Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Weapons w/ aUEC and Automated Turrets

So we tried really hard to get them into 3.0. We basically spent about three days. The ship weapons are unfortunately part of our old 1.0 item system, and they had a level of inheritance that none of the other 1.0 items had, which was causing a lot of interaction problems in the shop. So it was unfortunately a stretch goal and we had to get a bunch of other stuff done for 3.0 first, so it was basically the last three days right before we went out of me trying to just jam it in at the last second. We were close, but it just required too much programmer support. So basically what's going on now is that we've got all of our ship items, or ship weapons, being converted to the 2.0 system by our UK and LA ship teams. And so once that happens, we'll be able to not only put them in the shop physically, but also we're going to get the kiosk working as well, which is not just going to be ship item related; that's going to be accessible for all shops at that point. So shops could potentially have additional items in them that maybe couldn't be displayed. It's what we wanted to get in last year, but just didn't have time.

So an exact timeline, that's something that we can't really give right now, because of all things with iteration. The biggest roadblock actually with any of that is getting the actual manned turret gameplay into a really good spot first. So we've put these cool turrets on a number of our ships. We've got a lot of gameplay plans for making multi-crew matter, even if it is just a hired NPC, even compared to anything like a slaving rig or an AI blade. It's getting that manned turret gameplay where it needs to be first, and then start giving the other options to be like, hey, you don't have to have all your friends online all the time, so here are these other options that you can triage things down with. But it's making sure that the core experience is fun before we start adding those in, because otherwise it'd probably just short-circuit that whole experience.

And of course, we want as many people in the turrets as possible now. That's how we're going to get the feedback we need. That's how we're going to get the metrics we need and stuff like that. To automate them right now, this very moment, would actually undercut our efforts in making manned turret gameplay better.

Exactly.

Oh yeah, [the Terrapin] looks fantastic. Dan Kamensky has done a ton of work on this ship, so as you can tell, there's still a few glitches that we're working out. So this is really cool. I've only recently jumped onto this ship. Calyx has done the bulk of the heavy lifting with the design and plotting stuff out for this ship. I'm just coming in to do some help and clean up, just getting seats and stuff set up. But probably the coolest thing, even when he was getting me up to speed, is just the start of these component panels. That one did not function how we were expecting it to. But just having this first step of, okay, well, here's this panel, and we may need to thin down how thick the panel is, but it's like, yeah, I can walk up to this housing, this cooler 01, I can pop it open, boom, there's my cooler. Same on the other side, here's my other cooler. So right when the ship comes out, it won't all be fully interactive to the point where, okay, now you're physically ripping that cooler out or you're doing the manual repair work. But it's that groundwork for when we get to that point. So it's really cool to see. And he's got all the core components over here. These sort of got passed by a bit quicker in the update video. But you've got your life support, your jump drive, radar, and the exceptionally glowy power plant.

One of the things folks pointed out in the Ship Shape segment is that the interaction system, the prompts, now align with the surface of the item.

Yes, that was a recent thing. And also, this is just how bright that thing is on the inside. You see it everywhere. So I've been working on just getting the pilot seat and the support seat set up. We're still getting a couple of timing things cleaned up. One of the cool things with this ship is a lot of the design process is intelligent reuse of assets. So if some of this animation looks similar, it's actually because we're using the Constellation pilot and co-pilot seat as a template to build this stuff out. It's that same kind of, okay, seat will turn, you'll jump in, it turns you back around. The timings are a little bit off, but we've got all the great screens lining this thing. When it's fully lit up, it's really cool. And then basically we're going to be working to get this support seat going, the remote radar and scanning station, where we've sort of got the end goal of, yeah, you'll drop down this and then you'll be turning around inside on this pivot with the scanner up top, sort of dialing in on your target. So it's going to be really cool.

Why was that? Is that for a ground vehicle like all the expedition ships have? No, the Freelancer DUR does not have a new exploration vehicle or anything added to it. Steve's answer was simply that the values listed on the ship matrix for the Freelancer DUR, the MIS, and the MAX variants are all based on the existing model, the pre-rework model that's available in hangars now. You remember that those variant models were built out as hangar-ready quite some time ago. They are not using the scaled value of the much bigger reworked base model for the Freelancer. Basically, we went through and we measured the models that we have, which is why it appears to have so much less cargo now than the base model. When it comes time to build out the DUR, the MAX and the MIS, which you can see on our public roadmap is scheduled for the latter half of this year, we will have the improved cargo numbers for the Freelancer variants. So basically what you're seeing right now is the actual measurements of the model that's in the hangar right now, which is why they're so much smaller. When it comes time to build them out, you'll get the better, bigger, badder numbers.

I can't say yes or no right now. So I'm going to give sort of a roundabout answer on that. The most important thing for us for the next little while is to get all our more standard biomes set up. We've got deserts, we've got toxic ones, we've got timber that we have to set up. We've got a bunch of different ones, and we've got enough area to cover without even delving into caves and things like this. We've already got enough content that we need to add to these biomes before we move on to that. I'm pretty sure this is going to be something that we're going to look into, but as of right this moment, I can't say yes or no whether we're going to have those. But of course, if time allows and we get to the place where our biomes and the surface itself are acceptable to us, then yeah, that would be something to look at. As with any of my answers, it always goes a little bit longer. But there's other ways to accomplish this rather than fully voxelizing terrain and making it fully dynamic, because we can place points of interest very similar to how the outposts get placed. If we wanted to go the route of, yeah, we've actually modeled this into the side of a hill or whatever, then that's not beyond the realm of possibility. So if design ever comes up with a need for that, or a given landing zone needs that, then that might make sense. But as of right now, I can't say either way, but it's definitely something we want to look into, I'm sure.

Now there's a little bit of misinformation there. We've never planned the mobile app to come out in 2018, right?

Correct. If I'm to try to answer the question as truthfully as possible, like you mentioned, a Star Citizen mobile app is not planned for 2018, unfortunately, because we still have a lot of work to do to get to something that's acceptable. There are also a lot of things left to define on the game side, what services are going to be made available through that. That doesn't mean we're not working on improving the mobile experience for Spectrum, which is a very important piece of work that we're currently circling back on. And so this means better responsive support on mobiles. Specifically, we're looking at shrinking the size of our build, which is still pretty large, and so loading it on an older iPhone is going to suck. We've done some work in 2017 on the mobile keyboards, which turned out to be a huge can of worms. Huge can of worms. You have no idea. And so at least now it's potent. We're putting a lot of effort into trying to improve that. But most of the mobile-related work for 2018 is focused around improving the mobile Spectrum support.

Now, of course, the Star Citizen mobile app was one of our old crowdfunding stretch goals way back in the early days. So that is definitely something that is on our list, definitely something that will be developed at some point in our future.

But we want that to have some gameplay interaction and not just be a social app. And so there's more to that.