Developers answer fan questions on a possible dogfighting lobby, Marines, legal and illegal goods by system, and the Caterpillar's shadier transport role. They also cover in-house versus outsourced work, thruster consistency (the Cutlass has two), hull weak spots, and private servers versus the persistent universe.
So, here's the thing about a sandbox world like ours is going to be: players are going to choose what careers they want, and maybe there will be people who specialize in FPS versus flying their ships, and maybe there will be Marines. I mean, I think that there will be Marines for the UEE too, so.
Why, yes. Actually, we've talked about that in the economy document and things like that, too. There are going to be a lot of different little things like that, little nuggets that you have to go and discover in the galaxy.
Yeah, it is a great idea. Maybe we should have a design meeting and get to see what CR thinks about that and go from there. Maybe you have just affected the game.
The Caterpillar is, what is it, we call it the anti-Constellation, the anti-Freelancer. I guess it's the anti-Freelancer, it's in the description on the website. It's a transport ship, but it's maybe used in slightly shadier transporting sometimes.
We have various pods. We have Los Angeles, we have Austin, we have Montreal. We're all one big team. So while it seems like some things are outsourced, and some things very much are, most of the assembly and everything else is being put within the various studios, being Santa Monica, Austin, Montreal. We're all really working together. So yes, a lot of stuff. In fact, the majority of the stuff is done in-house. But we also want to work with some of the best people in the world, in the industry, as far as concept. And Chris has really always been big about working with some of the people who worked on the big budget movies and stuff out there. And those guys don't want to be in-house somewhere. They want to be working on Star Wars and Star Trek and all the next things. And so we get them in, the Ryan Churches, the Jim Martins, and we get to use their skill set and have them be part of Star Citizen. So yes, there will be a lot of people in-house, and there still are. I believe the count is somewhere north of 80 right now, with all the various offices and such.
So back in the day when Chris was slaving away at building this initial demo that launched this whole campaign, he didn't have a whole army of people working with him at the time, so he had to go and get some assets offline. So he bought that ship at TurboSquid.
When we put ships in our game, there's a lot of work that goes into this. You have to do the interiors, the exteriors, the lighting, all these different pieces, animations. Everything has to work.
Yeah, and it has to look real. You've seen the interiors of the ships in the hangar. Look how much detail there is in those. So that ship's not really ready. I don't know, maybe someday it might come to the game. So, I don't think we've actually got any plans to do that.
So the thing about thrusters, the ships all have their own unique look to them. So all the thrusters do look a little different. I mean, obviously the Aurora thruster doesn't fit on the back of the 300i. But what matters about the thrusters is that there is consistency to their functionality. So a TR2 is a TR2 is a TR2 across any of the different ships. In some cases, you might see slight differences in how those TR2s behave because you might get different variants of the engines. But, yeah, a TR2 is a TR2, no matter where it is.
As of right now, we don't have any plans to build the Zeus out. But you know what? At some point down the road, you never can tell. We may have a bunch of collector ships.
Right, but you never know. It might be useful somewhere else in the future. This game, if we do this right, it's going to go on for years and years, and you guys are going to be playing it, and we'll be adding stuff left and right.
Well, the way the ship parts work is they have physical locations in the ship, so if you do shoot through the armor, for instance, and hit a certain location, you might damage different components.
Not necessarily that much detail, but certainly there are spots you should aim for. Like, for instance, the Aurora says 'target here', with missiles sitting on top.
TL;DRPersonal servers won't be allowed to spoil the Persistent Universe's secrets, so discoveries will be found there first, but the final design of the update system isn't settled.
I think what he's really asking is, if he's running his own server and we're updating, are they then going to know where the secret systems are when they're added, or how are we going to handle that?
And that's the important part of it too, is that whatever the secrets are in the game, we are not going to let personal servers mess up our persistent universe. So whatever the system ends up being, that's a discussion we still have to have with Chris, but whatever that system is, we are going to make sure that things get found in the Persistent Universe first.
Right, and Chris is very aware of that. We want to have servers out there that people can use, but we don't want it to screw up for everybody else out there.
I'm mainly, right now, a gameplay person. In the past, I've done a lot of tools work. I work fairly well with non-programmers, and so I tend to follow the tools role. We're using CryEngine. We have everything we need. And so I've also done a lot of gameplay. So I did a lot for the Hangar app. Going forward, I'm going to do a little bit with Tom Sawyer. I've done some server work before, and he's getting to the point where he's going to be able to slice off some stuff that he's going to need help with. There's not going to be any overhead to eat up any of his time trying to learn it.
And that'll take some of the burden off, because persistence is coming. And once we get persistence, it's a whole other bailiwick. Right now, you're just hitting the database and it tells you what you have and it populates it and we're good to go.
Well, the game itself. What I really enjoy about live MMOs is what the players do in the game, and you can't predict it, and then you either do stuff to clamp that behavior or you start coming up with systems to enhance that, because it's something that we didn't even think about. And that's some of the coolest stuff for me that I enjoy.
We're kind of doing that now though. Usually that happens when you release it, but we're finding out now what they want. We're asking what they want to see in the hangar, what kind of things they want, and then we're going to chase down that direction for development.
Yeah, so that's some of the most interesting stuff for me. It's challenging, because you can't give too much, because then you don't want to take stuff away.