Star Citizen Live: Targets, Turrets & Take-Offs

So we don't have a current time frame of how long they're going to currently overheat for. And this is not something that's going to be in 3.10, but this is something we're looking at where it's going to depend on the size of the thrusters, the amount of power the thrusters develop and the size of the ship and the design of the ship as well. So this is something which will come in a later release, but it's not something that's going to come for 3.10.

Yeah, like Rich said, it's a very hard question to answer because there's so many ships with so many configurations, but generally those that have VTOLs will take longer, if at all, to get to the point where overheating damage is. At the moment in 3.10, we do have that limit. So when they overheat, they just cut out to stop you damaging it. But in a future patch, we'll give you the option to turn that off if you're a madman that you want to artificially risk your life.

And I would imagine that's, of course, assuming you're using the VTOLs. If you haven't switched your Cutlass into VTOL mode or your Reclaimer into VTOL mode, then it's not providing any relief for your maneuvering thrusters at all at that point.

Yeah, if you're not using the thrusters, then they don't consume any fuel, they don't heat up, they don't have a risk of being damaged.

Okay, so nudging does not mean that we put the bullets around the corner or anything like that. Every weapon on every ship has a convergence allowance, right? At the moment, that allowance is quite high for each weapon. It's like eight degrees. So when you target something with fixed weapons or with any other weapons and you don't fire at the target, but if the target is really close to you, then you will see that your shots will cross over in front of you. That is convergence, and this is just an inherent property of the weapon, so they can gimbal, a little bit of gimballing in each, right? So we're using that to help the fixed weapons finding the target. I know that people would say, oh, wait a sec, it's auto-aim, but it's not really auto-aim. So assuming, I'm prepared, you have a ship flying in front of you, right? So this Hornet goes into this direction. Then the predicted impact point will be here. Let's say John is aiming at me. Let's assume this is the center of the predicted impact point. What we do is when your current aim vector is intersecting with that, at some point we will start nudging the bullets towards the target, but it won't be an instant swap, it will be a fluid ratio towards the target. So if you're really aiming good anyways, but if you're slightly offset, it will still nudge the bullet in this direction, but not perfectly. So it kind of slowly fades them onto the target. What this effectively does for fixed weapons is it makes the target a little bit bigger, so it's a little bit easier to hit, but it's not auto-aim. It's just an assist that we allow based on the convergence properties that the weapons have anyways. Because you could argue, hey, if the weapons can converge, why can't they go a little bit more on the target? So this is what we're doing with that. And it is really necessary. So we did a lot of gameplay tests with that. And it definitely improved the viability of fixed weapons. Not to the point that they're already on par with auto gimbals. That's something we need to fix later. But they will be more usable in 3.10.

Yes, but it's more along the lines of porting the 3.9 Flash-based HUD to our own proprietary Building Blocks system. So everything that was there in the existing central Flash, your central heads-up display, so your throttle, your indicators for where you've got your landing gear out, your pips and reticles, moving all of those from Flash to Building Blocks. So they do look different. They have a slightly different arrangement. And some of them have some slightly different behaviors. For example, EMP weapons have some extra information on there now, purely because it's a lot easier to do it in Building Blocks than Flash. So it's not a completely radical new HUD. The targeting side is slightly different, but I think we'll talk about that later. But the actual HUD is just an updated version of what we had before. Players who had the Gladius or the Mantis or the Carrack, we've got a preview of that in 3.9 anyway. But going forward, we're continuing to iterate on the HUD. So what's in 3.10 will be every single ship in the game has HUD visuals similar to those three ships that I mentioned in 3.9. And on top of that, they have some extra features that weren't there in 3.9. So I think the missile and self-destruct messages that had disappeared are back. And then that gives us the basis to then do the manufacturer styling on top of it in a later patch.

Manufacturer styling is something we've been talking about for a while now.

Rather than just doing a tint for a different color, they will physically look differently styled based on the manufacturer rather than just this one's blue, this one's green.

That's something that was removed in 3.5, I think, with the revision of IFCS. It was something we intentionally didn't put back in, not to say it's never going to come back. There was a lot of overhead that came with it and a lot of, miscommunication is the wrong word, but there was a lot of confusion about how it actually works, the cost of keeping it up to date. It's something we keep looking at. I know there's a sort of vocal group of people that want it back. So I'm not going to say it's never coming back, but it's not on our immediate priorities to bring back.

