The developers answer fan questions on Squadron 42 story and mission design, ship trading, insurance, fuel, multi-crew dogfighting and missile physics. They also cover the Galactapedia, the Freelancer, and the launcher patcher's back-end and disabled BitTorrent support.
Modding competition. So stay tuned. We don't have a lot on that right now. I'm just collecting some really cool sponsors right now.
So stay tuned for that. And we'll have a big announcement later on with that.
Yes, we're sort of circling into the broad storyline, kind of locking that down, and in the course of that, we're sort of sketching out possibilities that we could do for specific mission design. So, yes.
I think both of those are possible. You will be able to transfer ships from player to player. We'll have some mechanism for making trades between players. Now, there might be some taxes and fees associated with such transfers.
I don't know, Rob. Citizenship, we definitely say, isn't something that transfers. You have to earn it. So maybe we will let them play Squadron 42 with each of the characters. That would be kind of cool. It's sort of a history thing.
It would kind of be hard for some of the role players maybe to justify that history.
But still, it'll be fun.
And you have choices to make in Squadron 42, right? So you could play different storylines. So you might want to play through it more than once, I would think.
Oh, I think a lot of people will.
Can you imagine a Freelancer with a big person-shaped dent in the back wall every time you accelerate?
The gravity system in the ships will keep you stable, like you're in an unmoving environment. And it's fictional, right? It's a game, so we want to make sure that it's fun to play. Although maybe there'll be some mini-game or something where you're tossed around like a ragdoll.
Well, if you run out of fuel, you could call AAA. Maybe some insurance companies will even offer a refueling service. But I think a lot of players are going to want to do that too, where they're going to be available for refueling, so you can call your friends.
Also, if you have scoops on your ships, they are fictionally able to keep you minimally fueled, so you should be able to limp around a little bit, at least.
Limping around, which also means that you're a target for pirates, or bounty hunters if you're in trouble.
Yeah, they're wrong.
It is going to be a very detailed campaign.
Yeah, so what it's always planned to be is a single-player, narrative-driven experience as opposed to the persistent universe.
Like Wing Commanders of old.
Yeah, I don't know who those people are.
And why is there zero talk about it? Well, we're here talking about it now. But again, the answer is we have to keep Squadron 42 [quiet] because it's story-driven. We don't want the story to leak out. We don't want people to know before they play. It's part of the fun. It's discovering the story and playing through it.
I would guess that in the year and a half or whatever it is between now and the persistent universe being live, some company will come out with some great way of handling this.
Some fictional in-game company, you're saying.
You think that could happen, Dave?
Sure.
We're going to have the multi-crew ships working at some point during the dogfighting, but I'm not sure if it will be available in the very first iteration. It's all very iterative, so things will come online constantly.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the beauty of what we're doing here, the modular development, is it's iterative, and we'll be upgrading all the time, so there will always be reasons for you guys to get online and try it out.
We'll probably have some HUD widget-y goodness options of some sort.
Not during alpha. Maybe during beta.
Yeah, that's one of those TBD things that we'll figure out as we go. And again, you guys will be part of that process. You'll help us figure out what works and what doesn't.
We're not sure on that one yet.
Honestly, we've talked about it. A lot of people want to be able to defensively booby-trap their cargo so pirates can't take it, but it seems kind of unsporting, don't you think? But if there are booby traps for loot, then there will be scanners for booby traps.
It's all about checks and balances.
Well, they can't get in, right? You have a hangar. You guys should have your hangar now. And unless you invite somebody in, they're not going to be able to take your stuff.
We'll probably have some sort of recognition on the ships, too, so they know who's in them. And they won't start up for just anybody. And you'll have to override that to steal them, of course.
That's a great question, and honestly, I guess we would consider it.
Yeah, I think that's probably something that we'll have to get Justin on to talk about at some point, but I know we've used the forums for the hangar, and I know there is some plan in place for us to get a little better with the bug tracking and bug reporting, but it's just not ready to go yet. But I'll let him explain it a little better, because that's his bailiwick.
