Developers answer fan questions on ship names, search and rescue, NPC behavior, energy management, alien races, and one-off loot. They also cover alpha slots, melting ships, multiplayer dogfighting, and the delayed organization and new chat system testing.
Well, the answer is that you should ask the developers. If you're interested in how the ship is looking, ask the artists. If you're interested in how the ship is being initially designed, the designers. Specs should go to designers, too. We're breaking it up so that the individual teams can focus in one area. So you've got to pick what your question about a ship is. But pretty much everyone on the team touches the ships in some way. So if you've got a question, that's the place to ask.
Not at first. It's certainly something we're looking at down the road, but we're not going to have that Mass Effect style procedural terrain for the whole planet at first.
And we have a lot of planets and landing zones and everything to develop, and asteroid bases and lots of stuff. There's going to be plenty of stuff to explore in space also, which is kind of the focus of the game.
The answer is yeah, absolutely. You'll see some of that. But one thing we want to get across in Star Citizen is that there's another 900 years of history. So you're going to see a lot of ship names that refer to battles and events that have happened between 2014 and 2943. The Idris corvette is a great example of that. It's named after a famous UEE battle.
And you should be reading that fiction that's on the website that Haddock and Shimmel and some of the other guys are creating. It's pretty spectacular stuff.
Well, the answer is that we're using the extra funds to hire staff with every single stretch goal. The systems and the ships we unlock are just kind of an example of a little bit of what we're doing with the extra funds, but plenty of that is going to just improving the game all across the board. I mean, you guys have seen the office videos of Manchester and here in Austin. There's new staffing coming.
Santa Monica's expanding. We're all expanding. And the truth is, we asked the fans earlier if you guys wanted to keep doing stretch goals, and they all were like, yeah, keep it going. And so you know what? We're keeping going.
The answer is that there's no one good answer. Part of the Star Citizen design is that if you're into search and rescue, you should pick a base ship that you like and build it out in that direction. Add tractor beams, living accommodations, whatever helps it be a better search and rescue ship. But the Cutlass is a great base, a Freelancer, a Starfarer.
I know a lot of folks are concerned about this because they want to upgrade their ships, they want to try out other ships. Once you have an alpha slot on your account, it's there for good. So you can upgrade, you can sidegrade, whatever kind of grade you want.
TL;DRYes, there will be unique findable items that other players will want to take, and new star systems and artifacts are to be added regularly after launch.
So the answer is yes, and essentially there'll be a lot of cool stuff out there. And that's the beauty of making a game about space. We can consistently add new star systems with new artifacts, new things to be found. We'll be doing that. Chris has made it very clear that we'll be putting much more content in on a regular basis with the live teams after we're live.
Yeah, the engine supports it. And if you look closely at some of our ships already, there's movement in there. The Aurora has the flaps that come on the sides. You can see that in the commercial and stuff. The Constellation engines go up and down. There's all sorts of cool stuff.
The first thing you're going to see is the multiplayer dogfighting, and we have the hangar team here in Austin that's working on multiplayer for the hangar, too. We're doing it in conjunction.
Exactly. Since we're doing things in parallel, we like to leverage the same technologies across multiple modules. And so as soon as you see it in dogfighting and it's working well, then soon the planetside will see it and be able to visit each other's hangars. That's how it's all going to work. So yes, it's coming. I suspect it'll probably be in dogfighting first. But we reserve the right to change our minds.
So that's actually a pretty good question. I haven't really thought of that in terms of if your, say, parent or relative has citizenship, that you get citizenship too in the case your character dies and you move on. So I guess I would have to think about that. I would think that, if citizenship does not automatically transfer, which it may not do, we would definitely give you opportunities to regain citizenship, so military service would be one of them, or various other things that you could do. But I don't have a fully formed answer for you on that one, but that's why this process is great. You bring up issues that we need to resolve, and it's better to resolve them now than later.
TL;DRNo decision yet on melting ships flown in the dogfighting module, with a leaning toward allowing it without promise, but ships applied to a Persistent Universe character can't be melted.
So we haven't made a decision on that. Definitely once the game is live and the Persistent Universe is live and you take your ship and apply it to a Persistent Universe character, yes, you will not be able to melt it, you will not be able to trade it back in, because you're playing the game and using the ship. My sort of initial response right now is on the dogfighting module we'll probably give you a pass and let you fly around and have some fun and potentially melt your ship. But I'm not promising it just yet because I wouldn't want people to abuse that. But I think maybe it will be an opportunity for people to try out things that they like and decide what they really want to play with. But definitely once the Persistent Universe happens, once you apply your package to a real in-game character and the in-game character enters the world, then you won't be able to just arbitrarily melt it and change it around.
