Calling All Devs - Missiles, 600i and Quantum Filters

Sounds like there's lots of issues. So we did some tunings. I'll start with the stuff that we have done for 3.2.1. So we did a bunch of power tunings. We thought we'd fixed everything there with it. I know there were some big problems where you did anything in atmosphere and the whole ship just turned off. That should be better, but I've seen people still having that issue to a slightly lesser extent, so obviously we're going to look at that.

The shields and power plants did get a big buff in 3.2.1, or 3.2, one of them, because when it was originally conceived, it was a medium ship, so it had medium-sized components. Then during production it got larger, but it still kept the medium-sized things. We thought, yeah, it should still be able to do its job. You can only look at the data, the numbers you have so far, and go, on paper, this is going to work. And you put it in game and it didn't quite work. So that did have a bump up to some large components.

The weapon placement, yeah, it's not great. There's a long story behind that, so if someone comes and gets me at a Bar Citizen, we can talk about that. And that's not an easy fix or a quick fix to do. That's going to take a lot of rework, so that's nothing we're planning on doing soon. It functions. It doesn't look great. We know about it.

Interior stuff, obviously lots of people have been looking into it and doing suggestions. We're not going to do, at this time, any huge interiors. We're not going to rip out the interior again. We are aware that it does look quite barren. It's got that sort of luxury, sort of brutalism of nothingness look going on, which some people like, but it's not for everyone. So we're looking at the feedback. We're learning from that. We've got some discussions going on. What we're learning from that, we're going to put into the 890, because that's obviously in production at the moment if you've seen the clips of it on ATV. And then once we've got to the end of the 890 process, we're going to see what we can retroactively put back in the 600i, that is just sort of a second polish pass on it rather than a big structural change. I think that was all of the bits you mentioned.

Wow. What a question. We've got lots of things we want to do from a design side. Obviously, the gameplay with them is very, involving is probably not the right word, but not just a spammy way of doing damage. We want people to think about what missiles they're going to use, what the differences between the three tracking types are, picking the right one for the right thing, and then obviously the receiving end of dealing with that incoming threat. That's where we want to go. That doesn't have a timeline associated with it.

Missiles have moved from the LA studio to Frankfurt on the weapons team. So they were responsible for doing all the conversion from weapons 1.0 to weapons 2.0. Missiles are in the list to be done next, along with the few bits that didn't make it.

As to what's wrong with them at the moment, they use a very sort of simplified, dialed-down version of IFCS called MGCS, Missile Guidance Control System. So if you think of all the little quirks that we have with IFCS at the moment, and tracking on something that's very small, moving three to four times the speed, going after something else that's moving, it all just sort of amplifies. If you have that 0.1% error on a ship, it gets wild on a missile. So we're aware of issues with their movement, their tracking. That really frustrating bug where they just hit stuff and bounce off and do a spiral around it, we seem to fix that every other week internally. And then so many things in the chain can break that. It can be ship specific. It can be shield specific. It could be missile specific. It could be networking. We've even had the planets break it. So if you're in the planetary zone, they go to it and then just go off somewhere. We've had it where it has actually been doing it, but the UI just carries on as though it was never there. So it's so far away, the missile explosion effect happens, you don't see it. All you see is the UI just carry on for kilometers in distance. So you think you've missed, but you've actually hit. But yeah, we know there's problems. We're looking at ways to fix it. I don't have a time for that.

I know talking with Todd, there are some fixes that we're going to try to get in for 3.3, but not the whole rigmarole.

Yeah, we want to hit the big offenders. Not being able to lock multiple targets frequently is a big problem, especially on things like the Retaliator or anything torpedo-based where you're stuck with one. That's a lot of your gameplay gone. And just the reliability of hitting and exploding stuff.

Yeah, it's going to get quite extensive, and CR really wants to have different iconography for the different types of locations that we have, which is something that we're working on right now. But as we get more and more of these icons, more of our different types of locations in, we absolutely want to have a filter. It'll probably start in the mobiGlas. So in the star map, you'll just click, click, click, I want to see these things. I could see that expanding. As we get the multi-crew stuff up and running, you'll probably see dedicated seats have a little more control, over some of the other seats or combined in a small ship. We haven't really explored that as much to date, but that's definitely in the plans. You have to be able to filter this large universe that you're going to be able to travel through. So yeah, that's going to be a huge element, not just for travel, but for economy reasons. Show me places that have fuel, or show me places that have trade, or this or that. It's going to be more than just the types of locations.

Yeah, so we're currently focused on the bartender experience, or the bar experience is what we're calling it. And the item purchases are going to start with the purchase of beer and simple things like that, as they often do. The most required purchases, right? The most important ones. But we're doing a lot of experimentation, because how big the menu is going to be has a direct impact on whether or not we can do it through inner thought, or do we need to bring some sort of diegetic UI that comes up like a menu, a futuristic menu or something. So we're also doing a lot of experimentation with just trying to get the bar scene to feel busy, like you would walk into a bar, and how do you get a really busy bartender to look and feel right? So there's a lot of experimentation going on there.

But way in the future, when we get towards black market deals, we don't want to have just storefronts that are black market shops. We want the whole back alley transaction to be part of that black market experience. So you're going to have to go and find the underground vendors and do those back alley deals. And we want that to be through player to NPC or NPC to NPC types of transactions. So that's a very important part of the future of the transaction system. And it's something that I'd love to see sooner rather than later, but it's going to start simple in some of the shops and then work itself out into the mission system, the rest of the world, black market and so on.