I know a lot of folks wanted to make things like formation flying easier and stuff like that. It's especially helpful for folks doing the cinematic stuff when you've got ships of different types and you're trying to keep them in the frame at the same time. It's like if we could just match speed, that would make that a lot easier.

I appreciate that. When we did the changes for IFCS, we looked at the analytics of how much all the functions get used versus the time we had to deliver the project. And it was very far down the list in terms of actual use across the game.

Yeah, I mean, that's quite a difficult one because we want it to be like a limit that we have, but it's how we build up to that limit over time, and it's also how we communicate that the ship is reaching its limit to be able to hover as well. So there's a lot of different factors to make that overall time feel right in the end.

We don't have an exact number, but it's not going to be an instant, you fall out of the sky; there will be suitable warning and time for you to do something about it.

Yeah, there will be very precise things on your heads-up display that tell you about that state. I mean, obviously it needs to be long enough so people can comfortably launch and land from a planet or so. But you wouldn't take a Caterpillar into a gunship role hovering over the ground for extended periods of time.

I think the short answer there is yes. It's not something we're actively working on, but it's something we've talked about, something that makes sense. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do. But when you have to factor in the altitude and then the planet and then all the wind and everything else, how much do we want it to be corrected based on environment? As soon as you get a gust of wind, do you want it to turn off? You start going down a rabbit hole. But yeah, it is something we've talked about, but it's not actively being worked on.

There's also the question whether it's an altitude hold or a height above ground hold or so.

There'll be a camp that wants one and the other. Do we do one, upset the other? Do we do both, double the time?

Whether it's sea level or whether it accounts for mountains and hills and stuff.

Terrain level, yeah.

So it hasn't really changed the responsiveness of the ships in terms of the initial movement. But what it does is it changes the time it takes the ship to automatically come back. So the ships feel heavier in that sense. So if you move the ship and then basically let go of the controls, on the bigger ships, you really feel the ship will take a lot of time to correct itself and go back to zero. Whereas the smaller ships will feel responsive compared to that. But you'll still feel a small bit of jerk in that. But it's much more prominent on the bigger ships at the moment. And again, back to your point, this is something we've put in the game for the first time. And we're currently evaluating it ourselves. As more players get their hands on it, we're getting more and more feedback towards how it's affected the feel of combat and the feel of flying in general. So it is something we're going to tune for this release, which we have, and then we're going to tune it for the next release and the next release beyond as well.

You make a great point, Richard. It's good enough that I want to reiterate it, that 3.10 is the next step in Star Citizen's continuing evolution of flight mechanics. It is not the final step. So it is the next big leap forward, and it's just as important to get these changes out there to improve the player experience, but also to generate the feedback that we need to continue improving and continue iterating as things go forward.

And similar to what we talked about on Inside Star Citizen last week, I think it was last week or maybe it was the week before, it's very hard to just read this or see us talking about it and go, yes, that's how it feels. You need to get in there and play it because responsiveness is subjective. Everyone feels it differently and just looking at a number in a spreadsheet doesn't give you that actual feeling of how it plays.

Yes. Though the current pinning system is just the first step. It creates the basic logistics to do that in the long term. I mean, for now, we only have the shared pins within the ship, so you can share it with your turret gunners and so on. In the long term, we obviously want to share it with our fleet and then squads and all that, but that's a bigger topic in itself because it requires that certain communication hierarchies and all that need to be established first. And then there's the question how that interacts with the whole online universe and with your friends and so on. It's a bigger question, which we can't approach yet, but it will happen eventually.

I can't overstate how cool it was. I've played in the turret before, and half the time I'm just looking around trying to wonder where everything is because you only see out the side of one ship. Then to suddenly get targets pinned for me and marked, it's like I knew where to start expecting things. It was a delightful improvement.

At some point, I would like to see a commander role that does these things on a bridge or so.

So for 3.10, we've got the direction arrow, which shows you the direction of the ship. And also we've got a really cool trail as well, which shows you where the ship has been. So you can kind of predict where it's going next. You can kind of see the path of the ship. So that really helps you in combat. So even though that was before my time, that's kind of what we've got for 3.10.

Yeah, it's interesting to have both of those because they're not always necessarily in sync, especially with decoupled flight. So it's handy to see where the ship's pointing and where it's been because you can sort of glean some information about the person you're targeting by the way they fly. And the trail gives you that sort of clue as to how they were flying. So if you see them doing constant zigzags, the trail will give you that path. So you can perhaps expect them to do that again.

Yeah, it's like reading your enemy and laying out your strategies to combat them.

