Developers preview Alpha 3.23: EVA in the Persistent Universe, a new interaction prompt, master modes, precision targeting, FPS reloading and dynamic crosshair, a restyled visor HUD and star map, character customizer, freight elevators, distribution centers, and ship price retuning (Pisces Rescue, Arrow, Connie, Hammerhead, 890 Jump).
A lot of stuff. Essentially, I am cross-project on both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen itself, so I essentially run the design teams that we've got, which includes mission design, economy design, system design, technical design, so all those teams report to me and we all work together as one big team. We also work with a lot of the other teams, obviously people like Ian Leyland and his art team, a lot of people that we've had on here before, but essentially I'm working with everyone in the company more or less to try and hit the vision that we're trying to hit.
TL;DREVA is going well but still has work to do, such as networking in the Persistent Universe; the new forward-leaning pose makes movement more responsive and lets players fit through tight gaps more easily.
Really good. Obviously, there's still work to do. Obviously, a big proponent of that, as you mentioned, it was in Squadron stream. Now we're dealing with things like networking, and this is going to be true for a lot of the features that we talk about today, is that there are unique challenges that come with putting things into the Persistent Universe and Star Citizen. It's looking really good. And obviously the guys yesterday, if you missed the ISC, they did a very, very good job of explaining the systems, but I'll give a quick summary of that. Basically, how we felt previously about the old EVA system is that it wasn't really up to scratch. The player experience and just the feel of the movement wasn't really as responsive and as basically easy to use as we essentially want. So as the game's evolving, we're finding that we're going into these environments where we're making tighter turns, we're going through wreckages, we're trying to do things like that. And if you think about the old EVA system, because you're flying around so upright, you have a silhouette of movement that's kind of like my forearm here. But if you think about it now, because we're going into what we've called the Iron Man pose internally, where you're kind of leaning forward, your arms are down by your side, your silhouette is more like this. So you're facing directly forwards. And what that means is if you're going through tighter spaces, it's a lot easier when you're rotating; you're no longer rotating like this, you're more rotating like this. So you can fit through those gaps easier and you're not bumping into things quite as often. And then on top of that, if you're winding your way through, you're almost mirroring a bit like a snake-like motion. And you can fit through all those tight gaps and turns and things like that too.
TL;DRThey want to move toward equipment like EVA backpacks with more fuel and oxygen later, but EVA fuel and zero-G traversal are not in 3.23, partly because players would need push-pull and refueling options first.
In the future we want to put more emphasis on basically picking equipment that allows you to EVA better. So that might be in the form of EVA jetpacks, not jetpacks, but EVA backpacks and things like that that might come with more EVA fuel, because that's something we want to do down the line. More oxygen and things like that for existing in spaces where there's no atmosphere for you to be able to breathe. And essentially, looking into that preparation phase that we've talked about before, where you're making considerations that, hey, I want to be an EVA salvager, I'm going to equip myself with the things that are going to be able to get me there. But until we get other features in, like we showed yesterday, we showed the zero-G push-pull, that's not coming in 3.23. And some of these systems we're holding back, because we wouldn't really want to implement EVA fuel without having systems like zero-G push-pull, because otherwise you might be sat in the middle of space, run out of fuel, you've got no options. You also need to build places to refuel.
100%, yes. So I'm glad you brought that up. We tried to be very deliberate in our storytelling. We said, this is coming in Alpha 3.23, and then further down the line, there's the zero-G traversal where you're climbing on the hands, there's the fuel. Some folks missed that EVA is 3.23, but the zero-G traversal, that crawling along the hands, and the fuel stuff is not 3.23. That is down the line.
TL;DRThe old plain use prompt became unclear as items gained several actions, so a single verb-based default item action replaces the long list, with the other actions kept behind a customizable wheel.
