Star Citizen Live: Alpha 3.7 Roundup

Yes, definitely. What we released as an initial release is just that. It's our first toe in the water to see how it all feels. This was definitely not the final plan for harvestables. For us, harvestables mean a lot of things. We made a system that can be used to spawn a lot of objects throughout the world that the player can harvest, collect, or do various things with. It's not just, oh, you take this thing, you take it to the shop, you get X amount of UEC for it. We want players to be able to gather research data from harvestables, to pick up a fruit and be able to eat it and get a bit of a boost for X amount of time. We want them to be able to extract whatever chemical substances each of them has and take that and use it for whatever, anything from developing maybe a virus or a weapon or a cure or all of these things. So yeah, the point is definitely to go into more of a crafting-oriented, science-oriented domain and give a lot of gameplay options here for the player.

Well, it's basically [...] not only the player, all the actors, the NPCs, AI, everything, whether social or friendly or enemies, feel. Basically, a guy that's been starved of food for one week is going to be pretty weak at combat. He's going to have little stamina. He won't be able to run much. If you feed your troops well and if they're happy and if they're clean and all that stuff, they'll behave differently from someone that's been left in a desert for a week and didn't have the required things. This entire actor status system kind of started when we first implemented the breathing part and the stamina and how g-forces affect stamina and the actor, and then it slowly evolved to incorporate anything that can influence the actor positively or negatively in the game.

And with every patch, we make progress towards building that system out. Even if something's not a direct improvement to the actors, the addition of something like harvestables is another step towards that direction of improving that system and making that system more robust and more capable.

Yes, I'm sure it will get more functionality. I can't give a lot of details, the stuff is still in flux, but I think the first one on the list will be more of a tractor beam functionality. So let's say we have a crate on the floor, I'll be able to point my multi-tool at it and activate the tractor beam. And now I have it connected to my gun and I can move it forward, backwards. It will help a lot of people move stuff around and be able to carry stuff they normally could not in their hands. That is, I think, the first functionality we will add. The purpose of the multi-tool was always to be a platform upon which we can expand and add module after module after module. It's one tool that you have, and you just change that module and now you can do an extra functionality that you couldn't do before. It'll just take a bit of time for us. As you see, we just got the mining one now. I think it's the tractor one that's being worked on next, so we'll get them out one after each other. It just takes a bit of time.

I want to add that when we say we're working on something next, that is not the equivalent of that will come out next.

It's in the works.

Yeah. There's other dependencies. You work on one feature and then there's a dependency, like a UI dependency or some other dependency. That has to be put on the side while we work on other things. So while that may be what we're pursuing next in development, it's not necessarily what's next for the multi-tool.

I'll take it. But it sadly doesn't do as much as we would want it to do. And not because the functionality isn't in there. We have the functionality. It's a matter of us getting the time to build the content. We would love it to start being used as in, let's say I go through a facility and I find, through the harvestable system, that there's a crate that just spawned that has this massive lock on it. I can bring out my cutter and start cutting the lock. It takes me a bit of time. I can open the crate and get this new awesome prototype weapon from there. Or it could be I find a certain hatch or panel that I can cut, and it allows me access a quicker way inside a facility. I could still go without the tool and fight ten other NPCs to get to the same point, or I could sneak through this thing. It's a gate opener for us. It's a thing that, if you have it, we allow you easier access to certain places or we allow you extra loot. There's a lot of games that have these chests of awesome loot, but you get there and unless you can lockpick it or something like this, you cannot get it. This is basically our lockpick. And I think in the future, we're aiming to have different locks and different methods of lockpicking, basically. So cutting is one of them.

Yeah, we had it in the downed relay. You had to cut the emergency thing open. But we found that at the time, not many people were carrying a multi-tool, because that was the only thing in the game you could do with the multi-tool, right? So why would you know to have it? But now that more people are using it for mining, and as Dan says, the tractor beam may come along sometime in the future, more people are going to be carrying it, so we can put it to good use. Because we found that people would get to that point in the relay mission and then be like, what? I don't have one of these. And then they'd just abandon it.

It's a very, very real consideration. Now that FPS mining is online, more people are carrying around multi-tools, but it does shine a light, to your point, that some of this stuff needs to become more ubiquitous before we can develop content that will really use it. So the more uses we give to the multi-tool, the more likely people will have it on them.