Okay, well, I think there's a little bit more HUD work for the EMP stuff. In the future, we want to move the EMP stuff more into the missile operator mode, but that's not for 3.10, that's for post 3.10.

So to give a bit of context for those that don't know what's going on with EMP at the moment, all EMP items start off by default and you have to manually turn them on. That's because it was a design that we wanted to try out where when they're on, they use a huge amount of power. So by having them on by default, you ended up sort of crippling the ships. You turn your ship on and they would immediately turn off because the EMP just started absorbing all the power your ship needed. So we'd have them turned off by default. Then when you want to use them, you have to manually go turn them on. And that's an awkward step that we want to solve in the future where if you're in an EMP ship and you hit right mouse button or secondary fire in whatever control scheme you're using, it goes EMP's offline. You're like, why is it offline? It's because it's not turned on. So we want to simplify that flow where it perhaps turns it on for you or gives you a prompt of what to actually do to turn it on rather than requiring someone to hunt through the MFDs to do it. And then it's you as a player choosing to do this big energy-absorbing behavior, which means you then have to choose, am I going to charge this up? Or am I going to use all my energy weapons? Am I going to use my power for flying, afterburning? It's a choice you have to make between the two. That's just sort of a background as to why it's like that. And then, yeah, lots of people get confused by it.

Yes. But with a caveat, I'd say we've got a very basic form of gliding right now, where we've currently got the ships with a flat surface, so the wings are not shaped like wings, for example. At the moment, the ships have flat surfaces which generate lift and drag depending on how you pitch and move the ship, basically. So if you do turn off the engines, you will glide, but you won't really have control over the ship. But again, this is the first version of the atmospheric flight for these ships, and it's a really big step we've taken, but it's a step to enable us to do other things in the future. So in the future, we're looking at having control surfaces and different shaped wings so we can actually maneuver the craft with the wings rather than the thrusters. Because at the moment, we've got wings, but the ship is still controlled by the thrusters. So you've got the wings giving lift and drag and you force the ship over and then you pull back. And then you get a force in the corner, which allows you to pull the high G with the wings. But that is driven by the thrusters maneuvering that behavior, whereas we want that behavior to be generated by the aerodynamics itself. But again, that's a step in future releases. It's quite a complex job to add control surfaces, especially to make it visually look correct as well with all the ships. But again, for 3.10, it's the first step. And we're going to get a lot of feedback. And then we can iterate on that. And then we can put that into future releases with control surfaces and make the ships even more different than they are now.

Yes.

Yes. In 3.10, like Rich said, you can glide, but the thrusters sort of take over. Unless you're at the point where all your thrusters turn off, you will glide nicely. It depends what you're doing before your thrusters turned off. But the version we have locally that isn't 3.10, where the control surfaces actually take effect, you can turn off every single maneuvering thruster and just rely on your mains and your ailerons. I think maybe the Gladius ones are actually flaperons or something like that because they do both behaviors. You can fly purely on the aerodynamic forces.

I saw Dave Colson flying the Gladius without any thrusters the other day.

Actually, it's even more interesting when you fly and have a wing ripped off or so because that is also supported. So you get really asymmetric lift then and you can easily crash if somebody rips off your wing.

Well, not in 3.10, but hopefully later down the line.

That's for a future discussion. There will be a slight change purely based on how ships fly. You're not going to be pivoting around like crazy like you were in 3.9 atmosphere because things will be flying differently. So it will be slightly harder to lock just because it won't be as easy to keep targets on screen. But the actual behaviors of the missiles once launched is going to be the same.

I mean, we have a lot of stuff we want to do with the missiles in the future, but it's quite big. I mean, we know that in multiplayer, the missile spam and so on can be very frustrating. But the first steps towards that will be with the missile operator mode, which is on the roadmap, and then we iterate from there.

Yeah, the whole missile and torpedo gameplay is the next focus of the team after we've wrapped up this patch's work.

Gunnery and controls. How long have you got? Okay, so gunnery for us is the process of aiming and firing your weapons. So we're somewhat closing in on that. So we kind of know what kind of modes we want to have when you fire weapons. I mean, we have fixed, we have manual or free, and then we have gimbal assist. Gimbal assist, for example, is a bit too strong. So later we want to debuff it a little bit. But for that we need more support from the sensor systems. But combat as such is undergoing a huge change at the moment. So what John just said is in the next quarter we're going to have more focus not just on the missiles but also especially on the weapons. So the future patches will change the way players employ the weapons. So they need to be really careful when to employ the weapons. So they need to pick the times when they do it and they need to decide when not to do it because employing the weapons will have a lot of disadvantages as well. During combat, we want people to commit to the decisions that they make. In this regard, there's a lot of stuff coming. I think we mentioned capacitors.

