Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay DirectorSo force reactions as a system, this is kind of our second drop that's gone live. So first, for somebody who doesn't know what force reactions are, force reactions are basically the reactions that your player character undergoes when they receive an impulse. And that impulse can come from a direct impulse, so for example something physically hitting you, an indirect impulse, such as an explosion, or sustained forces, things like wind or g-force. So what we went live with in 3.11 was the twitches and the knockdowns. So essentially, if you split down the force reactions into low impact, medium impact and high impact, what we shipped with is the twitches, which are kind of the physical procedural motion, so you see the character doing little small twitches when they get shot. And then we went out with the high impact as well, which is the knockdowns. So currently at the moment, in the ship, if you receive a really high impact, your character can fall over. And then we have the leaning. Now the leaning is kind of classified as a low impact. And as I described at the start, when we have direct, indirect and sustained, leaning is kind of your sustained twitch. It's the character bracing themselves, pushing themselves into that force. So for example, if you're on a ship at sea, you're steadying yourself, and that's what it's supposed to be. But what we don't have live in 3.11 is the staggers. The balance right now is that if you would stagger, we've just said, okay, you can just lean for now, because we didn't want to go, okay, you're going to fall all over the place. But eventually, for upcoming patches, we're going to be releasing staggers. So staggers is split into two forces. There's one-shot staggers and then there's stumble staggers. The one-shot staggers are where you receive an impulse and your character staggers. So if you've watched any film where they take a broadside or something and the character's doing this and then they're coming back, almost like that stumble, then you're back into the game. And then the other side of things is kind of what we call electrifying. It's like a stumble locomotion. So the stumble locomotion is where it might force you into seated or bracing onto something, because bracing is going to be part of it. So the stumble locomotion: say one of the thrusters on your ship has gone and it's rotating and it's giving lots of acceleration and forces, that's where your character is going to be like, okay, I'm out of control. Almost think of it like drunk locomotion. Your character is not going where you want it to go, but you've still got control of your character. You can still trigger actions. You can still do things. So what we're going to be doing when we do staggers and stumble locomotion is that you'll be able to brace onto things. So if you're sat down, if you're in the back of a Valkyrie and you're seated, if you come in as a dropship, then you're going to be braced, because that's part of it. So the long answer is what I just gave. The short answer is yes, in the future. But force reactions is such a huge system. We had to piecemeal it like this to give ourselves room to understand the premise, because when we talk about every force that's coming your way, I mean every force that's coming your way. You step out into wind, and if the wind is hurricane force, and we use realistic wind speeds, so if you're stepping out into an eight on the Beaufort scale or a nine or a ten, you're going to fall over. And then what we do, we actually simulate your character getting up, and they go into the effort set, which I think we first showed off at CitizenCon, with the hand coming off, you've not got a helmet on, and your character actually braces themselves. So what happens there is in the wind we have this sustained delta. So for example, if you go out in the wind and you see someone fall over, they're not just going to keep triggering falling over, falling over, falling over. They'll actually then stand back up and be like, okay, I'm bracing myself now. I wasn't ready for it, but I am ready for it now. So force reactions is going to be an ever-changing feature, but 3.11 is probably our first significant drop. We've had previous drops with it in terms of the twitches and the procedurals, and we're going to be doing further work on it. But hopefully that gives you an idea of the entirety of the feature as a whole.
Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay DirectorYeah, 100%. It's something that we've touched on. I know we're talking about 3.11, but it is something we've touched on in Theatres of War when we want dropships coming in. And the ships need to have meaning in the game. We've designed them that way. They're designed to give differing gameplay. So if you take a massive broadside... And also the larger ships are supposed to have, and it's something that will be coming in the future perhaps, a dampening effect, similar to a modern-day aircraft carrier that has a gyroscope that causes it to stay stable in rough waters so the planes can land on it. So we will be simulating some of that. So if you're in an Idris or an 890 Jump, you'll have less severe leans based off the relative force than on smaller ships. So for this drop we had to tweak it so that the leaning is a bit more subtle across the board, because we didn't have the medium impact reactions in terms of the staggers or the stumble locomotion. We didn't have that dampening force. But it's such a huge system and it ties into everything. It ties into when you're walking around in the back of the ships, the understanding that somebody in the ship is actually pulling some 9G maneuver and you're just stood in the back and you're like, what's going on? For example, we haven't tied it into you passing out and redding out and blacking out, and that is something we're going to be doing. So we wanted to get it live in some of these interim drops, and that was planned. That wasn't like, oh, we're not going to get it all done. That was like, no, no, let's try this here, then this and then this, because it gives us an ability to go, okay, how do we want the balance to be? How do we want to affect this? And yeah, it's exciting times.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveWell, this is the direction we're going, and we don't want these arbitrary limits on things. They're in there now because we don't have the ability to correctly police or defend the area. It'd be a griefing nightmare if we just allowed everyone to attack around the spawn locations. But we were starting to feel ready. We weren't ready going into it, and it took a lot of work, but we felt like we could get there for 3.11. We had AI that was capable of avoiding the stations, and we had AI accuracy being worked on, and that was really promising. It just felt like it was the time to at least try, and so we aimed for 3.11. We developed the size 10 turret because we were developing capital ships at the same time, so we added those. We already had the small turrets, the size 4s that have been on landing pads for a while. We had the size 6s that we used in the claim jumper missions. So we felt like with the size 10, we had the full array of capability of defending against all the ships in our game so far, and possibly even in future. The size 10s, you don't even get those on some capital ships. And the other thing was we thought we could develop the heat system, like a security response around a station. So we started trying to tackle that, and I think it's gone down really well. I think it needs a lot more complexity added to it. For instance, right now it just responds to the crime stats, the accumulated crime stats of all the players in that location. It doesn't respond to the ships they're in or how aggressive they're being at that moment in time. So in future, those are the things we're going to be aiming at there. But especially, I think we're trying to push another point patch out, and that has one thing that we're trying to address, because right now, as it's gone out, you'll only get them responding if you happen to hit these thresholds that we've put in. It was just a bug. And so hopefully with the next point patch, you'll be seeing them responding when you turn up with, say, a CrimeStat 2, which isn't one of the thresholds right now. We have a threshold at 1 and a threshold at 3, so they wouldn't turn up for that because of this bug. But I'm hoping when that goes out, you'll see what we were aiming for: the policing will be there, the defenses are already there. Yeah, I think it was just time.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveWell, it's an iterative process, like Luke's talking about. And this allows us to test out things and see what's working for us, what's not working for us. But we felt that the law system was mature enough to actually start introducing this.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveI think it's two-fold. From my point of view, it's because they offer the most coverage with the least amount of them, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the most important thing. And then there was a direction from Art, which is we don't want these things to look like battleships, which they would if we put turrets all over them, and you would probably need a lot more turrets to get [the same coverage]. So these things would end up looking like a battleship.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveAnd firing angles for it. So it was a long thought process that we went through on it. And then it's also just from a targeting standpoint: okay, I can go and target that. Let's say I'm a pirate. I want to take that out. I want to blow it up. It's easier for them to pick it out and see it. And then in the future, we've obviously got cannons or ballistic weapons on there, but in the future it'll be missiles or those types of things.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveSo far, the bugs that still remain, which is super useful. We know that, say, you can lock onto things through walls still, and you can even fire missiles. I believe the missiles go straight through the doors as well. That's because the scanning system and the missile system are still developing. You've seen how that's developed in 3.11. In talking to Mark Abent, they have the stream somewhere separate where they have all that fixed, and they're still testing it and making sure that it's ready for a next release. So there's plenty of bugs we've spotted and even started working on. I think it'll be in a patch a little later on where we don't allow you to fire missiles or lock missiles inside the green zones, the old-fashioned green zones, the ones that are still around at landing zones and outposts. You won't be able to lock on to anything in there, because it's unfair. You can shoot into it and those bullets don't hurt them at all, but you can lock on and fire a missile and that hurts them. So we have to prevent that. But as far as data goes, it's still too early to really draw any conclusions from it, because everyone's still going at it, going wild with something new. If we were to draw conclusions from that, we'd probably think everyone's a griefer, or it's going to be a nightmare, but things calm down over time.