Developers discuss planned planet scale (double precision), NPC factory management, alliances between orgs, smuggling and cargo scans, colorblind-friendly HUD feedback, and distortion weapons. Two QA staff describe their build testing routine, their backgrounds and a community tester group with a public JIRA.
The answer on this one was yes. He didn't expound upon it a lot, but he was talking about the different versions of ships over the years, which happens with cars. Everything evolves, so why should we be any different?
Yeah, the idea here is that the game is going to always be growing. We'll always be adding things in, so that means technology and that means everything will be changing over time. New stuff to discover.
Honestly, the planet in Arena Commander, it's too small. So we are planning on having much bigger. Now we are working on some background technology that will make that possible. We're talking about double precision. Yes, double precision. So we are going to have actual bigger planets in the final game. There should be some variation in the planets as well. They won't be quite life-size. Can't quite pull that off. But stars are a little different because you never get close to a star. So you don't need to waste all the polys on a giant star.
It's actually something that, when we send emails about HUD items and everything, there is a lot of discussion of, that you can't have just one type of feedback. So for instance, when something is damaged, we want to make it blink on the HUD and not just change to red. So we're aware of it, there are some small things, and it's something that will kind of evolve over time, we'll continue to add different options. And eventually, we want to be able to customize the HUD, so maybe you could even change out the color palette if you're having trouble distinguishing.
Well, the standard things we've talked about, whether you're gunner or whatever, but one of the specific things they asked was about whether they can run your factory node, and that's kind of the way it works. You're sort of the upper-level management of a factory, and you kind of pull the levers and decide how it's going to run, but then the NPCs do run the factory. It's not like you have to be there on the floor walking around smacking people in the head.
TL;DRCustom organization uniforms are a cool idea that wouldn't be available out of the box, would need CIG approval and art skill, and might be considered in the long run, with file-size concerns.
Actually, that was Chris's response, too, was that's a really cool idea. Standard caveats of if we do this: A, you need to be pretty art savvy to get something in our game, B, we have to have CIG approval of anything that goes into the game.
Right, and also, anytime you do texture changes or things of that nature, it adds to the size and footprint of the game on everybody's machine. So I'm sure we'll have to figure out a system where either if you share globally, everybody has to get that patch, or if you just share it with your guild members, maybe there's a batch file you can drop in there. It's like a choice or something.
So we already have the distortion cannon. That is a very different effect. The idea that it messes with your pipes and changes the heat or the power that's flowing through them rather than just physically damaging your ship. There's the idea of EMP weapons as well that may or may not happen early on. But the other thing, they're talking about the physical impulse provided by a weapon to move things around, which A, is not always fun when it's against another player. But B, everything in your game has an impulse to it. When you fire a projectile at someone, it is imparting its momentum to the ship. It's just a small mass versus a large mass, so it's not a significant move. But we don't have any specific plans to do that kind of weapon.
Oh, yes, the crazies. There will be human opponents. There will be other opposition than just, as we currently have it, the Vanduul and pirates. There's corporate raiders and that kind of thing. And we may have some crazies. It depends on what those crazy writers of ours decide to do.
That's kind of an alliance thing. I mean, sure, alliances, yes. Yes, there will be alliances. The thing about alliances, whenever we do alliances, I think of Axis & Allies or Risk. It was Phil, me, Chris, and Erin that were playing Risk all the time, and we would always have alliances. Those things never lasted more than two turns at the most, and then pretty soon somebody broke the alliance. It was a beautiful thing.
So that sort of covers it, the question itself. Yes, you can have a secret compartment and carry goods that are not necessarily legal in a place. There are also ways to prevent cargo scans, or at least try to prevent them. The counterbalance to that is that the Advocacy or the police in the local system would continually try to up their scanning technology so they can get past that and find your stuff. So yes, there will be checkpoints. Yes, there will be ways of sneaking past them. I'm not sure I can give much more detail than that right now.
Really, right now we're treating slaves or prisoners as more of an abstract. So it's a cargo. It's not really people that you would go and interact with. So freeing them would really just be dumping the cargo. So not really at this time a plan to have them help you seize the ship.
Those LA kids are definitely really pushing even harder than the rest of the group. Everybody's working hard. Everybody's working very hard. LA guys sometimes look like zombies in meetings. But Chris would like them to take a holiday, is the way he put it. But there's still work to be done. There always will be. So people try to grab vacations when they can.
We do. I mean, we all take vacations. I've got one coming up this summer, and people take time off. It's just, this is a lot of work. And most of us are here because it's a passion. We want to be here. We want the game just as bad as everybody else. So the only way we get the game is if we create it and make it.
Well, we get a build, and then we go through all the different checklists we have, which includes testing the hangar, all the dogfight module maps and game modes, and also the editor, so the developers can keep developing without having any problems with the editor, or hopefully we can catch as many as we can. And then they also help with reporting issues when they're working with the editor too. So we definitely go through testing everything, and sometimes finding issues is like searching for a needle in a haystack. So we have to make sure and check everything.
Well, I got into the industry originally working at Blizzard. I worked there for four years and I obtained the level of specialist investigator, and I primarily worked with account administration and compromised account investigations. And then after that, I transitioned into QA by joining the team at Portalarium, Richard Garriott's company. And that's where I would test a poker application, and they also had another game they were working on. And that's where I got my feet wet.
So I actually met Justin, John, and David at Portalarium. That was my very first game industry job. And before that, I used to work at Capital One in the fraud department. I used to stop bad guys.
I'm most excited with just how Arena Commander can simulate what the Persistent Universe will kind of look like. So when everybody's flying around, you can kind of feel like you're actually in the Persistent Universe. And also, I'm looking forward to the leaderboards on the website. It'll definitely provide some extra engagement and fun to the actual experience, so I'm definitely looking forward to all that.
Just that we're laying the groundwork for the PU, for the Persistent Universe. I think that's pretty exciting. It's like we're doing all the hard parts right now. Well, some of them.
So the plan is to have a core group of community testers. We're going to maintain what we have right now, which is the bug reporting subcategory of our website. So anybody will be able to report issues, but we'll have a core group, and they'll have special direct access to the QA team. And they'll be able to report issues and be the voice of the community, so to speak. And they'll be able to ensure that all the important issues are addressed.
That's correct. We had discussed having a JIRA, somewhat like how Minecraft does it, where they have a public JIRA and people can create issues, and then within that community there's a higher tier of people that organize all the issues, close dupes, or have it all nice and neat for us to go in there and just import them into our actual JIRA that we use.