Developers cover stealth signatures (heat, EM, shape), hard-ammo versus laser weapons, shield penetration, hardpoint-limited retrofits, trailers, LTI on upgrades, and guild hangars. The audio team describes the first orchestral recording with composer Pedro Camacho.
Let's talk a little bit about stealth. There are three different kinds of signatures. You have your heat, your EM, and your actual physical shape. Those are your three signatures. So what you do is you try to reduce your physical shape or your aspect, and you also try to... So you can reduce your heat by using non-laser, non-energy weapons, or by using smaller thrusters or smaller power plants. EM is reduce active systems, basically. That's how you keep that quiet.
I can confirm that Rob has now updated the ship stats page. In fact, by the time you're seeing this, they are about 24 hours out of date and will probably need to be updated again. There will be more comments on the forum about things that I don't have right yet.
Well, when Chris creates a new world like this, he likes to take kind of a placeholder from history that he can build on, but he's not absolutely married to it for everything. It's not going to be exactly ancient Rome everywhere. It's taking influences and building on it, and just a creative jumping-off point.
There's several different ways that physical ammo is better or worse than lasers or any energy weapons. One of those is that physical ammo is limited, whereas lasers can, in theory, fire forever if they don't wear out. Physical ammo punches through shields better. Lasers are better at armor. Physical ammo also generates less heat because it uses less energy, except mass drivers, which use a lot.
That's exactly right. There's some other stuff coming up with that that we don't want to talk about right now, but there's some really, really cool stuff going on with interface and holotable stuff that you're just going to have to wait for, unfortunately.
Basically, CryEngine gives us a lot of capability with dealing with penetration of armor and shields. It lets you determine whether something punches straight through or is slowed down, does less damage after it goes through, or it can impact the shield fully and all the damage is absorbed by the shield. So it depends on the type of ammo you're using, actually, how far it will go through and whether or not it will actually impact the shield or the armor behind it.
Obviously, we love talking about LTI, and we're going to be so sorry to see it leave. But the answer is that if you have a ship package, let's say you have a base Freelancer, and then we release some fancy new Freelancer some amount of months from now that we're not willing to talk about right now, you buy the upgrade, you will keep the LTI on the original. So that's a way for our original backers to keep LTI if they want to get a fancier ship.
Absolutely. It's going to happen. We don't know what yet. We've been talking about this sort of thing for a while. You're going to have items you can put in your cockpit, in your hangar, to show where you've been.
Other Chris Roberts games have done that too, with medals and things like that. Collectibles are always important to show what you've accomplished. It's not a scoreboard per se, but it is kind of a way of showing people what you've accomplished.
I can tell you that. It's going to be very, very soon. We actually shot an interview with Martin Galway talking about Freelancer just earlier this week. And we're going to be cutting it together. We'll have it as soon as possible.
We constantly update things, so you've got to be there on the site. And we alert people when it's happening. We send out a Comm-Link or we send out an email. We'll keep you informed. But it's coming.
Yes, I think we could do that. Actually, Chris talked about that a lot when we were out in LA. And we were talking about having different times of day and time passing on the planet so that you get the value of the CryEngine lighting. And that will affect what people are doing and where they're going.
Now, that doesn't mean they're going to be able to get into that. This is going to be on the website. But we are working on a social aspect, a social module up in Montreal, and we're going to Tinkertoy that thing together eventually with the hangar. I won't give you the exact date, but it's not that far off to where you can visit each other's hangars and check it out. And that's kind of the first step into what you were talking about just now. It's definitely what we're building towards.
Yes, we have lots and lots of different calibers. There are three classes of cannons even. There's the mass driver size, which are the very large ones, and basic cannons, which are just ballistic weapons, and then the Gatling guns, which have a smaller bore but fire a lot faster.
We'll have to figure that out, but basically the ammo is limited. There's not an infinite supply of clips. It's not like your pistol in most shooter games where you just keep reloading over and over again.
Right, so you don't have to get up and change the ammo, put it back in. So I think the answer probably is still to be designed, but I'm assuming that if you buy extra clips, you're just going to have access to those bullets.
Yeah, it's coming. Just a matter of how fast we can crank out artwork for different pieces. Containers for chemicals or for fuel might look different. Liquids would look different than, say, chemicals, or carriages for something like boxes or drugs or slaves or any of those kind of things.
Of course everything is subject to change, but hardpoints are fixed on ships. So however many hardpoints there are on that ship, that really determines the shape of that ship. So if a ship has a different number of hardpoints, for instance the 350r, which has two thruster hardpoints instead of one, then you cannot change one ship to the other. Same with the Aurora LN, which has the two extra gun hardpoints. That's going to continue to happen, I think, with each of these special variants where there is a different body style. You can't add another seat to a Hornet, for instance. Same idea.
Yes, absolutely. Chris premiered that back with Wing Commander, and Wing Commander 3 was the first one to let you do that, and it kind of got more comprehensive with each edition, and Star Citizen will continue that trend.