I was just about to ask about capacitors.

Capacitor gameplay as such is quite interesting for us. We're going to have this both on the weapons and on the flight model later. It's like the concept of stamina, right? So if Star Citizen were a fighting game, right? At the moment, what happens in combat, everybody's just punching, right? There's no consequence in not punching, so everybody punches. For us, that means players can tape down their fire button all the time without or only with little consequence. And that will drastically change in 3.11 onwards. So you need to decide when to punch. You need to decide when to block. And so we're slowly going into that direction of having really short decision-act loops, right? Sorry, it's called OODA loops: observe, orient, decide, act. So effectively analyzing your situation, then deciding what you do, and then doing the stuff that you want to do. And having a lot of small decisions, small loops in combat. That was a mouthful. What I'm saying is we want the players to make a lot of important, meaningful decisions in combat. And so the capacitor changes on the weapons and later on the thrusters, they will help us achieve that.

Yes. So the problem with overheating at the moment is that the player doesn't get a lot of information about it, right? So what we actually want to achieve in the long term is that overheating is more a consequence of strongly overclocking your ship and being careless with it. So heat on the weapons or on the thrusters won't be the immediate thing that is limiting your performance. It will be the capacitor gameplay. So effectively, if you have an energy weapon and you tape down your fire button, your gun will be empty and cannot fire after X bullets, and then it needs to recharge. And the way it recharges and how fast it's going to be, that's all under player control and will, again, require some decisions from the player.

So capacitors are for the normal, everyday use to enforce tactics and thoughtful consideration. And overheating is for the people who choose to abuse their components and max them out.

Max them out and then risk higher maintenance costs on the ships and so on.

Yeah, like you said a while back, this is not the final step. So it's like a three-pronged attack on the vehicle experience. So we have the flight changes that have come in 3.10, we'll have the missile operator mode, and then we have all these capacitor things. And they're all coming over upcoming patches. There was just no way we could deliver it all in one patch, in one drop. So we've had to spread it out over a few. When those three things are in together, that's when the fruits of our labor, so to speak, should be there.

And until then, some design decisions might not make sense for the player, but it will all come together. Hopefully in a couple of releases.

I've got a Cutlass right here. So this is where you do balance; there is some kind of gameplay side where a lot of the ships were designed certain ways without knowing where we'd be several years down the line, and the features we're going to model, the aerodynamics, the thrust and torque and balance and all this kind of stuff. So we have to balance certain things. So if you do have a Cutlass, you're not just pitching forwards because the ship doesn't have VTOLs at the front, for example. Because we don't want the ships to feel bad. We want it to make sense. But we don't want necessarily to make ships feel bad.

Sometimes the rule of cool works both ways in terms of how a ship looks. It takes some level of performance. If how a ship looks fundamentally cripples a ship's behavior, we're going to take steps to correct that underneath. So if Rich gets his Cutlass out again, the large VTOL thrusters, yeah, they look like large VTOL thrusters, but there are ones at the front that behave like VTOL thrusters to offset that. Otherwise you'd have to have the same size thrusters on the back at the front, or vice versa.

That's a very specific measure. It's hard to answer that because we don't know yet. We have a vision of what combat should be, and we're going to tune the ships towards that vision in the long term, right? Just saying increased accelerations might improve a certain aspect, but it might break other aspects of the game. So the answer is we don't know yet. We'll see how in the following quarter the combat evolves and develops, and then we're going to decide what we're going to do with the accelerations. I mean, we don't want to just increase accelerations. We want to make a fun flight model. So maybe.

And again, it ties back into what I said earlier. It's what it feels like. A lot of people tend to get into the data crunching. This value is 0.9 in this patch and now it's 1.7 in this patch. It's terrible. But does it feel better? Does it make the game better from being those values?

I think Yogi touched on this with his last question about capacitors. So the capacitors will help there because using your retro thrusters will have consequences to your thrust capacitor. So if you just hammer boost or afterburn on your retros constantly, you're going to run out a lot quicker than someone coming forward. So then you're going to be at a disadvantage. So that's where that will get stopped. Maybe not stopped, but it won't be the default scenario.