Yeah, so obviously we had an interaction system that has evolved a couple of times, right? And it evolves through necessity and where the game's at and where we feel like it needs to go. We used to just have the super, super plain interaction. Do you remember the old use thing that was in the middle of the screen? And looking back on that now, it was quite inappropriate, because you would hit use and hope that it was the correct action that it did. Is it going to pick it up? Is it going to open it? Is it going to close it? What's going to happen? So that obviously wasn't very clear. And as the game evolved and the items and the way you interact with items got more in-depth, and you could do three or four or five or six different things with the same item, the necessity came to basically have a selection there. So that's basically where we ended up with the system that is currently in Star Citizen at the moment, where we've got the list. Now obviously, playing with that for such a long time, we eventually got to a point where we were saying, we could definitely do better here, and it's something that we've wanted to do for quite a while. So that's where the player interaction experience comes in, where we are now condensing this down into one single use action. But unlike the old use action, you get a verb that essentially tells you what it is you're going to do. And that also ties into default item action. So I could look at all of these items on your desk, right? All of them might be very different from each other. Your laptop might be like the old-school use action, which would tell me that I'm probably going to hop down and start typing on the laptop. That folder there might be more like a pickup action, or an inspect action if it's something that's like a datapad, if there's an iPad on the table or something like that. And that allows us to basically look at all of these different item types that we've got in data and say, this is what we think the default item action for this thing should be. But again, in ISC, something really cool that we showed off is the ability to customize that as well. So we're not getting rid of all of the big list of actions that we previously had that were quite difficult to navigate through, especially in situations like combat. Combat is obviously something that we've seen a lot of in Squadron. You can envision how that generally goes. And again, through the game evolving comes the necessity to change it, right? I just want to look at a weapon on the floor and hit go. I just want to pick it up and use it, right? But as I was saying, we're not getting rid of all of the other actions that you can do with the items. It's just that they are tucked away behind a wheel. For the people who want to customize this experience or use the other interactions on specific items, it's all there, and it's in a slightly cleaner format with the wheel, so you're not accidentally clicking something on a condensed list that we used to have.
TL;DRThe prompt was heavily tuned to pick out important, large items near the player's focus, so it shouldn't become annoying, and mouse-over highlighting remains for fine control.
So we've spent a lot of time tuning that. So it's picking out the important items, the large items. Basically, we've got a system that essentially finds out where your focus is. So again, we have played with this a lot. If the F moving around on all these different items got annoying, it would annoy us too, because we play the game so much as well. So we're at a point now where we feel like the F selection is very, very clear and easy to use. And the selection itself: if I was here right now and I had moved my focus to your laptop, but I was too far away to actually use the laptop, it would prioritize the closest thing that is still in the focus. It's actually a very smart system. So we don't get annoyed by it at all. And for the people who actually like to use it, the interaction system is still there. So you can still mouse over things and highlight them and interact with them. If you really need to do fine control, oh, I'm sifting through this guy's stuff that's on his armor, or I've got loads of clutter on my desk in my hub, I can still have a fine selection of what I want to interact with too.
TL;DRDistribution centers are huge surface facilities with exterior pads, offices and inner workings, varying in layout and faction, with cargo and basic combat missions in 3.23 and more content expected later.
Okay, so just as a bit of background, the distribution centers are these massive facilities that truly are really big, that are down on the surface of planets and moons and things like that, and they are what they sound like, right? It's a center of distribution. There are lots of landing pads, it should be a big hub of activity basically, and there are a lot of different areas of the distribution center that are different from each other. So you've got the exterior, typically where people will be landing their ship, unloading cargo, things like that. You've got the offices up top, which is generally more of a front for whatever business or corporation has ownership of this place. And then you've got more of the inner workings, which are where you would typically expect to see cargo being ferried. If there's machinery that are producing stuff down there, if they're making something, then that would be where that's all tucked down. So what we're trying to provide for 3.23 is some variety between the different locations, so slightly different layouts between the different distribution centers, so they all feel a little bit different from each other, and different factions at each of these places as well, which should give a very different feeling of what you're going to be doing there. So just as an example, and we talked about this recently: you might have a law-abiding faction there. And typically, you would be doing what you would expect to at a law-abiding place, where you would be trading, talking to people, things like that, all above board. If you're a pirate, you can obviously come and attack and cause trouble, but they might have security systems made to deal with you. You might also have a hostile faction that's taken over one of these things that a corporation maybe previously had, and they came in and took over. And that would be a very combat-focused area for you to go and play in. And then you might have something that's more of a mix. So you go in, the front is very professional and business-like, but underneath, if you go a little bit deeper, you might find that they're up to no good. So ultimately, for the content we want to provide, the distribution centers have a lot of possibility, and there's no way that we're going to provide all the content that we want to in one drop. But we definitely want you interacting there, doing cargo missions and potentially some basic combat missions and things like that, to interact with all of the different areas of the distribution centers we're going to provide. But the future is very exciting for them, and these are big and diverse.
