Calling All Devs - Robbit Season

Well, I can remember right back to the original Dogfighting module release because I was working on it. So, like you say, this is something that people have been wanting for a while, it's been on our radar for quite a while. Various other releases we've done, we've seen Arena Commander for some releases get more attention than others. Moving forward, we're in the process of assembling a dedicated strike team to be looking at both Arena Commander and Star Marine issues, improvements, freshening up the game modes, new maps, that kind of thing. And certainly whilst we've been planning out the work for that team, multi-crew Arena Commander has come up again and we feel hopefully in a few releases' time we should have a team in place better to tackle that.

I've worked on quite a bit of spawning code for the various game modes before now, so I know for example we already have stuff in the game code that will allow you to spawn in various seats or beds within a ship. So from that angle a bunch of the code is pretty much there, and what the kind of things we'd need to add are some extra functionality within the lobbies. It might make more sense to do that as a sort of wider pass where we can look to freshen up the lobbies in general for Arena Commander and Star Marine modes to engage people further. But certainly in the lobbies, you'll obviously need a way to specify, I want to join this multi-crew ship and sit in this seat, take on this role, for example. So work like that is more of a sticking point than the actual game code right now. It's really just the sticking point in terms of getting that team assembled, getting people to actually have that as their focus and to look into those issues, because without that kind of wider feature work, it's difficult just to write a few lines of code and turn that feature on.

And then there's obviously other things we would look to do, for example do some more detailed balance passes, make sure the turret gameplay is fully polished up, and then obviously you'd want to look at other multi-crew roles. So it's possibly not just pilots and gunners, maybe one more, like engineering roles: part of the ship's going down, go fix it. Exactly. But then for a tier, for an initial sort of implementation of the feature, we could focus on the turret gameplay. That would be a sensible thing to do. And it'd certainly be cool to get it in Vanduul Swarm as sort of a starting point because that's probably easier to balance against the AIs when you're working in a co-op. I don't think there's any doubt in anybody's mind that this is something that we've wanted for Arena Commander just as much as players have wanted it.

As always, it comes down to a matter of resources and priorities. Obviously, Arena Commander and by extension Star Marine were meant to be test beds to get us to the Persistent Universe. We got to the Persistent Universe much faster than we originally anticipated with the explosion of resources in Foundry 42 UK and the addition of our Frankfurt office. So our attentions have been focused there in the Persistent Universe, but as Erin Roberts stated at the beginning of this year on Reverse the Verse, one of our objectives that we want to achieve this year is to build up that strike team, build up that dedicated team that can focus on Star Marine and Arena Commander and give them the love that we know not only that you guys want, but that we want to give. So no timetables yet, nothing to share, but of course the RSI public roadmap would be your place. And I know the roadmap hasn't been updated in a little while. After 3.2, we've been doing a lot of reshuffling, a lot of reexaminations as we prepare for 3.3. By the time this airs though, considering that I'm recording this on August 15th, hopefully that roadmap will have your updates. And that will of course be the place to check for when multi-crew Arena Commander and stuff get put on the development calendar.

So we are working on a feature right now. We've got a formal design for it that's approved for route planning. And what that is, is something integrated into the star map that allows you to basically, I'm in Port Olisar, I select Hurston. It's going to create, like Google Maps, kind of a path to that location that you've selected. And it will not only take into account how far your quantum drive will allow you to go in a single jump, it'll automatically pick the shortest path, but it'll also tell you how much quantum fuel is required for each step of the way. So I'm not sure if it's going to be this release or next. It's definitely being worked on at the moment. It's actually the next thing on our hit list. Due to CitizenCon, I'm not sure where that's going to fall, but it's definitely in the plans, and eventually that'll evolve into you being able to pull your pin around, like, ooh, I want to go around this side of the moon instead of that side, and so on. And we also want to do stuff like update the nav markers to actually show, oh yeah, there's fuel at this location, or there's not, or some of the other essential information that the players are going to need to navigate the map intelligently instead of just going, well, I hope they've got fuel there because I'm going to run out right there. So it's definitely in the plans and we want to make that much more user friendly and fun for the players to figure out where to go and how to get there.

Yeah, no, and it's got to be like, so this is my personal opinion and how this fully works out is a little bit to be decided, but I expect that you will gather information as you go to these different places. So you may not know there's fuel on Outpost 57, but as you go there and learn more about it, it's kind of like a fog of war on the map, right? You learn things, your computer now stores things about the places that you visit. And so you will accrue information over time as you travel throughout the universe. So we really want to try and push that sense of exploration in the world and kind of learning about the environment instead of, like you said, just feeding all the information all at once. So I would expect something a little along those lines more in the future, but that's even beyond the route planning stuff.