I think it's also a matter of building a lot of content that encourages people to get a multi-tool rather than forcing them to get one. So you encourage them, where they can figure, oh, this is an access point. If I had had a multi-tool, now I could open this thing and I would get some big reward out of it. Or you might see someone else in your team has a multi-tool and they get all the cool stuff. But I think it's a bit brutal if we just force people, as in you have to quantum travel all the way there, get down to the planet, fight some NPCs, and at the end of the mission, you do not have that one tool to finish. That can be very frustrating. I mean, of course, it would be nice to have a few of these missions. But that should not be all of them, because it's painful for the player.

No, it's not exactly a bug, and it's not because the people aren't trying hard enough. It's something that sadly we could not get online in time with mining. We would have wished that our FPS radar would have come online with this. Sadly, there were other priorities there, and the team that's working on that has more important stuff to finish, which we definitely understand, but it's a bit unfortunate. So what happens without an actual radar that can detect those harvestables is that there's still a lot of harvestables. We're talking, in the areas where they're seeded, I would say five to 20 per square kilometer. But the problem is they're only seeded in certain biomes, and those biomes occupy only, I don't know, sometimes 5% of a planet, and the planets are gigantic. So it all accumulates. So they are there, and it's hard for the player to find them right now. Once the FPS radar starts coming in, those will be a lot easier to find. Right now, they're easier to find in caves. Once you find a cave, they're a lot easier to find. But there's very limited ones, like Amioshi and Ranta dung. But the Pitambu, the Golden Medmon, all of the more exotic fruits, those are hard to find, because they're only, I think, on Hurston in the savannah biomes. So if you go into a savannah biome and you see one of the trees, there's a good chance that it actually has some fruits on it. Again, it's hard. We try to spawn them more in clusters so they're more visible, but it's a hard one. It's a bit unfortunate, but this is what happens with live development.

Just the simplest one, as I said, Amioshi and Ranta dung in the caves. These are pretty much exclusive to caves. You will not find them anywhere else. Then there's Revenant pods. These are pretty much in any type of desert environment, and I'm talking desert with oxygen, or desert with atmosphere, let's put it this way. Then there's Pitambu and Golden Medmon, which you find only in savannas. And savannas right now are on a single planet. And then you have Prota, which is a bulbous, poor thingy. You will find that in any acidic areas. So there's a moon, there's a planet that has acidic areas. You guys will figure it out. I'm sure that's not going to be a problem. They're, again, harder to find, even if the density right now is fairly high. They're small and there's no indicator that will show them. It's a bit unfortunate. We'll get to it, basically. Oh, and I forgot one other one. There's also component boards, comp boards, that you can find in the trash biomes on Hurston. So in those big trash heaps, sometimes you find these comp board thingies, which you can sell for money.

Yeah, so 3.7.1 is up on the PTU now. When we went live with 3.7.0, there were some bugs that we definitely wanted fixed, but we wanted to go ahead and get 3.7 out the door. So we're working towards those things, and we're trying to get that live. And then, looking ahead to the rest of this quarter, I think we definitely want to do at least one more point patch. And then we obviously have 3.8 at the end of the year. And you're right, there is an absolute push right now to get more focus on quality of life fixes. Things like making quantum travel work properly. Sometimes there's lots of bugs there that are causing issues that have knock-on effects to interdiction as well. Interdiction, I know, has been a frustration, and so making that a more enjoyable experience. There's issues with the ship HUD and being able to actually understand what's actually happening in the ship, and so we want to look at that. Improvements to flight and FPS AI, making sure that the load and save feature is working well and you actually have new areas that you can log out and log back in and you'll spawn in at those areas instead of just Port Olisar. Then a myriad of other issues, things like ships not dropping cargo when they're destroyed and police turning up at the right time, and security and stuff like that. There's plenty of things on the list that we were looking at that we definitely want to push for in 3.8. We'll see if we can get them all, because we're still trying to figure out how we can still deliver some content in 3.8 while at the same time balancing the quality of it.

