Developers say capital ships will likely use projectile weapons at first because beam weapons are complex, and mention EMP and possible leech weapons. They cover hangar module handling of unfinished ships (the Cutlass), starting locations, humanoid aliens, Squadron 42 ship use, ship customization, instancing, NPC crews and art outsourcing.
Well, for now, we're going to have to do pew-pew, because beams are hard. I mean, beams are cool. Babylon 5, Star Trek, a lot of them have been done. There's a lot of complexity to the engine to do beam weapons.
So it could be something that we play around with and get to eventually, but I would suspect that most of them are pew-pew or different effects-looking things at the beginning. And then beam weapons, a solid beam would take a lot of energy too, wouldn't it?
We do have some EMP weapons already on the list. In fact, the very first ship's document mentioned that, and there may be some kind of a leech. I'm not sure. We haven't really worked that in yet, but it could happen.
So there'll be other ways to... I mean, because if you think about it, you want to capture a ship, you don't want to damage it that much. Not too much.
TL;DRAll package ships are covered for the hangar module except the Cutlass, which awaits the asteroid hangar, and they don't yet know what Cutlass-only owners will get.
One of the reasons we brought this question up is that there was some discussion about that, that you have to have a package to have the hangar. Because that's the only thing that gives you the game.
Not just a ship, but a package that comes with the game, not just an add-on ship. So we have covered all of the package ships except for one, which is the Cutlass. Because we don't have the asteroid hangar ready, we're not ready to do the Cutlass yet.
We have to do something, and we understand that there are a few people out there who are getting missed on this first iteration. Not very many, though.
There may be some flow pets or something out there. We don't know yet. Hey, man, I didn't write it. Haddock! But all of the spacefaring races are humanoid because that makes it easier on our animators.
True enough. And also, if you're going to have ships to fly around in, they need to be basically the same shape as humans so that we can let them fly the ship. Can't be sticking phone books underneath you to sit in there and maybe not reach the pedals, like Short Round in Indiana Jones or something.
Think Wing Commander. You are in the military. You don't bring your ship along with you, or your lunchbox. You just go get on the carrier and they give you whatever ship they feel like.
TL;DRA cool ship-customization interface is coming in a later drop, and for now equipment just pops onto the ship via the interface without mechanic animations; the hangar won't be fully polished, and feedback is wanted.
Okay, so there's going to be a very, very cool, I've seen it, interface for customizing your ships, for putting equipment on your ships. Now, of course, that's not going to be ready on the first iteration here, but it's going to come in one of the drops. It looks great. And for now, and I think Chris has talked about this a little bit too, but just to update people, for now what's going to happen is you're going to do things in the interface, little wavy things and hand-wavy things, and then the equipment will pop onto your ship. We're not going to have a lot of extra time for animating robots and stuff like that to carry out the parts and weld them on. Over time.
That brings up a good point. So the hangar will work. It'll be great. It'll be fun. Is it going to be completely polished? No, that's part of the reason we want to do this with you guys, way before Alpha. We want to bring you guys into the fold and get your feedback. So we release systems and things as we go. And then you guys say, hey, that's really cool, wouldn't it be cool if? And if we can do the 'if' and it's not going to really impact the schedule too much, we're going to do it. We want the final game to be as impactful and cool as possible. And that means getting it to you in a playable state as fast as possible.
We're going to try to keep you with your friends, but if you're flying around with 200 people, there are going to be limitations. So you'll probably have, in the command and control sections of your group, the ability to divide up into squadrons or something. Squadrons will stay together, and you may even get to allocate what instances they go to at some point, but we don't know how that's going to work specifically yet.
TL;DRProbably not: players will likely have to fly along with any hired NPCs rather than letting them harvest while offline, because of griefing risks and the AI not knowing how to react, though this may change.
Oh, you have pushed Rob's big red button. Rob does not like earning money when you're not online. Now, that doesn't mean you're not going to be able to, because things change. But anything I have a say in, I try to push away from that. You will probably have to fly with any NPCs you hire. They don't just go off and do their own thing and then come back.
Think about that from the griefing or the other side of that. It sounds really cool, like I'm going to go set my guy's thing, I'm going to go to bed, make some money. But what happens if you get blown up while you're in bed and you didn't have a chance? The NPCs are still AI. They don't know to fly away. They don't know what you want them to do. There's just too much there that could happen on the negative side to warrant that. And I think that's probably a good reason not to allow that to happen. But again, we've got to get to that point and see how that works.
TL;DRHarry Jarvis describes his career in games and earlier in film, working with Chris Roberts on Wing Commander projects and Freelancer, and rejoining him after hearing about Star Citizen.
I've been in the game business for about the last 12, 13 years. Prior to that, I was in the movie industry, which is how I came to know Chris Roberts. He hired me to come out for the live-action shoots for Wing Commander 3. They were sort of amazing, challenging, really intense and fun experiences, and so I hooked up with him for Wing Commander 4, worked with him on the Wing Commander movie, joined him at Digital Anvil for Freelancer, and then we kind of swapped careers and I stayed in games while Chris went to movies. And now we're back together.
Well, I'd heard about Star Citizen, obviously, and had been talking to Chris and Eric Peterson over the last year or so as they got this up and running, and let them know that I was definitely really keen to join them again, and the opportunity arose and here I am.
The whole thing. The size of the project, the scope, is amazing and challenging and daunting. I really enjoy getting back to the space sim and this open environment. One of the things I really loved when I worked on Freelancer was that exploration aspect of the game. So the fact that it's not just the single-player space sim, but it's also got all that great exploration, that ability to go out and just find cool things, things that you didn't expect. Things that weren't on your quest list or in your linear storytelling, where somebody said, hey, you've got to go out here and find that. No, you just fly around and discover things that wow you. That really excited me about Freelancer, and so I see a lot of that potential in Star Citizen as well.
TL;DRHarry Jarvis is the art producer and outsource manager, planning art work and schedules and managing outsourced partners, whom the team treats as real partners with ownership rather than a widget factory.
I'm the art producer and outsource manager. I help the art team basically plan, figure out what we need to do, get stuff out for the schedule for things like the hangar release and those fun things. I work with all of our outsourced partners and vendors, make sure that we're keeping them fed, that we've got assets in their pipeline, that we're getting them feedback, making sure that they're giving us good-quality materials back in a timely manner, keeping track of all that, trying to keep us roughly on schedule and budget.
We're going to be a lot. It's going to be very diffuse. Most outsourcing, you give them a list of things and you very carefully vet every little thing that comes back in, and they're just sort of a widget factory off somewhere else. Our outsource partners are very much partners. They have to have ownership. They really have to be part of our team.