Developers answer fan questions on multi-crew ship capacity, physics-based projectile damage, pet health models, sim pods on big ships, weapon lockers, hauling and the Reclaimer, military versus civilian components, radiation affecting radar, hangar jukebox music, and lockable hangar rooms.
TL;DRLockable, passcode-protected rooms and ship lockdowns are planned via the GHOST system, but not at the start of the social module, though some will appear in Squadron 42.
Yes, so we're definitely going to have the ability to have security or pass codes or have them set to only open for you versus someone else. That's not something that will be in action for the beginning of the social module, but longer term it's definitely part of the plan. Planning to have security lockdowns, so if someone boards your ship, you can lock it down. When people try to board the ship there will be a minigame where they try to open the door by decrypting or decoding it. That is all functionality we're planning on.We have this system which we call GHOST, which is a game object state machine that we're working on which will drive a lot of logic of rooms and rooms are in both spaceships and environments like the hangars. That is logic rules for each one of the rooms that can do things like lock doors down. You can put everything in an emergency state and then the GHOST could set everything to have flashing/blinking red lights and klaxons going. We're very much planning to have that functionality, although it won't be day 1 [social module]. Although, you will see some this stuff in Squadron 42.
TL;DRThe jukebox plays from local drives so visitors probably won't hear your music, it likely isn't synced over the network now or in the first social module version, and he'll check.
That is a very good question. Based on what I know of our jukebox functionality, it basically plays music off of your local hard drive, so unless your friends have the same music you have, they probably obviously aren't going to hear the music you're playing in your hangar. I actually don't know the specific implementation for that, I just know that the idea with it was to search your hard drive and pull out your music and then play it. Potentially, you would have to make sure you all have the same music and then also, I'm not sure if that aspect is being serialized over the network. As in, it may just be a local thing that you play locally and when someone else has entered your hangar they may not know what music is playing in it. I am actually going to check on that one because that's one of those details that probably no one thought of but you do need to sync that over the network if it's going to work properly. My guess is that right now, it won't. It probably won't be in the first version of the social module if it isn't working that way right now, but it would be pretty trivial to do in a further drop.
So, I would say that long term we're definitely thinking about radiation or interference from big celestial objects as actually part of aspects of the gameplay that will be in Squadron 42 that you guys will play towards the end of this year. It will affect scanning and radars. If you were in that situation, you would basically (maybe not literally the sun at your back) it would be that kind of aspect. There are certain areas, like in Squadron 42 there's the coil – I think we've shown some concept art for that. When you're in that, your scanners don't have nearly the same range or penetration and they can go haywire. There will definitely be areas that will affect what you read on your radar and what your scanners can penetrate.
Yes, I would definitely say military grade and civilian grade components would be different and I would say that military grade will be much harder to obtain. Then, perhaps, depending on where you are running around with some obvious military grade stufy, may or may not cause some problems. That aspect of it we haven't decided – what the fidelity of the law enforcement would be. Definitely, generally you buy civilian grade components and then a fancy or upgraded weapon would potentially be military grade or certainly would be more rugged and would probably be harder to get and would probably be harder to get and probably be more expensive.
We haven't considered waste management pre se, although obviously we have the Reclaimer which is reclaiming space debris and refining back into materials that are useful. So, that is a kind of waste management. We will definitely have hauling missions where you will be taking big containers in some of the bigger ships you have, like the Hull C or something like that, where you will be doing some bulk hauling of goods. Quite possibly, you could have a contract to haul garbage from one place to another. I'm not sure we'll consider waste management a full time role at this stage of the game but you'll never know in the future. I think there will definitely be aspects that would pertain to sweeping up debris or monetizing it or transporting scrap or debris.
TL;DRWeapons on ships probably can't be swapped on the fly except for things like missile turrets, but larger ships will have internal weapon lockers that cleared crew can access via the GHOST system.
I don't know if we are referring to weapon racks inside the ship or are we referring to weapon racks on the outside of the ship?Basically, I think that on all of the ships that you have – in terms of weapons you probably won't be able to change then out on the fly unless it's something like a missile turret that can fire different kinds of missiles.Internally on the bigger ships, there definitely will be [**weapon lockers**](http://i.imgur.com/18Z47Ll.jpg) or weapon armoury where you can go and get laser pistols or assault rifles from. So, if that's what you mean in terms of having access to weapons on the rack, then yes people on the ship would have access to the weapons on the rack assuming they were cleared to unlock the rack/get a weapon off it. This refers back to the 1st question I answered in this show. It's the same functionality and it will use the same GHOST system.