The reason it's on the backpack is because it's the first implementation, and we had to put it on, ideally, the most meaningful piece of armor you have on you. And it kind of made sense because it was a big chunky box. You couldn't just hang it on your belt or something like this. So we put it on the armor. The goal is to allow pretty much any type of armor slash clothing to have some form of storage. If you put on your cargo pants, they have two pockets or four, whatever, each of them has a capacity and it all adds up to your inventory. Right now even smaller, lighter armors have a bit of capacity, so you can still loot a few things as you move through the world. You won't be able to make a fortune out of it, but you still can go pick up a key card or a fruit from somewhere or a mineable you find. You're not going to bring a hundred of them, but you can still pick up a few objects. The idea is to have the same kind of thing happening for a utility belt, as you say, or more like a clothing-type backpack that you wear on your back, or all of these items that you can put on you. And it all adds up to one inventory.

I think the closest one that's coming soon is exactly as you said, specialized mining equipment. Right now we have one mining laser for ships, and that's all it can do. It does one thing, it does it well, but there's no variation there. We want to add more variation to rocks, and automatically we want to add more variation to the lasers you can equip. So if we add a rock that has a resistance that, let's say, goes over 90%, the current Prospector will not be able to scratch it. It cannot pump enough power into it in order to break that rock. The idea is to provide a laser that will lower the rock's resistance, and it will be able to then transfer enough power to break that rock. Obviously, it's going to come with some downsides. It's either going to cost more, if it's better, or it's going to cost the same, but then it induces a lot of instability into the rock, so it makes the process harder. You might have another laser that makes instability very low, but then it raises the resistance or raises some other parameters. Then it could make the time it takes for the rock to charge up and actually fracture correctly a lot longer. I think there's a list of 15 parameters we have right now between the rock and the laser that we can play with and combine in different combinations to create something interesting. But this is down the line for us. Also, we're looking into having something a bit more short-term. A laser is long-term: you make an investment, and that is the laser you have for that ship. We'll have something more short-term. Think about how the MedPen is for FPS, where, oh, this happened, so I react to it. I use the MedPen, I get a bit of health back and I'm good now, I can continue. Consider the same with the mining laser. We can have a thing where the rock is about to blow because you messed up. Or let's say you had a lag spike, because it can happen. It's a very common occurrence for the players. You had a lag spike and suddenly now you're in the red. We will have some consumables that you activate on the laser, they get injected into the rock, and it kind of diminishes some of that, or makes it decay a lot faster for, let's say, 30 seconds, or doubles the power of your laser for 20 seconds. So you're able to temporarily boost your mining capabilities using these consumables. The problem is you can only have so many equipped, and you have to choose which ones you equip based on what you expect you're going to find. So if you're going to mine this type of thing and you know it has these problems, bring consumables that are going to help you in that process.

Well, I think what I got from that is that we're not done with mining. We got ship mining, we got FPS mining. We're not just leaving them behind. We're going to continue developing this feature, continue building it out.

One other thing, I forgot to mention this. I would say maybe further down the line, but not by much: we're looking into refining. It's not mining, but it's what you do with the spoils from mining. So you take this raw ore. Right now you get this mixed material that doesn't pay that well because it's mixed with everything. You have impurities in there, inert material. You have diamonds mixed with gold, mixed with Quantanium. And you want to separate them, because if you have each of them clean, 100% purity, then you can sell it for way more. This is where refining comes in. You can go to a refining station and create a refining job that gets processed over time. Some of them might take five minutes. Some of them might take one week. These happen while you're not online. You can log out of the server or go do something else. The station will work for you. Obviously, you'll have to pay the station. And then after a bit of time, you take your product back, and hopefully you make a run to another station where you get to sell it before you get shut down and your cargo gets stolen, which is a different problem. But we're only doing the refining part. Other teams are doing the getting-your-cargo-stolen part.

Yeah, it all bleeds together with missions. So when you can refine, there might be someone who's after a certain refined resource. And then, of course, you've got things like interdiction to interrupt your journeys and steal your cargo. It's world design, isn't it? It all comes together and builds into something beautiful.

