Developers answer fan questions on Squadron 42: drop-in co-op wingmen, rank and reputation carrying into the Persistent Universe, citizenship choice, branching missions, and dialogue. They also recap the Hangar V2 release problems: patch manifest bug, CDN, Visual Studio parallel builds.
Okay, so there are going to be a lot of questions about this stuff, so we'll try to be direct about the questions we're facing at a time. So you can't play multiplayer all the way through. It's a drop-in mechanic that we're going to be using. So what's going to happen is your friends, and not your NPC characters, but your friends can drop in and join you on a mission at any given time and be a wingman, but they're not going to be playing through the campaign, walking around the carrier with you or anything like that.
Yes, absolutely. Our inspiration is the original Wing Commander, and one thing Wing Commander lost over the years was it went away from that increasing in rank, because they had to do the live action with Mark Hamill and they couldn't change his rank badge. But with Squadron 42 we can do that, and it absolutely will have an impact on how your character is treated after the campaign, both positively and negatively. You'll have a better reputation, perhaps, if you moved higher in the military. Of course, the rule for advancing in rank is don't suck, right? You don't advance in rank just because we give it to you. But not everybody likes a high-ranking military officer. Maybe pirates aren't going to be so fond of you if you were a colonel in the war killing them all.
That's military stuff. They're not going to give it to you when you leave. So when you muster out, you don't get to take [them]. But there will be something. You might get like a tattoo from Squadron 42, and you'll get reputation, you might have medals you take, that kind of thing.
We've talked about that. We actually have talked about whether or not all the top, top gear is available to all players. And my thought is that if you didn't serve in the military or you have a bad rap with the UEE for some other reason, you can't get to it. So I would think that military service might give you some access at least to some things that other people can't get.
Yes, you can not accept your citizenship at the end if you're going to live outside the law. Breathe easy, you pirates. So the player gets a choice, essentially, whether or not they want to become a citizen. When we were meeting with the guys yesterday, that was kind of the imagery that came up during the meeting: you get your citizenship papers, and if you just don't sign them, then you're fine. Although if you're going to be out there raiding shipping after Squadron 42, you're not going to keep your citizenship for very long.
That seems to be kind of the way it would be, right? You automatically get citizenship, where you can accept it, and then you might lose it. It's like the right to vote here in the U.S., right? If you get convicted of a felony, you no longer have that right.
We're going to have a losing pathway. There is. You've played some of Chris Roberts' past games; they're amazing at losing. You have to lose once just to see what happens.
That is true. I think on one of the games, I think it was Wing 4, I believe, we did a survey, or we checked after it was out, how much people actually played. And most people only played like 27, 28% of the game. So there's so much out there they missed. But the hardcore people...
I don't know if Chris talked about that or not. People seem to have the impression that he did. What they're planning to do right now is work on the drop-in mode for cooperative play, and then maybe somewhere along the line we might have time.
So man, that would be really tough if you have a mission you can't get to and a bunch of people that are really good pilots decide to keep not letting anybody pass that mission. That might be tough. I guess maybe you can always say you don't want them in there or whatever.
The death mechanic is slightly different in the single-player games. I mean, if you look back at the Wing Commanders, right, if you die, you have to start the mission over. It's not like we're going to do the full mechanic there. So, no, we don't expect you to have a shorter lifespan just because you went through Squadron 42. In fact, you may have a longer lifespan because you have learned how to fly a fighter properly by going through the campaign. Hopefully. The Foundry 42 guys will make it properly difficult.
Of that we can answer. So Squadron 42 is, again, like the Wing Commanders in the past: you're in the military. You're not going to be flying your Constellation in the military. It won't fit on the carrier very well anyway. So you plan to be flying your Hornets and Gladiators and other ships that you may not have met yet. The good news is it's going to be really high-tech military hardware you aren't going to be able to get in Star Citizen, so you're going to have a completely different experience than some of these ships.
