Star Citizen Live: Ask the Devs - UI Teams

Well, the easiest answer to that question is just wait and see. But no, we're hoping to bring things in a bit at a time so it won't be a big lump of, here's all the new features. When they're ready, they're going in, and they're going to be ready as soon as possible. We're doing our best to get them from being showcaseable to being production ready, so release status, which is still quite a jump, but we're doing our best.

I imagine most of it is just as simple as take the stuff you did for Squadron, check the 'make multiplayer' box and it just works in Star Citizen.

No, in a word. I mean, just integrating the code is a multi-day, multi-week problem. And then there's additional features for, let's say, the visor and the mobiGlas, which are obviously maybe not in Squadron, that are going to be in the PU. And then there's obviously different maps and different layouts, and also people can go anywhere and do anything, and the combinations of stuff that people can do when they're playing the game all need to be tested and go through that.

Skydancer in the chat said that stuff looked pretty far along, and it is. It's as far along as we showed it at CitizenCon. But again, that was for the single-player environment, and integrating it into the multiplayer environment will take the work of not just your team, but multiple QA teams and multiple other Persistent Universe teams. You've got to hook it into the mission system. You've got to hook it into the overall location system and stuff like this. So server meshing and the replication layer, all things that aren't necessarily a part of the Squadron development that you now need to take account for. That's not to scare anybody away and be like, you're not going to see this stuff in a year. It's just we want to be very forthcoming that this isn't stuff that's going to show up tomorrow, but it's not necessarily stuff that needs to wait until 4.0. You guys will tackle the work, and as the work is completed and ready to go, it'll just go into the PU.

Yeah, we're not holding all of that that we showed at CitizenCon back for the 4.0 release. When it's ready, it's ready.

Those team leads are planning that right now. I was talking to Jens earlier about, can we do this here and can that go there? So we're on the case as well. We're figuring out how soon we can get stuff.

And some of the things are out of this group's control as well. So like the interior map, you think, well, we showed the Carrack, but we've got a few other ships that we'll need to ensure look great.

So I think the main thing is, as we mentioned in the Hold the Line video, we're trying to really emphasize the physical interactions with the world. And that makes the experience a lot more immersive and engaging. Because obviously, if you can do everything from the mobiGlas, how compelling is that? It's not far-fetched to imagine in the future we might be able to control everything with AI and brain chips and stuff, but it doesn't really make for compelling gameplay. I think with the hologlobes, the big thing about it is there should be certain benefits to using something that's specially geared towards the ship you're using. For instance, networking. If you have a lot of crew members that you're working with, I think it would be really nice to be able to amalgamate the data onto one display, like one hologlobe.

Everybody's standing around holograms.

Yeah, so it's amalgamating their individual data into one sort of display, and then they can do strategic planning and stuff around that. And then the same goes for the cartography deck or anything. Also, what I kind of want to do as something really cool is to have a Prometheus-style terrain, like a cross-section of the terrain on a hologlobe. So that when you're scanning for resource deposits and things like that, it's something that the ship specifically does. And then obviously I think that information would then be able to be saved to your mobiGlas. Because I think your mobiGlas really is about displaying the data that you've acquired over time through the use of various equipment, and the other displays are about actually gathering that data.

I think you should be able to. I think we should offer various ways of actually sorting through that data. So one of the ways that I think would be good is to be able to have user-generated folders so that you can organize your own data how you see fit, but also be able to organize it by hierarchical locations. So Stanton system and then planet, moon and so on, and be able to filter your markers that way. And possibly also tagging the markers, so you can tag them individually, and then that will go into the sharing of it, because you might want to only share a subset, right? So you need to have good ways of filtering by subsets.

And then being able to add notes to the map markers, titles, stuff like that, full labeling of things.

Yeah, I mean, we already showed the titling. I think we should be able to have that flexibility, because otherwise you don't want to be stuck in a box. So yeah, we'll look at that for sure.

Yeah, we're going to start drilling down into it. One suggestion that we probably will look into, we're not saying we're definitely going to do it, but we can potentially get data from the surroundings as well. So if you've got a mining deposit, we could potentially automatically say what's in that deposit on your little marker. So things like that we've got potential to do one day.

