Vehicle Experience and Vehicle Feature developers discuss 3.11 and upcoming work: docking, missile operator mode, countermeasures, capacitor gameplay, ship tuning and balance, overheating, gravlevs, ground vehicles, control surfaces for racing and atmospheric flight, and the Aegis HUD.
TL;DRThe vehicle experience team tunes ships and their components, weapons and combat, and works closely with the feature team to make the vehicle experience unified, consistent and good.
As far as the vehicle experience goes, it's almost self-explanatory but not quite. So we kind of look after the experience of the ship. So you've got something like Dave on the feature team will build the technology that makes the ships fly, but then the vehicle experience team will look after all the tuning, and we'll also work closely with Dave to create the flight model. And also we tune all kind of aspects of the game from the basic power plants, coolers, to the guns and the weaponry system. And then we also look after the combat system, so the experience that players have. And that was kind of key with the turret experience as well. We looked at what we could do just from a design point of view to look after that experience and make the turrets better. So we're kind of like a middle ground between a feature team and a content team where we make things feel better, and we try and just make them feel better and make them feel connected to one another. So all the complex systems we're building...
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David ColsonProduct Owner / Programmer, Vehicle Feature Team
It's worth adding as well that the vehicle experience team and the vehicle feature team are not wholly separate entities. We work very closely together, and the vehicle experience team is usually the group who helps the feature team define the features and the design for features. You can think of them as responsible for making sure your experience of using a vehicle is unified and consistent and good.
TL;DRThe vehicle feature team brings directors' visions into the game and maintains and adjusts the features afterwards, while ship layouts and gameplay systems like mining belong to other teams that all work closely together.
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David ColsonProduct Owner / Programmer, Vehicle Feature Team
Yeah, we pretty much take the vision from directors and bring it into the game and own that entire process generally, obviously advising the vehicle experience team along the way. And then we also just maintain the features, because obviously once they've been built, the work doesn't generally just stop there. We usually go back and adjust them a lot. And so, having made them and having understood the features, we're the people who you would go to when you want to change the feature, update it, or just keep it working in tip-top condition.
And then the vehicle content team, we don't have a representative from here today. They're the ones that actually make the physical ships. They're the ones who determine the layouts of the ships. I think one of the higher upvoted questions was something like, can we have light switches right inside all the entrances. That's actually a question for the vehicle content team who actually build the ships, as opposed to the vehicle experience or the vehicle feature team. And then kind of floating nebulously is then the PU gameplay teams who work on the actual gameplay systems like mining or salvaging, which are often closely associated with ships, but are actually not a ship system. They are a gameplay system that ships then participate within. So all of these things are four different teams here. They all work very closely together. They all work intertwined together.
TL;DRThe team is working on a missile operator mode planned for next year, ongoing countermeasures work with more coming later, capacitor gameplay with the weapons part finished, docking, and ship AI features.
They are currently working on the missle operator mode scheduled for next year, and in general they work on improving the missles. This links back to how in general operator seats work in ships and it will have an impact on how multi-crew gameplay works in the future. They have also been continously working on countermeasures. While they brought in some changes for 3.11, they are still far off from where they want to be but a lot of the missing features will come in 3.12.
They are now moving on to the capacitor gameplay. It is split into three groups: engines, weapons, and shields. The work for the weapon sub-system is already complete. They still have to finishes the other two systems, and link them all together.
Dave's team has been mainly working on the docking system, but they also have a couple of items on the back burner like improved MFDs. They have also been working on additional features for ship AI.
David ColsonProduct Owner / Programmer, Vehicle Feature Team
I think the big thing that you might have seen in the monthly update is docking. That's probably the major focus for the whole team. But then there's also some back burner stuff. We've been working on MFDs for a little while and we're starting to pick up future work for that. It's a pretty hard project, but we were starting to do that. And then we've also worked on some underlying tech stuff with IFCS to support AI, so giving AI more features that they can control on ships. And we also expanded out the underlying movement system in IFCS so that other systems could use it, like for example, EVA. So now in upcoming releases, EVA characters will actually be using IFCS underneath their character movement. It's that sort of thing where it's supporting other teams, and then docking is obviously our main focus.
They do have another combat summit coming up where they will break down where combat speeds should be. They are aware of the issues. They do not just want to limit the combat speed, they want it to happen organically based on the systems they have built.