That's a pretty good question. I think potentially on the bigger ships, like on the Bengal, just like it was in Wing Commander, there probably would be a sim pod or two that people could go train in. I don't know whether it would make sense on something like the Constellation, but it could make sense on the 890 JUMP. It is a pretty cool idea, we actually haven't been thinking specifically about that but nice suggestion! I think that will be something that we will consider, I could definitely see it on some of the bigger ships just like it was on Wing Commander.
TL;DRAnimals will have some health and damage modelling, but a full veterinary system parallel to the medical one is uncertain and unlikely at the start, given limited time and people.
Well, we'll definitely have the animals have a certain level of health and damage modelling the way that the humans are going to have. I'm not sure if we're going to have a whole veterinary system that is parallel to the medical system. We're definitely not going to have... you know, your space dog takes a hit in battle and now he comes back with a cybernetic leg... at least not at the very beginning because we've only got so much time and so many people to do everything.I would say that they would have a fair amount of detail in terms of animation, their AI. They can take a hit in the leg or body or whatever but we're probably not going to have... sort of they wake up and have a cybernetic replacement and have their own hospital system just yet. I think either you keep them safe or at one point will go to doggy heaven... or cat heaven.
TL;DRProjectiles are fully physically modelled by velocity, mass and cross-section, with gravity and other forces affecting them, so zero-g and Earth-like trajectories differ, though often not noticeably over short distances.
The projectile modelling in the game is full physical modelling, so we're actually in the process of changing out some abstracted damage point models for the projectiles to make it be more about velocity, mass, energy, size/volume/cross-section of a projectile. It's going to be much less about "this shell does 10 points of damage and this shell does 20 point s of damage". It's going to be much more, a hit at this velocity, it weighs this much, its cross-section is this much – and that will translate into amount of kinetic energy that's imparted that will translate into a damage amount. Energy bolts will be more about energy and less about the kinetic energy transfer... but still about the energy that is poured into the laser bolt. Because of that, you could have multiple weapons that fire the same projectile – say a 25 mm shell or a 50 mm shell – and it can have the same mass and everything but since the weapons fire the same projectile at different velocities, then that projectile will do different amounts of damage upon striking on whatever target you're shooting at.Then, not only that but things like the gravity – whether it's zero-g, Earth-like, or some other gravity – is all part of the simulation. So, as we move it forward at the speed, it will be affected by other forces which could include wind and all of the rest of the stuff. So all of that is modelled in CryPhysics and because we're having our projectiles all part of the physical simulation, all of the forces that affect everything else will also affect projectiles. This is slightly different from the way Crysis and those games have done it because they just did a ray cast and said, "Did I hit or not hit?", but we're actually firing real projectiles and moving them around in the physical space so they have all of the forces that act on them.So, yes, essentially you would probably have a slightly different trajectory path for a bullet you fire in zero-g as opposed to a bullet you fire in a more Earth-like gravity. Although, they go fast enough over a short enough distance that in most cases it would not be discernible. But yes, we have much more realistic ballistics and physical modelling in the game than maybe a lot of other ones.
TL;DRChris Roberts says they probably won't cap people aboard beyond what servers can handle, may restrict jump points, haven't worked out limits, and will launch unrestricted and then adjust, calling life support a good idea.
That is a pretty good question. Because, I'm sure when we get the game live and we have multicrew going... we're going to get all the users spawn, everyone get out of their ships, and see how many people they can cram into each ship kind of like a clown car. In terms of the number of people aboard the ship, I'm not sure we're going to be limiting it beyond what the game servers can handle, and of course in our game server situation we still haven't determined how many we can have on one particular game server but of course we'll save slots for your friends, for your enemies, for your people of interest, for some other people just flying around in the area so if you say we could fit 50 people or 100 people in one game instance, it's unlikely we would let you fit 50 or 100 of them all being your friends. So, then the real question is if all 50 of them could squeeze into the Redeemer, which they probably couldn't, what would you do? Would you fly off somewhere? Could the Redeemer fly off somewhere? Or, would you not fly until you're down to the actual crew payload. I think our rule would be: the people who can get onboard are onboard. It probably won't block you from being able to fly around, maybe it will block you from going through a jump point. We haven't really figured out the restriction quotient for people onboard ships. Out of the gate, we'll put the system up there and we probably won't restrict it and then we'll see what happens and manage it from there.But, the ideas of life support and C02 levels are really great in-fiction ways to manage the number of crew and guests you have on a ship, so thanks for the suggestion!