It could go anywhere, really. Where we're looking at for now, the core functionality will be similar to what's in the current Star Citizen, just with this much better interface. But in future, you've seen Google Maps, that's changed over the past 10 or 15 years and it's constantly changing. We could do the same kind of thing with the star map if we wanted to, but our priority is to make it nice and playable first, really useful.

We understand that maybe the current implementation is not so usable. So there's a priority of making that usable, and then we can look at all these additional features. We've got a feature list as long as your arm, with, oh, that looks cool, we could definitely do that, we should put that in. But I think showing things that you know about on the map is really important. When you learn things about a planet or a location, then this could be integrated into your map. So pinning stuff or finding out, I don't know, it's an icy moon with this kind of population, whether it's safe or not. A lot of that is based on your knowledge about what you've learned about the universe whilst you're exploring around it.

Well, there's that, and then there's things like the Galactapedia, which exists outside the game right now, but eventually will begin to be incorporated into the universe. And I imagine there's a lot of opportunities to plug into that and pull information from that. Just easy cross-reference through tags. If I'm looking at microTech, what other information? There's the information that I've gathered or members of my team have gathered, but then what does the universe already know?

Yeah, what are the governing bodies, find me a safe place to go and land and refuel and things like that.

So I would say that probably seems more like a Galactapedia feature than a star map feature, and then maybe the star map can tap into that in places once the Galactapedia comes online.

Well, for now, it'll probably do very similar to the current implementation. So you can plot multiple stops on the way, but for now we don't want to do a full, like if you've got a sat nav on your phone, we don't want to go into that much detail where it's doing everything for you and you can choose multiple routes. But I think in future, those kinds of features do make people's lives easier. So yeah, I think it's the kind of thing we'll probably look into later on.

I don't want to be flying through some really dangerous zone. Being able to avoid it sounds a good idea.

Yeah, I think there's big things like, you want to be able to know where you need to stop for fuel and how far you can actually reach with your current ship and that kind of thing. We can probably improve the way that's dealt with in future as well.

Well, we definitely will have the ability technically to do it. This is sort of a design decision about what you can track. We already have a thing for tracking with the AR markers anyway, so there's no reason why anything that's on the AR wouldn't also be integrated into the mapping system to show exactly where you left it floating around some moon somewhere.

I mean, for now, you'll definitely be able to see where your current ship is. If you just got out of your ship and you're wandering around, you'll be able to see that on there. For ships that are, say, locked up on a space station, so it's not actually in the game world, that will probably, for now, live in your inventory and the other menus.

But yeah, stuff flying around is much more likely than the ships that are associated with you.

One thing, we never really showed the radar very much at CitizenCon, mainly just because it didn't really fit with the flow of everything, but we've improved the radar generally, and you can zoom into that and see it full screen the same way you can with the star map. So the kinds of things that you would see as contacts on your radar, you'll also be able to see in the big version too.

Yeah, that's another use case for a ship hologlobe, actually: the radar, and you're seeing all the ships and possibly the whole fleet and planning a battle.

Yeah, it's so cool for multi-crew gameplay if you're stood around and you can see your friends flying around you and wandering around.

So it's very much a pervasive UI throughout the game. It serves many, many purposes.

Well, I checked with Rich Tyrer about this just now. And so yes, at the moment, that's the way it's going to work.

So I think technically it'd be harder not to, thinking it through. It'd be really hard to exclude that data. If you know about the ship, you know about the inner workings; you might not necessarily know who's walking through it at any time, but you might go, hmm, that door seems to have opened and closed.

So it does have gameplay implications, so it might make it trickier for some people, but also for people who do want to snoop on that stuff, it's going to be a fun bit of gameplay as well, I think.

So a couple of layers to that. One is whether you can see people walking in your ships. Another one, whether you can identify them. If they've done something to hide their presence, maybe you don't see them, but you'd still see your own doors opening and closing in your ship.