Through their gameplay tests they figured out that slower SCM speeds provide a better positional combat experience.
They are not 100% sure how they will fix it but it works right now by having a super springy suspenion it hovers on, and there is a lot of difficult friction modelling going on to make it behave like it does right now. This suspension model has been an issue, and it has never felt incredible to them. It has a low priority right now, so they will not have a look at it in the immediate future, but they also state that they are eager to fix it.
It is a consequence of the main thrusters generating the most heat because they have the most power. Their current overheating system is only based on heat right now. They are generally not happy with the system right now because it is very linear in the sense that you press the button and it overheats. They want heat to be more of a long term consequence, and the managment of energy to be the short term consequence.
TL;DRMaking ramps and elevators hit the ground without lifting the ship is a very hard problem; inverse kinematics created more problems than it solved, and progress has been made but it remains difficult.
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David ColsonProduct Owner / Programmer, Vehicle Feature Team
This is a really hard technical problem. They tried to use inverse kinematics and it created more problems than it solved. In general, the idea is to accurately model its physics (which they do not do right now). The physics solver that solves collisions between objects does not cope that well when you are moving objects too forcibly through the world. You have to move them with forces, and accelerations and stuff to get the physics engine to solve the movement correctly. That also brings a whole bunch of other problems, because when you move the elevator with forces or acceleration all sorts of other stuff can move the elevator with forces and acceleration. They have been making strides towards it. They have a similar situation with transit carriages (i.e. trains and elevators) which are similar setup, so that they have the correct collision behaviour. But they stress that it is a very difficult problem to solve.
In general they wait for a feature to be complete. For example, when IFCS 2 was complete they did a pass on every single ship. It is a constant balancing act of applying what they have learned after tuning ships, and how all ships relate to one another. Once they are happy with it then it goes out to the community, and then they iterate again with the feedback they get.
The next big tuning pass is planned for when the capacitor gameplay comes online because it will have a huge impact on ship performance. A goal of the aformentioned combat summit is also to create a relative ship tuning matrix so that they have more precise numbers on how ships perform. They want to have ships that have a purpose and specalisations. All of that will happen next year.
David ColsonProduct Owner / Programmer, Vehicle Feature Team
Not a map exactly but they want to bring back the 3D landing radar view that they had in the past. The UI team is looking right now into converting the radar system to building blocks which could entail this feature.
They do not have an answer to this question only their personal thoughts on this matter. They bring up that the self-distruct is a chemical process and should therefore not be stopped by an EMP. It is also a concious choice to destroy your own ship, and they think that in the future that when there is a higher cost to dying and losing your ship people will not use it as an easy way to avoid pirates.
That is something that we wouldn't handle. What VET does is mostly related to when the pilot is in a seat and doing things, or when somebody is in a turret seat or something. The minute you step out of that seat, it's probably not on us anymore. But I was always dreaming of maybe the audio team adding something for the PA system where the captain says, self-destruct has been activated, you should go to your escape pods or something like that. But ultimately this is a question for the content teams, not for us.
I do. I'm trying to get a glider license, but due to COVID and because the costs are not really low, I haven't done this since June. But it's cool. It's fun. It's terrifying, especially the landing. It's really terrifying.
Heat and so on, it's more like a side thing for us. So we're concerned with the capacitor gameplay and capacitors. The capacitor gameplay is in parallel to heat and power. With the capacitor stuff, you configure your ship and where it performs well in that specific moment. But heat development and cooling things and all that, that is a side thing which is independent of that. It's more about long-term decisions.
TL;DRAn auto flip-over option is something they will look into, possibly via a tool or thrusters, but it depends on first improving ground vehicle physics, which is a lot of work.
Yes, because it's very, very frustrating driving a ground vehicle and flipping over in the middle of nowhere and having no way to get it back. So that is definitely something we're going to look into. Also, we're looking into where we take ground vehicles in the future and the technology behind the ground vehicles, because it's fair to say that it's definitely not to the standard that we want for the ground vehicles compared to the ships. So our goal is to fully bring up the ground vehicles to the same standard as the ships going forward. It's just a lot of work to get all the physics correct, because you've got to get the tire, suspension, the actual physics working correctly, so you can actually implement systems where you can flip over the vehicle. And we do kind of want this to be maybe a couple of different ways. Maybe the player can carry a tool that can push the vehicle back over, or maybe the ground vehicle can have thrusters on sometimes to flip it back over. But it needs better physics to do that at the moment.