It also plays into this whole concept of information as a valuable commodity. Being able to sell your star map information to other players for whatever that fee is. Or selling it: I explored the outer rim of whatever system that's never been explored before, so I go to the local astrological society and sell them that information, where other people can then go and purchase a map of something that's been explored. So all information in the world should have a value to it. And the more that it gets explored, the more information, the more recent the information is. If somebody finds gold on a planet and that's a three-month-old report, is there still gold on that planet? Being able to consistently update that information with current information is also a valuable thing, right? So it all kind of ties together at the end of the day. But route planning is definitely on the near horizon.

So just to recap, because we went off on a couple of tangents there. For the first iteration, it's always tier zero. It's going to be limited in functionality. Hopefully it'll be what you need to get where you're going. Then as time goes on, we'll continue to iterate. The information that your Bitching Betty gives you about planning your routes will improve, but there will be an upper cap on it. We don't want to just provide you every single answer, automatically give you the shortest, most efficient, quickest, safest route in the world. We want players to discover those tendencies and use their own experience to inform that and to share with others as a valuable commodity.

Yeah, it's definitely going to be the shortest route to start. And right now we don't have a lot of other places to travel, but as that changes, you're going to have more options as to where to go, and whether or not that's heavily infested by pirates, that may be a decision that you want to take into account. So we recognize that you're going to need to be able to move those pins around, but that's not going to be tier zero for sure.

Yes, definitely. We've definitely talked about that. It's come up in multiple conversations just about quantum travel in general. We've talked about a few things because it implies that you can get to areas to drop that waypoint that don't have a quantum travel point associated with it to get there in the first place, right? It also means that you'd have to be able to point in a direction and just go somewhere to plot down your waypoints. So it does have some other implications that we have to work through.

Or just bring up the star map, find a space that's in the middle of nowhere and drop a marker on your star map.

Yeah, or I want to go there. We're just not sure what the best way to go about doing it is, and there's other considerations, like we want to have trade lanes or we want to have patrolled routes between two points, and so that also implies that people can circumvent these areas, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just we've got to think about what other kind of systems we need in place to make sure that it's a fun experience no matter where you go.

So not ruling it out then?

Not right now. No, definitely. It's being talked about, but we've got a lot of stuff to figure out before we can commit to that.

Coincidentally, I was literally hired right when those came out. So I've kind of seen them all. And basically right now we're working on what we're calling the common elements for our first major city building set, which is the Lorville Hurston landing zone. And so the hangars required for that landing zone are built with this new modular art set that we're working on. And every city will have its own modular set. It may be based on a variant of an existing one or a completely new one, right? But the plan is to take the hangars, which are client-side only right now, and integrate those into these major landing zones. So if you had, say, a Revel & York hangar, well, that might be in microTech, right? Because it's this big, fancy, high-tech thing. So the Revel & York hangars may be out there, ArcCorp may have the industrial hangars or something, right? But the different hangars will be stationed at the different landing zones and your hangar ownership would basically transfer to the location where that is actually located. And then that would allow things like being able to invite your friends to your hangar and stuff like that. And the plan is to still be able to do all the flair placement of your stuff to personalize your hangar, just as it was before.

And just before we see the Spectrum thread on it, the industrial hangar will probably go to Levski, considering it's...

For sure, yeah. Is it the industrial one, the rock one? The industrial one is the rock one. Oh, yeah, that would definitely go to Levski or Grim HEX or something. No, don't quote me on where they're going to go. But that's the general plan, though. As we build out more and more of our art sets, we're going to have more of these hangar common element sets that we can just snap together and create the small, medium, large, extra large hangar. And then you'll have several options of what you want to rent or buy at any given location. And if you own one, obviously, you would be grandfathered into the ownership of that hangar in whatever location they're for.

So, obviously, that's not the player hangar system. As that comes online, we'll have more information for you. We're still exploring a lot of ideas. We know how important player hangars are. It was literally the first aspect of Star Citizen that was ever put out. It is our version of player housing at this point. It'll be an exciting time when the first ones of those come online on Hurston, and you'll be able to decorate your hangar, and actually that's where you'll be able to invite people to visit your hangar with all of your hangar flair and stuff like that.

And coincidentally, the player hubs are also...

We're saving that.