So yeah, a couple of different layers. The markers on the interior map are what you detect on the radar. So if you can detect people, like we saw with the ping stuff in the demo that we did, then they will also appear on the interior map. But as you were saying, if they've got some mechanism of hiding themselves, then maybe they won't be so clear on the interior map as well.

We have the ability to hide and show different render layers. We could hide all doors if that's some gameplay requirement. Also, you're able to see the weapons on the ship as well and all the different components. We can hide those individually. I don't know if it's something where we get a base schematic of the ship, and then you have to hook into the ship to get that extra information or whatever. We just have that capability in the display.

Yeah, the fact it's live is really cool, and we haven't really explored that too much for now, so maybe there'll be some interesting gameplay that comes out of that as well.

No. So you've seen in the live demo we did, the on-foot routing is pretty comprehensive. So you can go from anywhere within the location to anywhere else that you can actually get to. But when you're actually navigating in space, we don't want to hold your hand too much, essentially. So for space navigation, you will have to plot the route like you do now and so on. But there won't be this thing where it says go to the space station, get in your ship, then it'll take you straight there and then you've got to get out of the ship. That kind of thing, we feel that's a bit too far.

I'm not getting from my hab in Area18 to my friend's hab in microTech door to door.

And one thing we do want to avoid as well is there's a term that some of the directors have used, which is called 'playing the map', where sometimes if it's too much, you don't even look at the game screen. You're just looking at this tiny little circle that shows you where to go. So we don't want that. We want to make people feel immersed in the world.

There's some crazy technical challenge behind that anyway. If you talk about the hab thing: well, where's the first step? Does it route you to the ASOP terminal? And then does it tell you what ship to pick? Because you might have 10 ships. You might already have some ships on the landing pad. Which one is it going to pick? Is it going to pick the fastest one? Is it going to pick the safest one? I agree with you, Simon. Just on a technical basis, I don't want to set off down that route. I think let the players play the game how they want and give them a hand moving around some of our more complex environments, but it's not about just... You've seen people drive like this, right, where they're just following the sat nav into a field or something.

Playing the map's a very real thing, I think. I eventually tapped out of, I think, the Arkham series of games because I was just constantly in the map mode. I was running around in bat vision or whatever it was. It was just like, I'm not playing the game, I'm playing the UI. It was great UI, but it superseded the game at that point.

Much as we like to promote UI, I think we've also made some great visuals beyond the UI.

For instance, with the new ship HUDs, we've made the effort to try to clear up the view of all these UI elements. It's really cluttered in the PU right now. It's really messy. We want to clear it up so you can appreciate the environments a lot more.

Well, there's two levels anyway. There's in-lore customisation, as in how you'd actually customise your ship. That's a bit beyond the scope of what I know about. But we also talk about accessibility as well. So the size of text, colour blindness and all things like that. As a systems programmer, I have to deal with that kind of stuff. We're building all that in anyway because we have to do appropriate things for colour blindness and text sizes so you can read things and not just have tiny text everywhere. But that really helps the game designers as well, because the game designers will talk about how we want to be able to customise our ship or we want to be able to customise the way a shop looks or something. From a systems point of view, which is what I'm involved in, it's just about trying to make the UI as flexible as possible so then we can do that sort of stuff. I don't know where we're at with the design for customisation, particularly ships. Obviously, the ships are the most important things. I mean, Yogi showed quite a lot of that stuff off at the show, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, I think at the moment there's more that we can do as well. A lot of the customisation at the moment is things like on the MFDs, you can choose which MFD you're looking at, that kind of thing. For now, our main focus is to take all that information and get it good for the player, and also try and get it contextual. So you're not seeing things you don't need to see. So while for now you can't customise everything to a great deal, it hopefully is a better player experience. And I think longer term, we've always talked about, say, if you buy a new helmet, maybe it has a different style of UI. If you've got a different mobiGlas, maybe you've got the pink version, for example. I think tying things to items is probably going to be the first thing before we get to the level where we're letting players customise every single piece here and there.

Yeah, I think the customisation will probably manifest itself first in the accessibility options, like for colour blindness and text size and things like that, and then anything beyond that is probably later down the line.