TL;DRMostly deflects as spoilers: it is a new universe, Blair is probably not returning though homages are possible, and the drunk mission isn't much fun.
Plus I think some former publishers we worked with might not take too kindly to [that], but I wouldn't be surprised to see some homage stuff pop up here and there now and again. Never can tell, but probably not Blair.
You know what, this would be a spoiler alert too. These are kind of things that the fans would want to play through and discover for themselves. And that's one thing we need to get out there: we'd like to answer everything we can, but we want to be cognizant of the experience that you guys are going to have. We want to make sure that you get to experience it the way we want you to experience it, and not knowing everything going in, right?
Right, and we talked about the drunk mission a lot yesterday, and the honest answer on that one is, it's really not much fun. You play it once to get the experience, and look at how messed up your controls are and everything, and then you're like, well, I can't win this. You go back, you skip the drinks, and then you go fly the mission normally.
So first things first, dead character. If this is your next of kin, then you already have the benefits of Squadron 42, right? So you don't need to play it again, because you can't get them again on that same character account. Now, maybe if you open a new character, you could replay it for that character, but not for that single chain.
We're going to see branching missions for sure. In fact, that was one of the stretch goals. As you were saying, a lot of people played through the original games without going and playing the losing missions or the mid-range missions. There's going to be some cool stuff in there. But don't expect an entirely separate path that just goes off forever in a different direction. We wanted the dialogue to be tight, the storyline to be tight. So it'll do small branches, but not necessarily vast branches.
You should say that the script for Wing Commander 4, I think you've actually got a copy, it is like this thick. It is unbelievably detailed and dialogue heavy.
There might be bromance. No, we were focusing very heavily in this particular storyline on interactions with individual wingmen, in terms of how you treat each other as comrades, not necessarily getting into some big mushy romance, especially since we don't know what character you're going to be playing. You could be picking a female or a male, so we can't really react to all those situations.
Yes, that is true. And look, what does Chris always talk about? Immersion, right? And that's part of what makes the universe seem alive and vibrant. It's all those little things that we get to see and do.
Well, we're building all the interiors out fully, so you should be able to walk around everywhere. I mean, if they'll let you in. You can't go everywhere, everywhere.
I imagine if you're a lieutenant, you're not able to go to the command center or whatever. Well, that's a question. I mean, are we going to open up new areas for people to go to as the mission progresses?
Absolutely. If you need to configure a loadout, they'll open up that area for you. But I can imagine Scotty chasing you with a wrench if you try to go into the engine room.
TL;DRConversations won't be a simple good-or-evil choice; characters react to whether you agree with them, which affects how they fly with you and respond to your command, in a reputation web.
There actually is a little more to it than that one-line answer. But basically, as I spoke about a little earlier, the characters' reactions to you change based on whether you agree or disagree with them. It's not a right or wrong thing. It's not 'I'm going to take the angel path or the devil path.' It's 'do I think the same way as this person does', and my reactions to other people, to missions, to what happens during the story. So it'll affect how they fly with you, how they react to you if you ever get to command them, all of that.
Ben, would you say that's like a reputation system then, sort of? The more you hang around with people, they like you. It's more of a like kind of thing, isn't it?
Well, you have to be online for the Hangar because you have to be able to get to your account. Squadron 42 will probably give you the option. We talked about this as well. What if they really just want to play that single-player game? So if you don't want to make a character that passes on into the Persistent Universe, we'll probably let you make a character and just play through the game.
Exactly. We're going to be building the tools to make those stories. We'll follow the lore that the players themselves are going to create. We'll let them inspire some of the things we want to do. There'll be big epic adventures going on in the universe that we will possibly create some...
We had a lot of very interesting conversations, some of which we can't repeat here. But we are going to go out to the UK and talk to them there, and maybe we can ferret out that information.