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveNo, I mean, I'm going to look into removing them around outposts, or not removing but relaxing them around outposts maybe. It needs investigation, I'll be honest. The next thing I'm hoping to do is fix up Grim HEX so that it has similar. Now Grim HEX is just slightly different, because currently all these turrets just react to crime stats, and obviously there are people at Grim HEX who have crime stats and are welcome. So they have to have their own method of choosing. They still have their own laws per se over there, so they won't be happy with you just blowing up their customers. But it'll be more like they attack you and say get out of here, and then they forget about it after a little while and you can come back. It's not like you have to go and hack off a crime stat from Grim HEX or anything. So I'm going to be exploring that, but obviously in future we hope to remove the interior green zones as well, or relax those to allow FPS combat. So currently Mikael on our team is working on spawn closets, so a method of getting things like a population in and out of the area, so that we can spawn police or respawn the NPCs that you murder, or have the NPCs run away. But even though we may have spawn closets quite soon, the whole policing of an interior, that's some ways off, because you need the population manager system there that actually has people running away into these doors and then coming out to attack you. That's some way off. But I think spawn closets are going to be cool, because we'll be able to use those in mission locations quite quickly to have reinforcements coming in.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveIt means that there was an issue that as soon as the thruster got imbalanced by 0.1%, it would show. That basically made it show up too early. So in the future that'll be fixed, and then you'll have to damage it pretty well to make that show up.
Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay DirectorYeah, absolutely. So as I touched on before, force reactions is not just a system that exists in some isolated area of the world, or the universe, should I say. It's something that is a truly systemic feature. So we want to tie it into everything that you're going to undergo: from wind, from G-forces, from impacts from guns. We already have some reactions, so if somebody threw a box at you, you should twitch and things, but when we add the multi-tool tractor beam or all the other different things, or trolley push-pull, and you get hit by those, then the relevant forces will dictate the reaction that you play. So like I said, force reactions is such a big feature, and the way we implement these features, we implement them in a systemic way to support scalability, because Star Citizen at its heart is a game about detail, but at scale. And so the reason why we go down that lens to create these systemic features is so that once we've underpinned that feature and have it in the game, I'm going to say something that probably never works like this, but it just works, kind of thing. You have all of these different collisions, all of these different parameters, all of these different things that are happening, and you don't need a designer or developer sat there tweaking every little number going, oh, okay, somebody just threw a Big Benny's at my character's head, what should he do? It should be like, okay, this is the kinetic energy of the force that the Big Benny's impacted you with, and what's the surface area of it, and how does that work, and what is the relevant reaction. So it's going to be an ongoing process, but yes, absolutely, and trains did come up in terms of the monorail and things like that. So it's on the list. It'll just, as Todd said, take a little bit of time.
Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay DirectorYeah, so I could take that one. Obviously the networking side of things is something that we're constantly looking to improve. This particular case was way back when, probably about five or six years ago. There was a piece of code that was entered in that essentially added a hard 250 milliseconds, well, actually, originally it was 500 milliseconds, onto your connection. And it didn't matter whether you had the best internet connection in the world. It was just whatever you had plus 500. And it was to do with the general smoothness of the locomotion, to make it all look nice and look correct. And obviously, as we've developed the tech, we reduced that. It was reduced, I think, a few years back to 250 milliseconds. And then last year, as part of some of the downstream work that we released, we made it variable. I think it was around 3.7, 3.8, something like that. And that was actually a really significant change, because it meant if you had a really good connection, this buffer was variable, as low as 40, 50 milliseconds. So it meant that we were competitive with other games out there. But obviously, if you had a poor connection, there's nothing we can do about that. But fundamentally, that fix got squashed in one of the patches that got released, and nobody noticed. So we were like, oh, what's going on? Why is this happening? We were spending all this time, and then we actually found out, and it was like, oh, hold on, something's gone wrong here. So this round of work is actually just re-enabling the work that got broken. I think there was a bug or something that caused it to revert back to this default 250 milliseconds. So in terms of that specific one, that's happened to me several times throughout my career, where somebody's gone, oh, hold on, this tick box, we've just done a release build, but we did it in debug. And you're like, oh, why is the game running at 10 frames a second? And it's like, oh no, I just didn't click it. So that's a huge positive. But that doesn't mean to say that we're anywhere close to being done. I sat down with the guys the other week. CR is obviously wanting us to push on it, and rightly so. We're making a massively multiplayer game, and the networking is an absolute key focus for us. So we have dedicated resources working on it every single patch. We might not release something every single patch, because networking is a bit of a dark art to get right, especially with all the other tech that's coming online in terms of server meshing and so on and so forth. So yes, we will definitely be seeing more improvements in the future. When those come, I can't promise. But hopefully we can find some easy wins that give us some big benefits.