There will be. And it's not the tumor.
What is that thing on there?
That is artwork.
Do we want to tell them yet? Coming soon to a ship near you. Just gonna have to wait and see.
It's one of those things. Maybe you guys inspire us to make ship models for everybody, for all the different ships. I think you'd have a little trophy room. Because I think some of the ships won't fit in the hangar, right? So maybe you have the Corvette model in your hangar.
They look really nice, like a little glass case in the back.
So I guess if enough people ask for it, we might let them keep it, right?
We'll consider it.
That would not be fun gameplay-wise.
No, no. You fire a missile and it goes straight out the back. That's something that struck me as funny. But yeah, because our physics are real, it's additive. The vector of the missile launch is added to the vector of your ship.
So you're not going to run under your own missile, at least you're not going to run it down.
Well, not immediately. You might. If you're not smart, you might eventually meet up with it again.
Yeah, in terms of the Galactapedia, it's sort of the in-fiction Hitchhiker's Guide, if you will.
And actually, the web guys have been talking about at some point allowing the fans to add to that lore in some way. That's kind of what we want, right? We want the fans to create the lore and we want to be able to respond to it.
Well, they'll definitely be part of it, as in, if they discover a jump point or they kill Dread Pirates, then they of course go in there. But as for being able to amend it on the fly, maybe? I don't know. We're going to [need] some approvals.
Yeah, because people might put some stuff in there that may not be appropriate for certain age groups.
So what kind of stuff are we going to be able to do on the planet?
I'm not sure. We're still in the process of going through approvals on planet-side locations. But we'll sort of try out stuff and throw in things like, I think on one of the planets, one of the landing spots in Terra, we had a guided flying tour type thing, but obviously it's based on what we can get away with and what we can't.
Right, and we want to encourage interactivity, so maybe casinos, or maybe not actual casinos for real money.
Yeah, there should be local monuments, I think.
Yeah, things to do, things with the lore. The Mars Memorial. If you kill the Dread Pirate Roberts, how bad to the bone would it be if your statue appears somewhere? So there'll be things for people to do in there.
There will probably be some alternate insurance companies that work with the, shall we say, socially challenged portion of our society.
The shady elements.
The shadier elements, yeah.
So maybe not the nicer insurance companies, but the functional pirate insurance companies.
Sure. Sounds like a good plan. Might mess with your other systems and your avionics.
Yeah, it might cause some problems, but it might cause problems for other people. Probably mask your heat signature, very effective.
I actually was going to go into the film industry, and I was looking for jobs when I came out of college. And I saw the post for Lightbox. Lightbox was actually my first job out of college.
Working with Chris, you haven't really worked with him that much yet.
Yeah, I know. I've only met him once in a meeting that we had. We had an RT meeting, and that was a pretty cool experience.
I'd have to say the quality that they want to bring to a sort of MMO-type universe, plus the amazing community that they've already developed. That's one of the hardest things for MMOs to generate these days, is to get a community together of people who all want the same thing. The model that they're using for development is going to be awesome.
No, I do not. I originally went to school for animation. Couldn't really find any jobs when I came out of college, and then found a technical artist position, which is a little bit like animation. You do the rigging and stuff like that. And through that, that's where I learned about programming and Python, and I started making tools for the art team, and then I built up that knowledge, and now we're here, tools programmer.
Yeah, so the whole back-end system of it. Zane, obviously, he was the one who designed the front end and everything. But from the build system, which creates the CryEngine build that we distribute out to everyone, we use this software called Jenkins, and then there's a system that we use for taking that and actually making the patches and making them as small as possible, and then that's what we actually put up on the CDN for people to download. It's a lot of hand-wavy stuff and stuff goes on and it just works for you guys.
Yes, it's just not enabled. It has something to do with the third-party company that we're using for the software. There's lawsuits around it, so if they ever sort that out, it will just magically start working.
Yeah, people have asked that question a lot, and we would love to use that system, but right now it's disabled on their end, and so until the internet patent troll lawyers get finished with their stuff.