And these are humongous. These are the biggest thing we've done short of a landing zone. They are massive. They are microcosms of the entire Star Citizen FPS experience. When I say FPS, I mean things not in a spaceship. You'll get missions that will take you to these places. You'll go to these places to get missions to take you out. Some of the missions are self-contained within the distribution center. They're that big that you can do the entire loop within the distribution center.
TL;DRThey acknowledge resistance to master modes but say navigation and SCM modes make combat tighter and more personal and curb endless chasing; it is on track for 3.23 at the moment, and they want feedback.
I mean, it's a big change, right? And people are always initially going to be resistant to it. And I think that's very, very natural, because you've been playing a game for such a long time and it's such a big change that you're going to have to relearn a lot of the things that you've already learned before. But ultimately, again, this was another thing that has come around from us playing the game, especially in combat-focused scenarios in Squadron, and going through and going, hey, we feel like change needs to be made. So just a very, very high level of what master modes are: essentially you have navigation and SCM, two modes that you switch between, and they have very defined purposes with how you fly your ship. And what this has allowed us to do is in SCM, which is essentially your combat mode, we've made it so the combat is able to be a little bit tighter, because we've got a bit more control over the ship speeds there. That combat is a lot more personal, a lot tighter, and we felt that it made for a much more visceral and a lot more personal experience with whoever you're fighting. And obviously that's translated to player-versus-player combat as well, which again, we've been testing internally quite a lot. And it's avoiding situations where you're able to essentially exploit the flight system to constantly play chase and not really have a proper one-on-one combat with someone, and you're constantly running away. So we felt that it was a positive change as we've been playing the game.
I think from my limited experience with it, it gets more exciting the more players that get involved. It's certainly fun 1v1, but when the furball starts... When I'm seeing the battles with like 15 people involved, 25 people involved, it keeps them all tight and compact. And literally the screen can be filled with ships this way. It's a much more visceral experience.
It's a game changer. We've got such beautiful ships. We've got amazing VFX that when you're shooting at someone, you typically in the past haven't really been able to see, hundreds of meters, if not kilometers away from people. It seems a real shame to not be able to see some of that stuff. You're basically just interacting with the UI. So this bringing you closer together is just a much better feeling experience, in our opinion.
TL;DRPrecision targeting adds a toggled zoom for aiming at specific parts, and gimbals are coming to nearly all ship weapons and turrets, removing the size restriction, with only a few fixed-weapon exceptions.
So precision targeting at its very core is very similar to what you would do in a first-person shooter. You take time to aim and it almost helps you be more accurate. So what you can expect in the ships is an immediate zoom. So I know we've got a system where you can scroll in and zoom, and it's maybe a little bit awkward to try and use. This is more a toggle-in, toggle-out zoom. So again, you're going to be closer anyway through master modes coming in. This is more a case of: you're closer already and now you're zooming in on your target. You can see much more of the ship. So if you're in a combat scenario where you're flying around and having to maneuver a lot and you're dealing with multiple targets, you might not necessarily want to use it too much. But if I'm in a situation where you're flying a Cutlass and I'm trying to take one of your engines off, I can toggle into precision targeting mode and go straight for your engines if I wanted to just take out your engines, get on board and deal with you that way. So it, again, leans more into that closer-feeling experience. It also helps you with aiming at a target rather than trying to pixel hunt a little bit with your screen. And obviously it makes it more accessible than having to scroll in and out with the mouse wheel. It's just one click to toggle in and out. And then with the gimbal change, the big change there is all ships are basically now going to have gimbals. All weapons are going to have gimbals. Weapon slots of ships are going to have gimbals. So that's not entirely true. I'm going to contradict myself already. There are a few exceptions. You look at the Idris. It's got a massive railgun on it. It's not going to be rotating around everywhere.
