forth that happens. And then at that point in time, I think we're ready to reveal something.

Yeah, we've started internal discussions on it, and we haven't nailed down anything on how it would work, but we do see it as being very, very valid. And then it would be obviously working out... Obviously, we always want time associated with things. So you do kind of have to pay a price in one way or the other of you losing that object. But obviously versus it being completely removed from your inventory, this is I'm just paying the price of...

I think it's important to remember that things like LTI or the six-month insurance or 12-month insurance or the 72-month insurance that you got on your pledge is for the hull of the ship and the default equipment that comes with it. As of yet, there has not been any implementation of item insurance. So I can attest from playing the game myself and watching many Twitch streams and YouTube videos that lots of folks are exhausted with constantly losing their items when they die and having to rebuy them.

Yeah. And a lot of times we know it's not the player's fault, and that to me is the biggest part. Sometimes the game crashes, sometimes the server crashes, or the ship randomly blows up every now and then. So there's aspects, since we're in development, we don't want to punish the players too much, but we're still trying to work out obviously that magic middle ground of... You don't always want the answer to be, let me engage, all the time. It's, should I engage, or should I possibly run away? Should I go stealth? We want these other gameplay choices for the player to make. But right now, a lot of times, the player might not have enough information. And that, to me, is once we get scanning and radar and the heat signatures and the power and all of those things working, so that you understand how much am I flashing my ass out into the universe, versus this other person that I see, and understanding their loadout compared to my loadout. That's a lot of gameplay aspects and understanding, do I want to engage? And I think having the insurance so that in case you made a bad choice, it's not so damaging to the play experience.

Correct. And so I think this goes to what we would consider kind of secondary points of interest around planets. Those are plans. Those are talked about. And then it would be, for example, like Hurston. OK, well, do we create where the family retreats to? I don't want to say their Camp David or something like that, but basically their vacation home. The other one that we've talked about internally that we would love to get, but we need to just see time and resources, is Hurston Weapons Testing Ground. So this is where they test all the weapons, but it's a biome that would be specific to that location. And so there's those types of things in the plan, and it's just going to be balancing the going back and revisiting old planets and planets that we've released, and obviously the planets that we need to create. So right now the focus is on getting the first iterations out of New Babbage, Orison, Area 18, and basically fleshing out the system and getting all of those key pieces in place. And then the talk is, do we go to the next station or the next solar system, or do we actually go through and flesh those out a little bit more, or do we split up the team and kind of do half and half? Those are always the internal discussions that we do.

Well, we might see the first iteration. So the guy that is working on it just finished the TDD, and so I'm assuming that will be signed off in the next week. So at that point in time, real work will be made towards that. But the thing is, regarding the way that we work, in particular for internal releases, we usually have a feature cutoff of about a month before we do a release, anywhere between six weeks to a month before we do a release. And so if the feature is not ready at that time, we don't want to put it out. And that's why you see some things slip, some things are held back to a next release, just because when we play it, it doesn't live up to the standard or it's not fully implemented the way that it needs to be. And so we'll need to see how much work is able to be done on that. And then from there, it's basically just putting it into our sole editor, making sure that we have the different planets basically tagged. So meaning the law at Hurston might be different than the law at Orison versus Area 18 kind of thing, just because you're dealing with different security forces. That's something that we need to work out internally. But I think that you'll see the first iterations maybe 3.5, definitely 3.6.

We do lots of internal playtests here, and when new folks come on board, they spend a lot of their first week or two weeks, three weeks, playing the game to become familiar with it. And we had somebody in here the week before who was playing Star Citizen for the first time, and they'd gotten most wanted and they had to go to Kareah for the first time to try to lower their...

To clear it. Yeah. And so I think, at least in speaking with Tony, there's bounty hunter things that we want to obviously create for that. And then later on, there's the prison slash jail gameplay that we want to create. I'm sure we'll do a release of that later on.

What I was getting at is, for a good six hours of the day, we just kept hearing what Spock would refer to as colorful metaphors coming from this office down the hall while the person continuously tried to reduce their criminality at Kareah. And the fine players of the Star Citizen Persistent Universe had no interest in allowing him.