So that's a good question, and it comes first with, okay, what is soft death? So soft death is a bit of an interim solution due to the fact that we cannot currently in the game let you damage the power plants or relays or anything like that. So that means that, the way the game works currently, if you set something to zero HP, it will just explode. Soft death allows us to bypass that a bit so that you get a non-functional ship that you can still loot. With the physical damage system, we expect that to change, and instead of having soft death as its own thing, have it be more along the lines of, if you lose enough parts of your ship, well, you will stop flying or you will stop being able to fight. And whether that's repairable, well, it will depend. In some cases, some components are easy to change and repair. On the other hand, power plants for some ships are so large that you will need to tow the ship all the way back to port to do any kind of repair.

Yeah, so to add to that, the soft death that we currently have is basically just an interim solution to the proper soft death that will then come with what Guillermo just described. Even moving forward with Maelstrom, it will be even more complex, where players will be able to shoot away certain sections of the ship. So you don't just have to repair the ship items on it, but you have to exchange entire segments of the ship itself.

I didn't, but that story CR told was absolutely true. I mean, he recounted the story, so I don't think I have anything to add to it. But it was just one of those things where everybody gets together and reviews what they're talking about, showing things to CR so he can plus something up or send us in a different direction. And Paul Reindell has this video. He says, just casually, I think I've figured out how to demonstrate server meshing. Because some of you remember, you still give me crap about it, we tried to tell a server meshing story at the beginning of this year. And the problem with it is that it's not a very visual thing. So if you can't show it, it's just a bunch of people talking. And we learned that the hard way. We kind of knew it, we thought we would try anyway, and it didn't work. So it took the better part of a year, eight, nine months, and Paul Reindell, super stud that he is, shows up and says, I think I've got a way to show it. And he shows this and we're all just watching this thing with anime eyes. He did it. Yes, it works, but also we figured out how to demonstrate it visually. Because the thing works on the size and scale of star systems, so it's a very hard thing to show visually. And he did it, and it was a recording. Most of CitizenCon was pre-recorded. And Chris's response, after he teared up, was he challenged Paul to do it live. Which is, if you want to know what it's like working for CR, man. He showed him this amazing thing and he was like, this is great, this is wonderful. If you weren't a coward, you'd do it live. And then Paul and myself and a couple of IT people spent the next three weeks, because it was just three weeks before, completely rejiggering that presentation in order to figure out how to do it live. That's probably my favorite thing about CitizenCon. Going back to that question, my favorite thing about CitizenCon is my favorite thing about working here: we don't chicken out. We don't take the easy road. If there's a way to do something that would be better, then even if it comes with more risk, and it almost always comes with more risk, we do it.

We said it earlier in the show, and it wasn't hyperbole: CitizenCon was 71 ISCs. If you wonder why no other game company does a weekly recurring behind-the-scenes docuseries in the middle of their development, it's because it's hard. But then to also do a big two-day event where we basically dump an entire year's worth of ISC content in two days, while still having to make ISC content... The easy thing would be to take a quarter of ISC off or two quarters off, but we don't do the easy thing. We do what we think is the better thing. So ISC topics for the remainder of the year: some of the things are ones you can expect. We've got two weeks of IAE coming up. Pretty standard, these two weeks of every year are dedicated to ship content, so the next two episodes of ISC that air during IAE are going to be all dedicated to the new ships and vehicles that are debuting at this year's event. Then the week after that is probably going to be a look at the Pyro Playground and the Preview Channel. It's going to be a bit about the Preview Channel and what it is and how it works and why things will come to it and why things will go from it. And then a look back at the Pyro Playground, for the folks who didn't get a chance to experience it, and why certain things were this way and that way. And then we've got a 17-minute section that's just dedicated to camping and griefing at the spawn habs. You have the option not to. I understand the thing lets you, but it's a choice to do and a choice not to. And then we could do some 3.22 stuff that hasn't been announced on the public roadmap yet, so I'm not ready to say what that is. And then we've got two weeks after that for 3.22 stuff, and then we're done with the year.