Yeah, so there are a few that are going to be stuck as they are. But what we had thought about for a while that we weren't too keen on is the swap down and swap out for the different weapons and exchanging the gimbal out for that, basically, because new players come in and it's not immediately understandable what's going on there, and we didn't really feel like it was adding as much value. And just to touch on the turrets as well, turrets are now going to have gimballed weapons too, which is really, really good, because previously you were limited to the rotation speed of the turret. It gives you a little bit more look-ahead and a little bit more of a unified, pleasant experience that you can expect from the ships that you can then expect from the turrets as well.
...[down] one size. Yeah, exactly. So some ships will get bigger weapons for this. And of course, there are the exceptions. If you look at a ship and there's clearly a very impossibly fixed weapon on it, think Inferno, think Vanguard with the nose, think Idris with the railgun, those will not be gimballed. So we're not going through and remaking the ships to do that. So there are a very small amount of exceptions. I think it's like four or five.
TL;DRReloading is being streamlined with an ammo repooling interaction that condenses magazines for a weapon via a basic animation whose duration depends on the amount of ammunition, keeping magazines themselves.
Please stop me if I go too technical or go too deep on this, because obviously this is my jam. So, God, where do we start? So let's start with reloading. So the changes or improvements to reloading, as we've been calling it, again come through the necessity of change through playing combat in Squadron a lot, very focused combat areas where we're able to really hammer out some of the basic combat mechanics, where we were in situations that were getting frustrating. As most people probably know, engaging in FPS combat, if you reload, we save your ammo pool to your magazine, and that goes back on your suit, and you might then end up in a situation where if you want to put more magazines on your suit, your suit is now completely full, and you can't put more on unless you swap them out, and it's a very sticky, tedious process. So essentially we're trying to remove steps there. Rather than get rid of the realism that you have with basically having magazines that contain the ammunition, we want to keep that. And down the line we may still want to lean into doing the magazine stripping through a proper animated system. What we really want to lean into at the moment is just an ability to be able to condense the amount of ammunition down that you've got. So that's what we call ammo repooling. And that is an interaction either on the weapon or in your inventory that lets you essentially go, this weapon, I would like to condense all the magazines for that. Your character will play an animation while it's happening. It's quite a basic one. And then it will take a varying amount of time depending on how much ammunition you're shifting. So if I'm doing LMG mags, that will take longer than, say, if I'm doing pistol magazines that might have 10 bullets in or so.
TL;DRThe dynamic crosshair shows the expected spread of the weapon and is meant as a combat feature on combat helmets, tied to longer-term plans to make armor sets feel different.
Okay, dynamic crosshair. So again, this came through necessity from playing combat so much. It was essentially a situation where you don't always have time to aim. Sometimes you want to just shoot your gun in a desperate situation, and it's really nice to have an indicator there of where it is you're going to shoot. We came up with a dynamic crosshair; it essentially gives you an idea of what sort of spread you can expect from your weapon. We essentially simulate spread through a spread cone on our guns, just because we don't want the gun shaking all over the place to generate it, so we do add some spread on there. And essentially, the more you fire, obviously it changes, the more unstable it is. The dynamic crosshair basically tells you where you're going to be shooting. Now what we've done, and this leans into some down-the-line armor gameplay that we're going to be leaning into, where we want to make the armor sets feel different and give them a unique purpose, is this dynamic crosshair is meant as a combat feature that you get on combat helmets. So if I'm, say, an engineer or something like that, I don't necessarily need a dynamic crosshair for my gun, because I'm not really going out and doing combat. You might get other benefits from wearing engineering gear or medical gear or whatever, but this is something that we're obviously leaning into long term, and this is one of the first features that we're bringing out for combat suits.
TL;DRThe visor HUD is being restyled with new notifications, a combat stack, widgets, a compass and a minimap, but the minimap only covers marked-up locations, mostly ships in 3.23, with more added patch by patch.
Yeah. So basically the visor HUD is going to be a big restyle. So I think the big task at the moment is restyling it for the Persistent Universe. Just a few features essentially. We have the existing hint system that we've got in game. That's all being tidied away into the new notification system that we've got with high and low priority notifications, where we've got some really nice visuals for those. We've obviously got the newly reworked, I'm going to call it the combat stack. That's what I quite like calling it. No one else calls it that, but basically it shows you where all your ammo is, gives you all your feedback for your weapons, changing items, things like that. Shows you what's in your hands. Then on the left-hand side, we've obviously got all the widgets for things like your health, the environment, all that sort of stuff. We've got the compass that's going in too. It's in the video. You can already see it.