The mainly look at the statistics they gather from the servers, and sometimes it is very clear that a ship is too OP, and sometimes they have discussions about it. They do some testings internally but they also mention that nothing beats the data that they can gather when the player base is testing a ship.
This is a question for Turbulent. What they have heard is that it is supposed to be an opt-in option in the future where you can choose to join the ship channel.
No, it is not where they want to be. In order to set this up properly they need the capacitor gameplay to come online, the resource managment system, repair gameplay, and more. Balancing this right now while critical features are missing is virtually impossible.
They do not want a meta for ship components. For example when they see that a cooler always works best in all ships and situations then it means that they did something wrong, and they will adjust it.
Yes. For example, they had a lot of comments on how missles worked and that started off the initiative to create the missles operator mode. The same is true for the capacitor gameplay. They make those suggestions when they see that the systems they have right now cannot be tuned to get them to the point where they want to be.
TL;DRThe speakers say G-force limits are under review and will matter more, with aerodynamic control surfaces allowing higher-G maneuvers in atmosphere, a better exhaustion model, and talks about specialized flight suits.
So yeah, we've got two sides to this. We've got the overall ship performance in space, which we have cut down to some of the physiological G limits. But again, we are reviewing these limits. But also, in atmosphere, we're looking at having control surfaces on the ships again, to allow the ships to move from just being pushed by the thrusters to being pushed by aerodynamics, which is a much stronger force. So we're going to have ships that are full-on racing performance ships that can do unbelievably tight turns in atmosphere with control surfaces. And the consequence of that is that's going to be really high G. It does push the limits on something like the M50 right now. You can definitely black out in ships like that currently. But with control surfaces, you have to be even more careful. So we'll get much closer to actually the physical limits before the pilots have serious consequences.
Yeah, lift is awesome. On top of that, we're not really happy with how the current G-force exhaustion model works. At the moment, the single exhaustion axes of the actor are kind of isolated from each other. So there's no overall exhaustion value. Once we add this, this will be another factor in how you can perform, because you do not only need to take care of your own ship, you also need to take care of your body. We also have some talks with the actor team about specialized flight suits that will increase or decrease the G-force limits for those pilots. We'll have to see what comes out of that. But yeah, G-force will play a bigger role in the future again.
They are confident in the flight model they have now, and once they bring online control surfaces they feel confident that racing will come back because control surfaces will allow certain ships to do maneuvers that no other ship can do.
Another issue is that the racing tracks they have right now in the game are very old and were created with the old flight model in mind. They need to be reworked.
TL;DRThey say there is a plan to retune all ships so similar ones fall in comparable performance windows, narrowing the gap to the Arrow and Gladius, with bigger ships fighting differently rather than just slower.
The answer is yes, we do have a plan for this. So once we do have the blank, when we do that work going forward, that's when we're going to retune all the ships, basically. That's what I'm trying to get through. When we get to the point where we retune the ships, that's going to be the point where we really analyze how close ships can be. Because we do realize that the Arrow and Gladius are probably further away. Well, the performance of those ships is better than the other ships that we compare them to, and that distance is greater than what we want it to be right now. So we want to narrow that down to bring other ships where they are much more comparable to the Arrow and Gladius, basically. That's what I'm trying to say. And that will come with the capacitor, but it's not because of the capacitor, it's because of the tuning of the ship. And that's the point where we go back and we retune all the ships together. But our goal is to bring similar ships into similar performance windows. So yeah, that's definitely going to happen in the future.
And it also has to do with the purpose of the ship. If you compare two dogfighters, yeah, they will perform quite similarly. And if you just go for dogfighting, then you have something. But if you, for example, are trying to dogfight a heavier ship, that gameplay is going to change in the future. So bigger ships like, let's say, the Constellation or Freelancer are not just going to be slower dogfighters. They're going to fight differently. It just speaks again to ship specialization, and this part of our work is not complete yet.
They provided some feedback on it. - Normally, they make concepts on how they think a certain widget should work and what is important but the UI team does the final implementation.