Moving forward, we want to do an overhaul of the UI, so that it's clearer in there. So you've got things like, I think I touched on it earlier, recommended party size. Perhaps if something requires a tool, it mentions that you might need that tool in some clear and easily decipherable manner. And of course, just adding more missions that you can share. So the missions unlock as you go along. And as you say, we've got those Northrock bounty missions at the moment. So you could take those as an example: as you progress through unlocking harder missions, you might find yourself going into ones where you really need a party, so that you have that experience of, oh, I've hit some kind of cap here, so that I can make use of mission sharing in an interesting way. Things like balancing the amount of rewards you get, because at the moment, obviously, we've made mission sharing missions out of previous missions, and the rewards are kind of capped to one player at the moment. So a lot of people are finding that they're mission sharing, and then they're like, oh, there's only a small amount of money to give you. Sorry, buddy. So we need ones with nice big payouts, nice big juicy ones that people can look forward to doing with their orgs and all of that sort of thing. It's an exciting feature. So moving forward, we need to expand on it: iteration two.

Oh, that's sad. [...] But we look to fix them. These are bugs that we really want to smash. And as long as the community continues to use the Issue Council and help us out with that, we'll be sure to thwart all of these issues.

The last time you and Luke were on, you guys made a good point about how the missions themselves are actually dependent on multiple subsystems. A mission doesn't exist in its own ecosystem. A mission is a set of goals, but some part of those goals needs this system to function, some part of the goal needs that system to function. And the mission itself can be fine and can be functional for weeks if not months, but then when an issue happens with one of these subsystems, a part of that mission breaks, and it's actually not mission related at all. It's related to one of those subsystems. So when a mission like a Pro Tem mission breaks, one week it can be because of this system, and another week it can be because of that system, and in another patch it can be because of another subsystem. So while they always manifest in a similar symptom, the causes can actually vary from patch to patch and even from instance to instance.

Yeah, very eloquently put, I must say. That's exactly it. That's one of the really interesting things about Star Citizen. A lot of these things happen behind closed doors. We make a mission, test the mission, we get feedback, we get to improve it. But during all of that time, you guys also get to play the game in alpha. So you get to experience this ebb and flow of development firsthand. And it's really helpful, because you guys get to send us these issues too, issues that may have been missed, issues that only happen when there's 50 people on a server, all of these kinds of things. So moving forward, we love to find these bugs.

That's one of the reasons it's so important to continue to submit to the Issue Council, even if you see what seems like the same issue. Your cause may be different from Dan's cause, which may be different from Gareth's cause, even though the visible symptom is the same. Because these things touch so many subsystems, your individual occurrence may lead us down a whole different path.

It helps us prioritize too, because if enough people are reporting the same issue, we've got an internal review process where we look at the feedback that's coming in, and that helps us when we're doing our quarterly planning, and when we're doing feedback reviews and feature reviews in general. It helps us look at what the most egregious issues are, especially as we shift towards this quality of life focus. What are the things that are the most bang for buck? Well, let's look at what the feedback is and use that as a tool.

Next up development-wise, we have a couple of prototype new entrances. So we have big sinkholes that you can fly the ship into. We have larger, more cavernous entrances that you could drive a ground vehicle into. We had those a little while ago, but, talking about all of the different teams you need, we hit a little tech hitch where we needed real-time probes, because obviously our planets do rotate, and the time of day changes organically as they rotate. So we needed some tech to make sure that the entrance to the caves wasn't pitch black during the day, because we could only light it in one certain way at the time. But moving forward, we'll be able to have it dynamically change as the planet rotates, and we'll be able to introduce these much larger entrances. Then with server-side OCS coming online, we can have more of them, and we can have them much bigger and deeper. We've got these room archetypes that we already have that we want to expand upon. You might find some with some structures inside, some that are more lived in. Moving forward, we'll have AI combat inside there, which we're also working towards. Of course, that'd be really cool, because I've seen lots of videos online of people shooting their guns and really enjoying the reverb and all of this stuff. So I imagine it would be really chaotic having a nice big fight in a big central hub of a cave. And the VoIP as well, the way the VoIP reverbs inside. You're going to be working with your team, trying to fight the AI inside and everything like that. Just really expanding upon it. As Dan said a few times, it was a toe in the water for caves.

One of the things that I would love to see in caves, I would love to see them become more dangerous. I would love to see that every step you take, you have to be careful. You don't know what's behind the corner. I know we're far from that right now, but I want us to get to the point where we have critters in there, stuff that can bite you, stuff that can jump at you and stuff like this. And when you hear a sound, you don't know what's coming. You're like, oh, was that it? Or is it something else? That's where I want to get, where people are in the dark alone and the flashlight starts flickering.