Jared Huckaby · Host, CommunityClive Johnson just broke out into a sweat.
Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay DirectorIt actually wasn't Clive. It was Gordon. So it was on the actor side. Whereas Clive covers the main networking, this was on the actor networking.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveCome on, cut me deep. You should have used the one that's not in chat. 'Why isn't it still fixed? Still can't mine. Missions bug out. Equipment still vanishes.' Right. There's a few issues. I think a lot of them stem from the way we give you the multi-tool. Usually, obviously, you go to a shop and it goes straight into your inventory. You don't see anything in your hand. There's no physical thing. We spawn you with the thing in your hand. We've never done that before, tried that before. It's obviously buggy, and the new commissary machine that you go to to get your multi-tool, that's the first time we've tried a vending machine. So it physically spawns it, you bend down, you pick it up, rather than it going straight into your inventory. And we hope to roll those out to the rest of the solar system as well. But when they work, it seems to be that when it spawns or when you're given it, you're losing either the mining attachment, or you're not seeing that in your [inventory]. And there also seems to be a bug sometimes when you pick up mineables, you drop the thing. It's such a shame, because obviously the prison relies on a lot of other features, and if any one of those breaks, the whole experience kind of crumbles, and we've tried to address that by adding the one mission in there. I really want to get back in there, get some time to add some other ways to earn merits so that you don't have to rely on all these other systems. But in a perfect world, all these other systems would always, always work. I guess another issue is that even if you do have a really good mining session, you go to sell it at the kiosk and you can't, because all shops in the game, I believe, attach to a specific kind of server. It's not the server you're on, it's a different one. And if that's having any troubles, then you're stuck for being able to sell, you're stuck for being able to get out of prison, and only the missions would work then. So there's no one answer for it. There's a lot of bugs in a lot of places on a lot of different teams, and I guess I need to really push all of them to try and figure it out. But it's always the case that for me, I own this, and this is something that's close to my heart. I'm about as frustrated as everyone who's playing it. But for all the other teams, it will be a small, tiny little piece of something. But in the end, it all adds up to something bigger. So I'm going to chase all of these things. I saw today a tiny little issue with a mission. Because it's a mission that everyone can accept, they race each other down. The whole point of it was you hopefully see other people racing past you trying to get to it before you. And if someone gets to it first, it silently fails. So you could still be running the whole way there and not have noticed that the little bit of text at the top vanishes. So I've got Ollie fixing that one, so you'll actually now get the bigger notification at the top of the screen. But yeah, I'm on it. There's just a lot to fix in a lot of different places.
Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay DirectorMagazines are a complicated facet. The way they work now is not the way we want them to work. So the way they work now is obviously you have a magazine, but you don't necessarily interact with the magazine itself. You interact with it on the gun level. You interact with the magazine in your PMA. But again, that's not necessarily the long-term solution. The reason why magazines are so underpinned by the PMA right now is there's no persistency in the PMA. So for example, we can't store that you've got a partial mag or you've got partial ammo. And where we want to go in the future is really deal with it on an actual bullet level, so that you're physically stripping magazines, you're physically putting bullets in. And we've actually started a lot of work on that. And the problem that is called out is not a trivial fix to do. So what we've got to do is weigh up: okay, do we spend significant time trying to fix this issue, or do we take a little bit more time but deliver what we actually want the experience to be? And what we actually want the experience to be is obviously underpinned by iCache in terms of persistency. It's underpinned by physical inventory, in that you can pick up things and manipulate them in your hands. So I think recently we did that for some of the grenades. That was something that was really close to me in terms of the throwing that we released in 3.11. Throwing, obviously, it's a better throw, it's a better experience, so that's core fundamental. But one of the main reasons why I pushed for Throw T1 was because you could go up to a grenade in the world and you could pick it up, and you'd press G to throw your grenade, and you'd drop the grenade in your hand and pick the one off your chest. Or if you didn't have one attached to your armor, it wouldn't do anything. So there were two systems there, the carryable system and the throwing system, and they didn't talk to each other. Now, when I came on board, we wanted to make sure, and this is why with force reactions we're being careful, that it's great a feature being systemic, but it needs to be systemic and talk to all the other systemic features. And so when we're talking about throwing, that means, okay, I should be able to pick anything up and throw it. And you'll notice that we've started to add things like default item actions. For drinking, for example, you press left mouse button, you drink. If you get a grenade, you can throw it. So we wanted to do that for magazines. We wanted to do that for MedPens. And Luke touched on it in the prison: we don't really spawn things in people's hands. This is the first way that we're delivering, with the commissary machines, the multi-tool physically being given to you. And there are currently issues with that flow because of the way it's set up and how it interacts with you. Because if you look at a MedPen, for example, you can't pick it up and put it in your hands. You have to attach it to your suit for you to actually then use it as a MedPen. Or if you store it, then you have to go into your PMA and then equip it. Whereas what we really want, and it's something I've touched on before in terms of the external inventory and the physical inventory and the personal inventory, is that you should be able to open up and be like, okay, I see my character. I can see all the items that are physically attached to him. I can manipulate those items on the fly without having to go into the PMA, because the PMA is kind of a bag of holding that won't exist in the physical inventory world. That might be a list of all the items that you own across the universe, but they might be in your hangar or in your hab or in your ship or in this locker or somewhere else. And you're going to have to deal with things on a player level, on a player scale. And so from a magazine perspective, to come back full circle, it's getting the work for the magazine to be able to go in your hand. And then that's actually not just, oh, why can't we just carry it? It's like, okay, well, now I can take the bullets out because it's only partially full. We already have the chamber logic on the weapons, for example. You've got a magazine in and you rack it, it takes one out of the magazine, one in the chamber. But we want the ability for you to be able to take that out. It's got 29 bullets in. I should be able to take the bullet out of the chamber. I should be able to then manipulate those containers. I should be able to find ammo out in the field. If I've taken someone out, I'm like, okay, their cartridge doesn't fit my gun, but the caliber of bullets does. So I can pick up their magazine, I can strip the bullets, I can then put those bullets into the magazines that are going to fit the gun that I'm using. So it's not that we don't see these problems and go, they're not important. It's that we have to weigh up the bigger picture of: okay, where do we want this to be? What do we want the experience to be? Where's the best bang for buck? How are we going to deliver the best experience for the player going forward? And so that's where we're at with magazines, and magazines really are just the tip of the iceberg. It's magazines, it's physical inventory. Obviously, that's underpinned by iCache, and that's something that we're working on. We've got multiple teams working on that endeavor. It's something that we really want to push live. It's going to change how you play Star Citizen. It's going to give credence to why you have some of these large ships with lots of lockers and lots of storage space that is not just the cargo hold. That you can be like, I want to store my Caldera environment suit, I want to store my Novikov environment suit, I want to have this particular armor or these particular weapons, and this is the loadout that I want to choose. And this is something that we've talked about as that core gameplay, that core loop of experience. It's not just you pulling the trigger, shooting the guy. It covers the preparation of: what do I need to go? What do I need to take? What food do I take? What drinks do I take? What outfit am I going to use? The grenade launcher is a good example. The grenade launcher right now, you can just buy 500 clips for the grenade launcher and you just keep giving yourself infinite. But in the future, if you can fit five P4-AR mags on your suit, you're not going to be able to fit five grenade mags, because they physically won't fit. It'll have to be that you'll only be able to take a certain amount of ammo. And that will dictate: okay, maybe I want to take an Animus for ground-to-air combat. Well then, that's a lot of space. Then what other gun are you taking? How many magazines are you going to be wanting to take? And that's why, I've touched on this before in terms of the different archetypes with the armors, they should have real benefit, real differences across the board. And right now, they're not where we want them to be, both from a damage mitigation and an archetype in terms of their role. But the magazine issue itself is a symptom, and we want to fix the root cause, within reason. Obviously, if it's really bad, then we need to spend time fixing it, and absolutely we will do that. But in this case, we have to weigh up. It's a non-trivial fix due to persistency and all the other issues, so we have to weigh that up against everything else. Fundamentally, we make those decisions to make the game that we all want to play.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveSmall addition to that: we fixed a bug for 3.11b. Basically, people that had previously bought a ton of magazines weren't able to access them, and so we fixed that bug.