Yeah. And we know that Hurston needs something like that in their area. Same with ArcCorp. It shouldn't just only be Kareah. And right now, Kareah is a certain way of doing it, versus that's kind of what Ruto and some of the mission givers in GrimHEX were really built for, was to basically hack and reduce your crime rating. So there will be other ways of reducing it. It's just we're not ready to unveil those yet.

I don't know what I can say and what I can't say on that, so I won't say anything.

I got halfway through the question and I realized that we haven't actually been weapons-free on that one yet. What I can tell you guys is it's still in active development. I got to sit in on a meeting with the folks at Turbulent a couple days ago. It's pretty cool for tiers of implementation. Rest assured, obviously, when it's ready to be shown... I show everything, don't I?

Yeah, but here's something I think we can talk about. So basically right now, the way that we've been putting our ships together, we have the bare minimum item attachments for everything, and one of the things going forward, and it will be first seen with the 300, is basically, if you think about the 350, OK, well, that will have some other item slots that theoretically the player could put what they want on there, or at least they have a choice of a few different options that they can put on there. And right now we don't have that in the game, but that's where we're moving to. So, let's say, the 300 base model doesn't have those, but the 315 has one, versus the 325 has maybe two, and the 350 has three or four kind of thing. So that's the way that we're adjusting the customizable ships.

You'll hear more about that as we get closer to the release. The release of 3.5 is scheduled for the end of quarter one. We just crossed the one-third mark of quarter one, so it's still a bit too early to have confirmed details for you.

Yeah, and a lot of the features, once we get closer to what we consider feature lock, we really start seeing what's being locked in, what's not being locked in. And then, obviously, going back to the ship customization thing, at that point in time, it's rolling it out to all the ships, making sure that from an item port standpoint, we have those empty item ports that will take different, what we consider, customizable items, whether that be, let's say, an extra radar or an extra cooler or an extra power plant. And then it's up to the player to pick and choose how they want to customize their ship.

We have it planned. Basically, right now, what we are focusing on is getting our different ammo types working. So, for example, like a tachyon or gamma or incendiary. So we're focused on getting these aspects working, and then from there, there's the gadgets, there's the grenades, there's the non-lethal aspects, but then there's also the player aspects. So being knocked out and figuring out what that actually means. So as a player, am I just seeing a black screen, and then at that point in time, I choose to basically leave my body and respawn, or do I sit there and wait to come to? So these are the aspects that I think we need to figure out and play around with a little bit from an internal standpoint. But we are very aware of the non-lethal actions and being able to subdue somebody, and it's something that we do want and we will be building.

We will be doing an adjustment to basically the way the TDDs work, and then once refineries come online, the idea would be that the TDDs is where you'd go for the commodities, and you'd go for basically being able to purchase refined goods and those types of things. For refineries, that's where you'd go and sell your refined goods, and then from there in the future, the idea would be that you can process it and then take it somewhere else and sell it. In the short term, I think the way that we will adjust it is basically the refineries: you sell the unrefined goods and you can buy refined goods and take them to other places. Obviously, with outposts and those aspects, that would be that you're selling unrefined goods, unless it's a mining outpost, then you're actually buying refined goods. And that's just a different way. So we will be doing a sweep through that. Rob Reininger and I are very aware of it. And in particular, once Area 18 goes in, we want to be able to create a triangle of gameplay. So for example, ArcCorp needs certain things that Hurston doesn't need, or Hurston's willing to sell, and same with basically the Crusader area. So basically creating the triangle that the players need to travel between. And then obviously when New Babbage goes in with microTech, then that will create our fourth stop. And then once we create those jump points, then each one of those solar systems on the other side of that jump point will be requesting different things as well.

Yeah, I mean, we know that we're missing black markets. That to me is one of the major ones that we want to be able to get in, so that when you're a pirate, you can go somewhere and you can sell your used bloody goods that you've ripped from somebody's corpse kind of thing. And then there's just basically getting the stores fleshed out more. Obviously having sinks, money sinks in the economy, so that your UEC actually gets used up. And I mean, we talked a little bit about that with the insurance, or even our item upgrades, our item wear and tear and basically having to repair those types of things. So having those UEC sinks to basically pull money out of the economy. If there was something specific that they were looking for versus just general economy things, we know we're doing a lot of work for that, and maybe that's something that Tony can pontificate on if you ever get him on.