Well, we had some issues where the character swap, the outfit swap: the character, when it was wearing the Privateer outfit, didn't have hands. The Avenger wasn't in the hangar yet. The LCD screens weren't in there yet. But the fish tank was. We did have a fish tank there.
Yeah, there was no buggy track at that point. It was being worked on, but it wasn't in the actual release yet. And there were some issues with the Constellation that popped up afterwards that weren't in the last patch, with getting in the turret, and the offsets. There were some animation offsets that were not supposed to be there.
TL;DRBuilds break because many people check in changes across interacting systems and ships, so a build system runs continuous integration, but only one QA tester exists and more QA is going to be added.
I mean, it's a ton of people all checking in stuff, so sometimes it stomps something, or sometimes you change a little thing not thinking it's going to affect this system over here, and it does. And you're just like, well, why did that happen? So everyone has to kind of work together: I'm working on this and you're working on that, and we have to make sure that we're all working on the same stuff together so that we're not stomping each other or checking in something that breaks everything. And so we have a build system that does a lot of continuous integration to make sure that whatever we check in doesn't just break everything. But we don't have a test system. So Justin is our only QA tester. Every time we make a new build, he's testing it. And there's a lot of stuff there that needs to be tested for one person.
A lot of the thing is that it's a linear process. You can't just take any element out of it without conceivably domino-effecting the whole thing. And we have a lot of people working on a lot of different things in a lot of different locations. So to coordinate all that and have everything come in at a single point is a huge amount of management. Especially the ships, because the ships involve everyone, all the way down: from the XML files, loading in the weapons and the swap-outs, to actually setting up the ship through engineering, and then art. Animations. So all that stuff is integrated in these ships. And so, again, if you find something that's messed up or there's a bug, then you fix it, and conceivably you've broken other things. It just happens that way. Things that you can't foresee happen because there's so many moving parts. It's like taking out a spark plug of your car. Well, conceivably, if you keep it that way, it's going to break your car. There's a lot of things that cascade down from that.
With the build system, once we generate a build, we create a patch of it. There's a couple different files that are associated with that patch that basically tell the patcher how to patch from where you are to where you need to go to. When we upload stuff to the CDN, we need to make sure that all of those files are there and that they're actually generated. We found that there was actually a bug in the patch building system that didn't generate the right to-from patch. So we had to, after the fact, fix that, and that's what ended up solving that issue. But we found a bug in the system. I mean, it was deep down in there; we had no idea it was there until we ran an automated promotion system that we had just developed this week.
TL;DRThe slow build may have been caused by a large added video file, but the team wasn't sure, and other unnoticed background issues, including Visual Studio toolchain bugs causing slow or hanging builds, turned out to be involved.
H
HarryRelease Testing Developer
Well, one thing we were adding was the Aurora video, the commercial, which was a fairly sizable file. And even though the patch system does a diff and doesn't try to download the whole patch every time, still, that's a big add. So we weren't sure if that big of an add of a single file was what was causing this. So we were kind of trying to do some investigation, trying to figure out, is this what's slowing it down? Is that the one thing? We weren't sure, and it turns out there were other things going on in the background that we weren't aware of at the time that were biting us.
We basically have to work around bugs in the Microsoft Visual Studio toolchain that cause issues like just hanging builds, and they look like they're progressing, but they're just progressing slowly. You're not sure what's going on.
Yeah. There are issues that Visual Studio has with parallel builds. So to speed up our build time, we do a lot of compilation in parallel. And Microsoft really doesn't support that very well, at least it seems. So we have things like that to work around. Sometimes it's just a simple restart of one of the build slaves, and sometimes we have no idea why.
Highwinds is the outsourcer that's in charge of the movement of the download through our patch system. It's called the Content Delivery Network. CDN for short.
I think they love it so far, especially the new Avenger. It was a shame that we weren't able to show actually getting into the ship and getting into the cargo bay for the live demo. But once we got the patch out, they were able to do that, and I think they're definitely loving the...