Jared Huckaby · Host, CommunityIs that in the live 3.11 now, or is that coming in an updated patch?
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveThat's coming in 3.11b.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveWell, years ago now, we tried having it turn off when they left monitored zones, but everyone thought it was a bug, quite rightly, I guess. Especially at that point, missions were quite buggy, and some of them still are, but if they accepted the mission and then didn't immediately get a marker, they assumed it was broken. And there wasn't the backup feedback there to say, no, actually, you do have to hunt as a bounty hunter. But there wasn't enough feedback for them to even hunt. They just had to hope that they were going to come into a monitored zone, which eventually most players do, but an AI wouldn't. If an AI was spawned somewhere where, say, the comm array was turned off, then you just would never know about it. So that's why right now the god marker is on all the time. Now, next year at some point, we'll be looking at Bounty Hunter V2 as a proper career. But between then and now, I've already got some things underway to hopefully allow us to not only just have that marker on when things are in a monitored zone, but to give you the last known position of it when it went out of the monitored zone. So you can read into that things like, if you were there when he jumped away, you'll get a really good idea of where he went. And I've just talked to my coder about this. It seems all possible that we can even add on there the time, how long it's been since he was at that marker. Now, again, that's going to make bounty hunting maybe impossible if these guys stay at Grim HEX all the time, or stuff like Levski. So it's something we're going to test internally and see if it actually adds anything to it. But the direction we're going in for bounty hunting as a career, there'll be all these things that the bounty does that give his position away. And it will really mean you feel like you're on the run, just like in real life.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveYou feel like you're on the hunt.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveOh, I'm talking about, say, the bounty feels like he's on the run as well, because he can give himself away if he does the wrong things. Kind of the TV shows version of it, where they triangulate your position if you're on the phone for too long. You can imagine how we could do that with a mobiGlas, or certain things like when you buy something in a shop, or if you decide to park your ship properly, that might give you away. So you have to start living life like, okay, I have to just get out of my ship without parking it properly, float over, I have to buy something and then run away quickly, get to my ship and leave, because I've just put a marker down on that position that my bounty hunters will be heading towards. But at the same time, give the bounty hunters enough information so that they can maybe see a pattern, like, this player always tends to head back here after going to Yela. What are they doing there? Are they selling the stuff they steal in the asteroid belt? That kind of thing. So I think that answers the god marker thing. It's because we don't have all these other things. If I just turn off that marker, you'll be lost. You'll assume it's a bug. There's a lot more that's got to back that up to allow you to hunt.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveIt's a bug. We know about it. We're trying to fix it. It might not be fixed. I know it's not fixed for 3.11b. But it's something that we are trying to fix and trying to get to the root of. I think it's been happening for the past year. One of our coders took quite a long time looking at it and trying to get to the root of the problem, but wasn't able to get to it. They're going back to it.
Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay DirectorIt depends if they took an arrow to the knee. Yes. Don't skip leg day. Yeah, it's a bug. Whether it's leg storage, whether it's backpack, whether it's chest storage, it should all be treated the same. So it's a bug and we need to look into it. Just touching on storage itself, obviously we have introduced leg, chest and backpack storage. Currently, the backpack is kind of welded onto the core when you go and buy it. The intention long-term is that you'll be able to take the backpack off, and you'll be able to buy different backpacks for different suits that have different functionality. So the current method of the backpack that's live, while it's cool that it's showing you the direction we're moving towards to give you that level of granularity, eventually we'll add more gameplay-related clothing and things where you can have concealed things. But for now, yes, it's a bug and we'll look into it. Well, we are looking into it, shall I say.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveWell, I'll let Luke talk on this one as well, but it comes down to my direction on this. So it's really the way that we're rebuilding them and adjusting them. The way that I talked to the guys is we wanted to make sure that we have local ones working first, and then from there we go to interplanetary, and then obviously once we open Pyro, then we go interstellar. So that was basically my direction to the guys, and then Luke can talk through any of the other adjustments as well.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveWe knew we had to make it modular. We had to rewrite the delivery missions to work with the upcoming dynamic mission system. It's not using it right now, but in future...
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveIt's built to use it, though.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveYeah, the missions are built to use it. They're made so that the game can pick an item and then figure out where that item wants to go, because the places produce and consume things. You'll also be able to say how far away, how difficult is this mission? Do you go to one planet and then just deliver to its moons, or do you have to deliver three packages to three different planets? How dangerous are those places? How dangerous is the package? Is it a timed package? That kind of thing. But we had to start simply. And first, Todd got us to look at real-world logistics and try and emulate those, because you said the word hauling in the question, right? And no one hauls one small box, unless it's a really, really valuable or necessary piece that must be delivered, this one box, in time from one planet to another. That doesn't work out. It's not efficient. So having so many of these missions where you just carry some grain from one planet to another, one box at a time, it doesn't make sense. And I do appreciate that what it represents is kind of a hauling mission, even though it's just one box. I do understand that. But we started on this kind of local: you're a guy who collects three boxes at a time. Even now, it's still not entirely correct. We would want you to pick up three boxes or drop off three boxes somewhere that makes sense, like a rest stop. But the rest stops, they're not fun right now. They need a new location. They're not fun for collecting three boxes and putting them on your ship one at a time. We need a location nearer to your ship to do that. So imagine you have that. You pick up those boxes from a depot, somewhere like a rest stop, and then you scatter those boxes. You drop them off at outposts. Then it starts to make sense.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveIt's more like a post office delivery person or a bike messenger kind of thing. So that was the idea behind it. And then obviously for the interplanetary and interstellar ones, then you're starting to get into the larger logistics.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveYeah, true hauling. Or we are going to have missions where you take one box to a different planet, but this is going to be timed. You have to get this there. This is important.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveThink of a heart transplant or something like that.
Richard Tyrer: Grenade launcher is where it is right now but physical damage will change everything. It is a representative weapon in terms of, you know, grenades are explosive and they do lots of damage but... it wont be like that forever.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveI'm going to get on to that, because, well, it's because we regenerated the rest stops. And those kiosks, which personally I didn't like, I think they need to be more inside a shop, a shady shop.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveThey should be a person. You're selling it to a person, not to a kiosk.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveBut we have locations like the salvage yards and the stash houses, which I think just need to be able to buy this stolen stuff. So I'll check into that.
Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay DirectorI'm going to say three things. I'm going to say Throw, external inventory and force reactions.
Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Star Citizen LiveWhat we managed for the armistice zones. There's a lot more to do, but I think especially the heat system is promising. And what else did I do? Oh, we finally figured out how climate works, so you won't get any planets that are like 2,000 degrees or absolute zero.
Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen LiveCargo depot. I like the way that the stations are laid out now. Very proud of the team doing that. And then personally, the force reaction system. I've been talking about it since I was in charge of Star Marine, so it's good to finally have that.