Yeah. Well, not north in space, but you've got a bearing. And then obviously one of the biggest ones is the minimap, and the minimap is amazing. It really is. And it links into what we're doing, which we can talk about in a little bit, with the star map on the mobiGlas 2, which is basically the area map. I'll make very clear now, we're not doing all locations with the minimap, because obviously there is a lot of space and areas to mark up.
Yes, I was going to say, let's talk about that. The minimap does not just exist in a vacuum. Every single location in the Persistent Universe has to be marked up in order to feed that information into the minimap. I'll go ahead and say, because I talked to John Crewe about this just yesterday, the ship team is working diligently to get as many of the ships as possible marked up for 3.23. You can at least explore your ships with the minimap, and then maybe a couple locations here and there. And then that will just continue. Patch after patch after patch, we'll just continue to mark up more and more locations until eventually all of the PU reaches parity.
Yep, so it's going to be really easy to find your way around everywhere once it's done. So you can basically just get a view of where you are, where you want to go, set a route, all that good stuff.
TL;DRThe new star map is a restyled, clearer and easier-to-use quality-of-life upgrade that adds estimated travel time and basic search, with search to be expanded later.
So, big, big quality-of-life improvement from where we're at right now. And again, we're changing it because the current star map is difficult to use. It's not clear, you don't get enough feedback, some things are broken. But we've spent a lot of time on styling it, making it very clear, making it very easy to use, done a lot of testing ourselves of just playing around with it. We've added some new features to it too. So essentially an estimated travel time if you set a route somewhere. Search functionality, which is all fairly basic to start with. We'll obviously come back more on that later down the line. But essentially, if I want to go to Hurston, I type in Hurston, it takes me to Hurston on the map, and I click set route, and then I go. Yeah, it's been a long time coming, and we're obviously very, very excited about it.
TL;DRThe character customizer offers a DNA blend between your head and a bank of heads, plus anchor-point dragging that finds matching features, along with new hair, facial hair, makeup, hair dye and a reworked UI.
Yeah, the character customizer is super cool. So along with all the new scans of characters and all the new people that you're going to be able to customize from, you've got basically two ways of customizing a character now, which is very exciting. You've essentially got something that allows you to do a DNA blend, which, that's what we call it anyway. So you're basically taking your head on one side, which is what you currently have. There's basically a bank of heads on the other side that you can flick through and look, I like these particular features. And what you can do is you can select one, go, I like this person's nose. I can then go on my slider and go, I want to go all the way to having their nose, or I want to go all the way to having mine, or I want to go somewhere in between. So it blends the two shapes together. And you can do that for the entire head. You can do it for ears, nose, eyes, brow, lips, all that sort of stuff. The second way of doing it, which is a very cool one, is, I don't know what we ended up calling it, but essentially you are grabbing anchor points on the face. Let's say I grabbed my brow and I was looking at it from the side, and I drag my mouse to the right-hand side and try to pull it out. What it does is it looks through our bank of heads that we've got in the back end and essentially tries to translate what is there to what you're doing with the mouse. So if I did it on my nose and pulled it that way, it would try and find a nose with a shape that's like that. So you're basically grabbing points on the face, moving the mouse around, and essentially seeing it go through all of these different iterations. So it feels like you're sculpting, but you're not, if that makes sense. So you come out the other side being able to make some really, really unique characters. And we've had a lot of fun in tests trying to make Stone Cold Steve Austin, Dave Bautista. It was a fun testing session. You can get something that looks pretty damn close. But on top of that, we've got new hair, facial hair, makeup. The hair is very, very cool, by the way. You've now got hair dye, so if I really wanted to, let's say, change my hair to white, I can change it to white, have it fade into blue, I can select how quickly it fades in, if it's a sharp transition, if it's near the root or near the tip. There's a ton of really cool customization there, and obviously the UI has had a big overhaul as part of that too.
TL;DR3.23 brings instanced hangars with a freight elevator and kiosk replacing regular inventory storage, letting players pull out their goods and load ships using hover trolleys and the tractor beam.