It's not that everybody doesn't love Widow. Man can't live on Widow alone.

We understand why people are gravitating towards Jumptown. It's basically a way of uniting people, and in particular with the real estate that we have right now and 50 people per server, there's no real way of uniting people, and I think sometimes space can feel very, very empty. And then obviously with some of the lack of AI to basically engage, I completely understand why people are doing this, and I actually applaud whoever started it the first time. So it's fantastic.

Not right now. I know that we have a discussion with Clive regarding shards soon, and other aspects regarding the server meshing aspects soon. So I don't know exactly how that's going to impact the way that we design, the way that we build. So I think that's the first iteration. Obviously, making sure that the server is running and solid enough is another iteration to make sure that we can actually increase these counts. There's some code that I know Chris Roberts actually needs to check in that will make the ships cheaper to run. Poke, poke, Chris.

I know one of the other things that we're doing to improve performance, and one of the things that will be a step towards getting more people in, is reducing the amount of draw calls on the player characters, for instance. Right now, our player characters are anywhere from 8 to 15 draw calls because of all the different armor patches and whatever. And we're working on an optimization system using layer blends to reduce the player draw calls down considerably.

But right now, the ships update constantly. Each item attachment updates constantly. And that's the code that Chris is checking in. So the update would only happen when something is basically changing on that, so that there's a state update. And so I think once that goes in, the draw calls of the ships go down as well. Or not the draw calls, but the actual cycling update of the physics and everything like that.

So it will really depend on the elevator system. So basically if it can be done in a realistic way, Chris wants it done in a realistic way, so that there's a sense of travel. Now there's been aspects of, let's say you have a super long space station and you get into an elevator here and then we warp you to a section here. And then you see basically an establishing shot of, oh, okay, that's the landing pad that I just landed on. And then you get to the end of that, it warps you to another section and then it's opened up again and you see outside. So you get a sense of travel. And then there's some cases that we just can't do physically. So it really depends on how it's built, but for the most part, if it can be built physically, Chris wants it done that way. You can see that with the trains in Lorville, and it's the same thing with ArcCorp. There's that sense of time, that sense of progression that happens when you're going through a level.

I think I said it once before, Lorville didn't become real to me until I rode the train. It was seeing it through the windows of a train. It was like I needed something between me and it for it to seem real to me. I think it's an experience that I can relate to, taking the Metro to work or whatever. Those kinds of experiences are important.

Yeah, they are, and I think it's also trying to find the fine line. It's not a full-life, complete simulator, meaning I don't want to wait nine minutes for a train. So I think it's finding the fine line of what we feel is valid, and does that mean we need to build something on the track so that we can actually increase the amount of trains that happen there? Is it that we make the train move faster to cut down the time? So these are all basically game slash reality balances that we have to deal with. And I think players see it now, like when you're talking about Port Olisar, obviously getting out of your bed, getting to your ship, getting into it and flying off, versus the real-world time scale of doing it at Lorville. There's a certain amount of time sink that happens with Lorville that we look for, and Fred and QA will actually be looking at different ways that we can shorten it without taking the reality away.

It's one of those things where a long and drawn-out train ride or an elevator ride is cool the first time, the second time, the third time. You think, wow, this is just like real life, but on the 400th time, the 500th time...

Yeah, I mean, for example, the get-out-of-bed animations. Bender and I have talked about it, and we do have quicker bed animations. So getting those switched out and all of that, but that's something that the player experiences over and over and over again. And part of that is basically finding the fine line of, again, what's real versus kind of snappy gameplay.

If they could send through why they feel it's important to do that. I would equate it to people walking around on the phone and you wanting to go and smack the phone out of the person's hand because they're getting in the way or they're walking slower. From a gameplay standpoint, what does it really gain us? And if it's just to save a little time here and there, it would have to be kind of a big enough thing to really warrant that, just because of the way that we do the mobiGlas to make it legible. We darken the background, and we do these, not necessarily fakes, but basically the way that we focus things. And like I said, with the darkening of the background so you can actually read it, you're just going to be walking into a wall.

Games like Sea of Thieves do it pretty well. They bring up the map and you can only see the outside around the edges. And it's very much like you walking around with a map kind of thing.

But again, what does it gain us as compared to us focusing on something else? That to me is going to be always what we weigh it up against.