Yeah, fauna. I'm super excited for fauna in caves.

One video I saw that I really enjoyed was speaking to the danger of caves. A group was mining the FPS harvestables, and I guess they didn't do a very good job, because there was a reaction, and it exploded, and then they ragdolled away. It was funny. I was like, wow, you've got to be careful, man. There's a skill here that you've got to master. It's kind of a combination of the two: caves and harvestables all coming together to make a really cool experience.

I can confirm that as of yesterday that bug is fixed, and it should actually be in the 3.7.1 patch. I don't think it's in yesterday's PTU publish, but it should be in today's PTU publish if we end up going today. So the next PTU publish should have it, and that should be fixed. Just for a little background on what was happening, I actually hit up our backend server engineer who was working on it to see what was actually going on. So the issue was that sometimes the loadout service, or what we called the loadout service, was failing to return a customized loadout to the DGS. And there was a possibility, when that happened, for an outage to occur in the services chain, the chain of services. So now if the DGS can't get a customized loadout, it's going to get a pristine version of the ship instead from the entitlement processor and keep running with that. So users should never fail to get claims anymore. So that's good news.

We actually don't have the guest on here today; we'd have to talk to Rob Johnson, but I did reach out to Rob Johnson to get an answer. Rob Johnson tells us that in recent patches, we've been adding more analytics to the bed to try to really nail this down, because the bed logging thing has been a persistent issue for quite a few patches. And as we learn more about what we need to look for in order to track this down, we've added more and more analytics over the last few patches. There is a potential fix. I won't be quite as concrete as Jake was about the ship, but there is a potential fix in 3.7.1 that, through the analytics, has already told us we've improved it: where the success rate of successfully logging out and logging back in the bed was hovering somewhere around 50 percent of the time, it's up to 80 percent in current PTU builds right now. So while we may not have found every single cause, since this is the same symptomatic issue that can be caused by multiple systems, we are pretty confident that we have improved it quite a bit in 3.7.1, so look out for that.

Definitely, yes. It should not be something that is restricted to a ship. It is right now because those ships come equipped with a specific radar that can find resource signatures. The goal is eventually for any ship that has the power requirements, or the size of slot needed for that radar, to be able to equip the radar. But there will be a downside. A radar that is very good at detecting these resource signatures will be not so good at detecting ships. So you're probably going to be able to detect something to mine from, let's say, three kilometers, but then you'll also lower your ship detection from, whatever, 10 kilometers to about half of that. So there's a trade-off. If you want to be good at finding resources, you're not going to be so good at finding enemies. So it's up to the player to configure their ship how they want, based on what function they want to serve. It might be that I have a ship that I use for fighting a lot of the time, but my buddy needs me to scan ahead of him and find mineables for his Prospector, or her fleet of Prospectors. And you just go, yeah, I'll equip this one, I'll do this job now. But if we're getting attacked, I'll be a bit blind.

Right now, when we got the final numbers of how many caves we can put in the game while keeping the same performance, we kind of figured out that they're going to be a pain to find. A planet that is so big, and five caves: the chances of finding them are very small. So what we did initially, we had a solution of putting a signature on the cave so the radars will pick it up. We started with a signature of 5,000 meters. Before we even went live with that, we made it 10,000 meters, and I think now we've made it even longer. There's a tiny triangle that appears as soon as you go close enough to a cave. The problem is even that is not enough. What we don't really want to do is just give a mega signature that everyone sees, just because they're there, and they just win a cave. That is not what we do. We would like to get to the point where a planet has a realistic number of caves. So if everything goes well with server-side OCS, that should allow us to put way more caves in than we have. I'm talking orders of magnitude more. If you look at Earth right now, there's thousands and thousands of caves. We want to do something like that for our planets. We'll see what the number actually is and what performance allows us to do. But the idea is to increase the density. That will automatically make them easier to find. We would still like to keep a bit of a signature on the cave, so if someone comes close enough to a cave, they'll detect it. But again, this will be dependent on what radar you have. Do you have a radar that is specialized in finding caves? We can put a specialized signature type, not necessarily on the cave, but for underground deposits, because we will have this in the future. We already talked about this, where we can own a piece of land and prospect it and go, oh, this piece of land has this amount of stuff underground. Ideally, with the same device, you'd be able to say, wait, there's a cavity here under the crust. But that is coming a bit further into the future.

