So yeah, generally on pretty much most of the places where you can land, you need to communicate and say, "permission to land?" and they'll give you a landing slot, and then you'll head in, and your ship's auto-computer will sort of fly you down into the planet, into the atmosphere. You'll still be able to look around, walk around your ship... but it will bring you into your landing spot on the pad, and then once you get there, you get out. So you will not be able to sort of just bully and barge your way into a planet uninvited basically. Whether a spaceport can be closed due to a lot of traffic, I don't know. The bigger planets, probably not, because we can instance obviously, so a lot of people will be coming and going. And I think there will be a certain amount of enforcing if you try to get to close to a planet - whether you'll sort of burn up in the atmosphere, or the local police will shoot you to say you got too close.
So generally when you land on a planet, you sort of land in your, like, landing instance. And so that landing instance is sort of unique to you, but if it's a bigger planet and you're on a bigger spaceport, there would be sort of landing areas off in the distance, which you can't reach yourself directly. And what we're planning to do in those landing areas is to sort of, you know if it's a big spaceport maybe there could be 6 or 7 slots in it, and a smaller one would only [have] 2 slots. But we would have ships come and go from those landing spots of in the background, and that would be sort of determined by who was coming and going from the planet, or what NPCs were coming and going from the planet, and who you saw would be sort of dictated by who your friends are, who your enemies are, what your designated persons of interest are. So it could give you some indication of the comings and goings of other players or NPCs to a limited amount where it feels like you're on a living location. But your own spaceport instance is really only accessible by you, so even if you see the stuff off in the distance, you can't sort of jump over there and try and steal their ship.
Yeah, no, so we're definitely planning on having search and rescue be one of the sort of things that you can do in the universe. And then we sort of anticipate that some players would actually like to do that, or perform a support role, and so there probably would be missions generated for it. So, you know, you would definitely be search-and-rescuing NPCs as well as potentially real players. So there you go!
That's actually a pretty good suggestion for something that explorers could do. I mean we were definitely thinking that you will go down... besides sort of mapping out jump points, and where the asteroid fields are in the unexplored areas of star systems... that we would have some level of landing on some non-populated planets, and you could maybe do some looking if there was an ancient ruin there, or you could do some sort of scouting, or you know, like check it our for minerals or something. And probably [fauna and flora] could be kind of an additional part of that, so that's a pretty interesting suggestion - so we'll add that to the list of things that we potentially would do for the explorer, 'cause I think that's kinda interesting. I mean we definitely want to have you visiting different planets and different areas of the galaxy, and having mementos to sort of, instead of having some achievement in the generic awards system like you do on console games, we wanted to like, go to your hangar and see these mementos from these different places that you've gone and visited.Ben Lesnick: Plus you've gotta get new fish somewhere!Chris: You've gotta get new fish somewhere, yeah! Maybe you've gotta go fishing for it! ... Umm, so, anyway, that's a good suggestion!
Yeah, no that's definitely our plan. So our plan is that, like internal damage if you're having a firefight, you know, you can destroy things and you can potentially blow out windows. And so you would probably want to be smart about the kind of weaponry you use 'cause you don't want to depressurize, say, the cockpit of a Connie or something. So that is part of the plan, and we're definitely going to be working towards that.
From the way that we're looking at doing the PvP combat, is that if you're in a system and you get attacked by someone else doing PvP and it's a system where it's regulated, where there isn't meant to be PvP, as long as-... as soon as the attack happens, the ship's computer of the person getting attacked sends a distress beacon out. And that distress beacon, in a regulated system there'd probably be, like, relays, and then the relays - they'll get broadcasted around, so it sort of is a report of the attack. And there will be some very expensive and hard to use-and-get equipment that will allow, you know, someone that's trying to do a heist, or a pirate to maybe potentially block a broadcast, but it won't be particularly easy to do and it will be something that we'd want, if someone's trying to do a heist - you know, like knocking out the equivalent of an armored truck or something - then they would have to maybe try and blanket out the local relays, and so they won't get the UEE after them.But I'm not so sure we're going to have a "black box" so to speak, because it's more like a distress beacon that gets sent out, and then either it gets picked up by the relays, or it gets somehow intercepted and blocked. So I guess you can't really do the blackmail. A black box is kind of an interesting idea, but right now that's not in the development plans.
We actually... there is actually a very small amount of gravity that's supplied on the Murray Cup racing map, the New Horizon. I'm not sure if we've put wind resistance in there. The engine actually supports it - it is actually just a setting that you do, and we removed it for everything obviously in space, but I'm not sure if someone put it back in for that particular map. But there definitely will be some other areas where, I think on some races it'll be all out in space, some races would be closer to a planetary surface and they would have more atmospheric effects or more gravitational pull and stuff. And that could also cause, or create, some interesting twists in the racing. So it's still early days on that and there will be more stuff to be done there, but a lot of the engine already supports that kind of stuff.
Well we're definitely going to have space stations that you can attack, that you can defend, that you can try and take over - and some of the bigger ones would have some pretty significant defenses. And some of these would be AI, you know, NPC-driven, and some of them would be player driven. I don't think we'll have anything on the level of the Death Star where you can fly around and just blow planets up, but there certainly would be ones where you would go in with a group - so you would have to have some friends that would maybe take out the air cover and then take out the, you know, the anti-... I guess we don't say anti-air guns, but anti-space guns... "anti-spaceship guns" would be a good way of saying it... basically take out all the defensive perimeter, and then you would go in with a boarding ship and then try and takeover and control the space station. So there will definitely be a lot of potential for, you know, "a raid" if you wanna call it, where you and a bunch of friends work, or people in your organization work cooperatively to take over a space station, or an asteroid base.
Heheh, well, I think you'd probably be dead, and then you would respawn back on the most recent friendly planet that you were on, with the fiction that the rescue crews went out there and found your almost dead, or almost lifeless bodies and managed to get you back. So I don't there'll be a case where you can sort of die in a remote corner, and no one knows where you are and you won't be able to respawn... if that was what the question was about.
So I... I think we're definitely planning to sort of personalize the level of the "Bitching Betty" so you can have different voices later on down the game. And, you know, potentially we could do some more ship AI personality, although we're not really going with the sort of AI setup in Star Citizen. I think we had a whole fiction thread about it that David Haddock wrote with the Tonya Oriel piece, if you remember the cruiser ship that went off that had the AI that potentially went crazy. So I think our world is more like the voice you get on navigation, and less like an actual personality. But, you never know... but I think that's kind of gonna be our take on it.