I remember that was a big deal. You want people to have more control on the ship because everybody's got a different style. Some people like to get in there, slug it out. They want more up front, shield-wise. Some people like to fight from a distance. You want to support all the different game types and different people types and personalities. What's more important: speed or weapons or defense? And we want the immersive experience to be whatever somebody wants it to be.
Well, our composer is Pedro Camacho, who has worked on lots of little projects for us, like the Hornet commercial, the Aurora commercial, and the original 300i commercial. And the orchestra is the Capellen Orchestra, which is a group of freelance players from different orchestras around Europe that collect together to play trailer music, the big bombastic scores that you hear playing underneath the soundtracks of cinema commercials. And the recording took place in the Czech Republic last Friday night. And we now have the recordings and we're going to show you them as soon as we cut something together.
Well, Pedro did not know that I was attached to the project, even though we know each other, and he wrote straight to Chris Roberts on Chris Roberts' Facebook page, which apparently anyone can just write to Chris anytime they like. Anyway, Pedro composed a demo and sent that to Chris, and Chris really liked it, and we took it from there, and he became the composer. That's the short version.
TL;DRThere are tens of thousands of pre-mixed WAV files of dialogue, effects and music, which the software plays by rules that set speaker position, volume and pitch from the 3D environment.
Well, there are tens of thousands of individual WAV files all getting played either one after the other or all at the same time, depending on the computer software. And they are dialogue files, sound effects, musical clips. We have all three of those kinds of sounds baked into WAV files. We call that a pre-mix or a pre-rendered type of WAV file. And we decide how to play those, which loudspeaker they're going to come out from as they move around the surround field, and the volume, so that things get louder as they approach or quieter as they go away. We change the pitch, so things will do that Doppler-style thing. As you fly, you're initially approaching something and then you start departing from it; that changes the pitch, just like in real life. So the computer's running all these software systems, analyzing the 3D environment constantly, and picking which of the WAV files to play, and we have to set all that up. It's almost like a wind-up toy. You wind it up, and then you just let go of it.
TL;DRPedro sends a simulated version to Martin and Chris, Chris has the final say, and Martin then gives technical feedback so the music fits the sound mix, requesting changes if needed.
Pedro sends a simulated version of the music to me and Chris, and we both listen to it. Chris is the one in charge, obviously. If he doesn't like it, it doesn't matter if I don't like it or if I do like it. But when Chris likes it, then I talk to Pedro about the technical aspects of the music, or details that pertain to the length of the tune, or whether it's going to interfere with sounds or work well as a piece of music that's playing in the mix. And I can often get Pedro already in the right groove before he sends anything. I give Pedro a bunch of information first. And so we either like what we hear from Pedro within the first 30 seconds, when we double-click on the WAV file, or if there's some aspects to the WAV file that we don't like, then we ask Pedro to make those changes. It could be the tempo of the music, if there's too much of a heartbeat feel or not enough of a heartbeat feel, or high-pitched instruments, all kinds of different sonic, timbral aspects.
Exactly. I'm thinking of all the sounds and whether it's going to invade the sound mix too much. We don't want any one particular element to be like a big noisy guy at a party. One WAV file playing in the sound mix can really make a real mess of it and make it hard to hear the other one. So we have to keep everything as clear as possible.
Well, they sometimes do. Hopefully they don't. It's a trick. When the loop is 10 seconds long, people kind of get that idea pretty quick. So we generally try to make them as long as possible.
That was Pedro's recommendation. Pedro said, I know this great orchestra director; he has an orchestra that he collects together and they play music for games as well as trailers. And he was willing to give them a try. He sent a lot of pre-recorded clips of that orchestra already doing their work to us, and we were like, yep, sounds good to us. They were playing other people's music, of course. So we were certainly willing to give it a try.
No, it's a little bit like regular film score musicians. They basically sit down, they haven't ever seen the music before, and they just start to play. There's usually 10 to 15 minutes of trying to play through it. But you get recording almost immediately with these sessions, and they'll never see that music again, because the following day there's some more music from somebody else. So when we hear music, either in a movie or a game, and it's something we fall in love with, and 20 years later we're listening to every nuance of that music and thinking about how great it is, that is something that they literally played in the course of a few hours, having never seen it before. And they never had a chance to play it again. It's amazing how good they are.
There's a lot more music than what we recorded on Friday. It's a four-hour session. You have to play again and again if somebody makes a mistake. And I've said they're really good, but there is an occasional mistake. The benchmark is that you get about 15 minutes of final music, end-to-end final music, in a four-hour session, which doesn't sound like a lot, but there's a lot of time the orchestra director or the conductor is talking to the orchestra, everyone has to sit quietly and wait for the tape to roll, and other things like that. So you don't get four hours of music, is the bottom line. 15 minutes. So we have a lot more than 15 minutes in our game, so we're going to need a lot more of those sessions.