Steal while it's being worn?

Yes, like actually just take the backpack and run off with it.

I don't think this is something we've considered yet, but I find that it's an intriguing thing. I'm not sure if you should be able to steal all of it, but maybe steal a Hadanite out of the box that the guy's got on his back if he's not looking. There's a lot of other problems there. If you can steal that, automatically you can steal maybe his weapons, or some important, mission-critical item that he needs. There's a can of worms that needs to be very delicately opened and checked for other problems. Once we open that can of worms, it's dangerous, but it would be cool. We all love pickpocketing in various games, but it needs to be done to a certain extent where it doesn't heavily inconvenience the guy that had his stuff stolen. He needs to be able to retaliate, or there needs to be consequences if you're bad at it. So, yeah, it's a tough one, and I would say it's a bit early to call on this one.

This is, again, one of the reasons it takes us so long to develop. Developing a tractor beam to pick up a crate and move it around is something you can do in a month, easy. Dealing with all the consequences of what players will do with it, that takes years.

Yes, but be honest with me, Dan. I've worked with you long enough: you look forward to the crazy things that players will do with it.

Of course. I want them to do the crazy things. I want them to do as many crazy things as possible, as long as they don't end up griefing other players, who end up getting upset and leaving the game because they got griefed by someone over and over and over. That needs to not happen, and our systems need to be robust enough to not allow that to happen. You're allowed to steal from players, you're allowed to kill them and hunt them, but they need to be able to retaliate. If they're just there getting punched over and over and abused, that is not fun for anyone.

So I think I know where this is coming from, because right now people go out with a Prospector and they find a cluster of Hadanite or Aphorite or whatever they find, and they see them there from the ship. Then they land their ship, they get out of the ship and they start looking around, and they're like, where was it? Because you have a completely different perspective from your ship. Suddenly everything is a lot larger once you go into FPS, and you start looking around and you can't find them. Definitely the idea with radar and anything you can scan and all this data acquisition was to be able to store it, sell it, or transfer it to your own player. If I can sell it to another player, if I can sell it to Gareth, so maybe I'm not a miner, I just scan, I find the stuff, I sell it to Gareth, Gareth makes money. If I can do that, automatically it should not be very hard for us to transfer it from our ship computer to our FPS. It's my data, I choose where I keep it. If I keep it in my FPS helmet or I keep it in my ship, it's up to me. I see no reason why we couldn't do that technically, once we have the tech to transfer the data to other players, which is in the works.

Yeah, that is actually really interesting, because it's like a stepping stone towards the exploration type of gameplay that kind of just happens naturally in the 'verse right now. If you're able to actually scan the data and then take that, you're like a data runner. We have ships for exactly that reason. Maybe you don't really care to actually go down and mine things, but you want to enable other players to do that. Maybe you have an org and you're like, I have no interest in mining, but I'm going to join the mining org over here so that I can help them out by finding cool places for them to go. I just like the exploration aspect. That's really cool.

I think right now this is kind of happening for free, where people find, for example, where a cave is, and they go on YouTube and make a nice video: here's how you find it. You go into orbit, you look at this pixel and you fly your ship at this velocity exactly there, and you see this mountain, fly to the left of it, and now you find the cave. When people find a rich cave and they can scan and gather the data and sell it, I think you'll see a lot fewer YouTube videos, and you'll see a lot of people going, hey, do you want to buy this cave data? And that's when it becomes interesting. It's way more gameplay-oriented, rather than people just trying to be helpful for the community, which is appreciated right now. But I think the gameplay will change once you can make a profit out of it.

Data running and the selling and collection of important data has been one of Star Citizen's promises for a long time. Ships like the Herald are built around that. So I definitely see this, if not this specific version of taking the data and putting it in the helmet, because that might require some UI work. But the ability to take data from one thing and use it in another way has definitely been on the roadmap, in the stars, as it were, for Star Citizen for some time now. So while we don't have an ETA for something like that specifically, I think we can all say that's definitely something that we want to work on and pursue.