Yeah, we've got the freight elevators. We've got basically the instanced hangars. So you're going to be able to go to your own hangar. You're going to have your freight elevator. You're going to be able to spawn your ship. The core part of the experience is that you essentially go to your freight elevator. We'll have a kiosk with a nice new UI on it. You can then interact with that to essentially go, what's in my storage? So the regular inventory area storage is going away. So it's much more physically based in your hangar storage. It's very much more personal. You then go, I want all this stuff, click, click, click, click, click. You fill up, or see the freight elevator filling up, on the UI. You then click a button, and lo and behold, all your stuff's just come out of the ground. And then it's up to you to load it into your ship. So as part of that, we'll also have things like hover trolleys. We've obviously got the tractor beam that's usable in there too. So you can then wheel it over, start loading up your ship. And it's a much more representative feel of what the cargo experience is going to be like long term. It's a lot in 3.23.
I completely agree with your statement. First of all, of course, it includes the prices, but at least for myself, it's a bit more than that. It includes telling a story, but instead of using nice pictures, instead of using words, we are telling a story with numbers. We want to make sure that everybody is immersed in the world, they are having fun, they progress, and everything that they are doing not only makes a difference for the world and for the other players, but also makes a difference for themselves. Would you agree with that, Nick?
Yeah, absolutely. Especially with an MMO, it's all about an immersive dynamic. It's the feel that everything around you is connected and that your actions have purpose and you can progress, and so can your friends.
For sure we're in the process of retuning that. We're not only giving our players, and ourselves, because all of us are fans of the game, the chance to earn more money, to become rich and be rewarded in a fair way for the activity they do, but also the chance to spend that UEC on something that they can be proud of.
Well, cohesive is a word that we are using a lot: bringing all these systems that our wonderful colleagues already built, bringing them together so they make sense when they work together. So you've already seen some glimpses in Pyro, in the design of Pyro, in the design of the new prices of armors that need to work very hard. We're working on the weapons, on FPS weapons, pre-balance, vehicles, ships; eventually we're going to do a pass on everything, basically.
TL;DRPrices are based on stable factors such as manufacturer quality and technology, ship size and role, rather than detailed stats that may change, so a combat ship costs more than a truck-like one.
There's not a good way or a bad way to do it. We explore different ways. So talking specifically about vehicles, for example, manufacturers. It's something that we look into. We could take each individual vehicle or ship and disassemble it into its stats. How fast does it accelerate? What is its maximum speed and mass and everything? But because that is subject to change, we don't want to tweak those prices every time a small change is made. So for that reason, we take those factors that we know are already decided on. For example, I mentioned already manufacturers. Some manufacturers put more care into their work. They use better materials. They use better technology. They use alien technology that is harder to get. That informs the price. Obviously, if a ship is larger, it's going to cost more.
The size of the ship and its focus. So the same way a tank is more expensive than a lorry, the same way we'd expect a combat ship to have better technology, better armor, better stats on average than a truck.
TL;DRAs non-final examples, the Pisces Rescue becomes much more affordable at roughly half a million UEC, while the high-performance Arrow combat ship would be around 2 million UEC.
I watch your show, so I see that you have a Pisces there. The Rescue one: because we want to make it more affordable, and because I see myself playing as a medic in the future, I made it a bit more affordable. So it's going to be in the range of half a million UEC, Alpha UEC.
Yes. The Pisces Rescue is going to be a lot more affordable than it was. I can give the example of my favorite ship. You can argue about that in the chat. It's the Arrow. I really like the Arrow. It's going to be in the range of about 2 million UEC. It's a combat ship, it's a high-performance ship, so obviously somebody that can drive that ship works very hard to get that ship, and again, they can be proud of owning that ship.
A Connie is a very good example, because a lot of our players like that ship. I think it's in the range of 10 million now. Maybe going back into combat, something even larger: I really like the Hammerhead. It's going to be about 45 to 50 million UEC. It's a multi-crew ship, so I can see players pooling their resources together to buy such a ship.
Worst-case scenario? No, we are talking about luxury. We are talking about Origin, a manufacturer that is famous for putting so much care and so much quality in their ships. And I'm thinking in the range of 70 million UEC. Somebody that has a Jump, they can be proud of it.