I mean, we do have internal PvP prototypes with customized tunings where we achieve this positional, knife-fighting quality in the normal dogfighting, right? But these things are really heavily dependent on the projectile velocities and other aspects. This whole topic is way too big to just be put in one single release with one statement like, yep, let's cut back-strafe or something like that. So we need more time to work on that. And this happens over the course of the next quarter. So we have a little side project going on at CIG, which is called Interactive Combat Testing. And within that group, it's not just VET people, but it's also people from our user research department, which includes Bayer, who used to be a very successful PvP player.

I like the way you say used to.

Yeah, he's pretty good. So we're working a lot with him to just iterate over the combat and narrow down on the experience that we actually want to have. And we have enough test results that suggest that we can reach this position of knife-fighting kind of dogfight again. But the whole work that needs to be done to implement this properly is way too much for one release. I mean, the first gunnery changes on the turrets and the fixed weapons that 3.10 will have are actually a result of the testing that happened. We kicked it off, I think, in March. And we still continue to develop things there. So over the next course of releases, we will move more stuff over to the main dev branch. Then it will eventually end up in player hands.

Yeah. I saw a question fly up in the chat a while back about engagements being different between 3.9 and 3.10. 3.10 does bring them in, but these changes we're talking about with capacitors bring them in another step. So you get that more visceral, positional knife-fighting spaceship combat experience rather than just two tiny pixels flying around.

So in 3.10, the graphics team provided a nice new little bit of tech to make the central flight HUD dynamically adjust its brightness based on the environment, so when you're in deep dark space, it dims down so it's not blowing out the eye adaptation. When you're in light environments, it ramps itself up so you can actually see it against white clouds, or if you're on Yela or microTech when you're in a snowstorm, it'll be bright enough with a drop shadow that you can see. Maybe if you point it directly into the sun, it won't quite deal with that, but for 90% of the environments, it works. There are a few quirks that didn't make it into 3.10, so not every single element on the HUD reacts like that. So 3.10 is just the flight HUD. We need to expand that to things on the lens, such as the reticles and mission markers, so they do the same thing. The VJoy, ATC gates in environments, because they're technically rendered on the lens rather than on the visor. They can't take advantage of it. So there's more to come there.

That's certainly great news for the HUD. You still lose targets in the sun on a really bright planet or in space if somebody flies in the sun. I suppose that's an appropriate tactic if you can utilize it as well.

It's a tried and tested combat tactic.

The G-force model is still the same that we had before, but we have it in our backlog to change it a little bit because we're not really satisfied with the effects it produces. As far as I know, it's on the backlog. I'm not sure what the other plans are.

It is the same G-force model, but with the changes to how atmospheric flight happens, you do hit it in different ways than before as well, because obviously you're doing completely different maneuvers than you did in 3.9. You can do really big banking, steep turns or stalls, which you just wouldn't have been able to do before in 3.9. So you never would have got to the point of the G-force redouts and blackouts having an impact on gameplay.

Yeah, there's also some really serious G-forces as well. We're pulling some crazy future kind of G-forces with these things, but also with the G-force itself, we're looking at, again, managing your capacity to withstand G-force, which is something that real fighter pilots do. So if you pull a G for 15 seconds, the next time, if you go into it straight away, you're not going to last 15 seconds, you're going to last 10 seconds. And if you do it again, you're going to last maybe five seconds. So again, it's about that management of your own personal resistance to G-force, really. That's going to play a part in the future as well.

I don't hate the Cutlass. I hate all ships equally. I don't have a favorite. I don't have a worst. So the Cutlass specifically, the only real change to it in 3.10 is it's got some armor. So we did a pass on pretty much every ship, re-added the armor items to them and gave them all some primarily manufacturer-derived baselines. So Drake ships have better armor absorption values than some of the other ships at the expense of maybe some shield performance. And the Buccaneer and the Caterpillar got some buffs in terms of their weaponry as well. So trying to just improve the usability of the Drake lineup, because looking at the analytics, the Cutlass fares quite well, despite the amount of noise that we get. If you look at all the data, even accounting for the fact that everyone has a Freelancer at the moment, all the Cutlass variants actually outperform it in the metrics that we have to look at internally. But the Buccaneer and the Caterpillar really did struggle. So for 3.10, the Buccaneer's weapons and missile mounts have been swapped over. So if you lose a wing, you don't lose all your guns. The coolers and the fuel tanks don't fall off in the slightest breeze anymore. Again, if you lose a wing, you don't fall out of the sky. The Caterpillar command module guns have all been upgunned a bit, so it has a bit more firepower. The Dragonfly and the Nox got a change to increase their speed and lower their ground-hugging abilities. So hopefully 3.10 should see a bit of a usability improvement for Drake owners.