TL;DRThere will be a contract system, possibly with escrow and paid arbitrators, plus mutual star ratings between employers and contractors, similar to real-world services.
So we'll definitely have a system to be able to handle these kinds of things. We may even have a system where you can put money in escrow until a job is performed, maybe even someone administers that for a fee. And also we're going to have a rating system. I think I've mentioned this before, but in America there's this service called Uber where you can dial up and sort of hire cars to take you places. And both the person that hires the car and the driver of the car rate the other person. So when you are looking at a car nearby you can see what that driver's rating is and the driver can also see what your rating is. So you obviously don't want to go with someone that only has a one-star rating. You want to go with someone that has a four or five-star rating. And I think that in that case we would definitely have both parties in sort of a contract, when an employer hires someone to run a mission, both the employer and the person running the mission can rate each other. And so you can sort of see, okay, well, this is a transport pilot and he's got a four and a half star rating out of five. He's pretty good. He's definitely worth me paying a premium, and this guy's got a three star rating over here. So we'll have a bit of that sort of self-regulating objective ratings and then also maybe some systems like escrow and a role that someone could take as an arbitrator for a fee to arbitrate disputes. So I think we'll have systems that are fairly similar to what's in the real world to make that kind of stuff work well.
Yeah, the short answer is yes, absolutely. My goal actually is for the NPCs in the game to sort of feel and appear much like real people. So in some ways I almost sort of feel like until you get up close I kind of don't want the players to really even know that it's an NPC or a player. It could be an NPC or it could be a player. And therefore for the NPCs we're already designing a bunch of behavior. Part of their plan is to sort of have human-like responses like preserve their own life and do all that kind of stuff. So I would definitely say that you will be able to say give us your cargo or pay the consequences, and some people will fight you and some people will just surrender the cargo and get out of there.
TL;DRNot all ships will have artificial gravity, mostly larger ones, and it won't much change G-forces, since pulling hard turns still pushes occupants, with zero-G also modeled.
So not all ships will have artificial gravity. Most of the bigger ones where you walk around probably will have artificial gravity. I'm sort of playing with the idea that maybe on some ones you would just have sort of more magnetic boots, because we are actually modeling for our first-person combat artificial gravity and zero-G combat. So we're going to have all those as options. And one of the things that potentially could be something that would be fun to disrupt boarders would be to basically disable your artificial gravity and then all of a sudden you're in zero-G. How it affects the G-force system? Well, really not so much. Pilots fly around here on Earth and they're experiencing the gravity of Earth, yet they still deal with Gs as they pull tight turns. And the same would definitely be true in space if you have artificial gravity in your ship and you start to really pull a really hard right turn. Since you're not statically bound to the object that's turning right, there will be an equal and opposite force on you and you'll be getting pushed. So you'll still have, obviously, G-forces happening even when there's artificial gravity. But generally, the other thing to remember is it's the bigger ships that would more likely have the artificial gravity. So, for instance, the Hornet doesn't really have artificial gravity because you're strapped in. But the bigger ships, you probably won't be able to pull as hard maneuvers as you would necessarily in, say, some of the smaller ships, which is, again, part of the sort of trade-off balance between big ships and small ships. Big ships have more armor, more weapons. But then again, they can't move quite as quickly and all the rest of the stuff. So I hope that answers the question.
So you'll definitely down the road be able to play as one of the other alien races. That will be a sort of longer term expansion of the Persistent Universe. Just right now in terms of generating content and assets, we've already got a crazy amount of stuff to do. I mean there's a whole bunch of people out there that think we've almost got too much to do already. So that won't be at the beginning, but that is definitely a long term plan because I really want to see that, and I think it would be fun to play as a Tevarin or as a Xi'an or a Banu. And if we do that we probably would also create sort of a companion single-player experience like Squadron 42 but for the race. So I think, yes, we will have that.
So definitely the next Great Starship ship will be available to everyone out there and be available in the Persistent Universe. So the answer is yes. And I think we're sort of debating, but we're probably going to let you guys choose what kind of ship it's going to be. So that will be kind of fun for you.
So yes, the answer is absolutely yes on that. That's part of the core design, that you're able to do a huge amount of energy management, from your power plant, to your engine thrusters, to your shield, to your weapons, and even inside your shield, depending on the shield setup you have, you'll probably be able to divert power between the different segments of the shield as well, and even between the different weapons. So yes is the answer there.
TL;DRPlayers won't be able to build ships from parts at the start, though they can buy and add equipment, possibly adapted alien items; the future is uncertain.
That's an interesting question. Really the way the ships work is that you sort of buy a hull and then you can customize it, add different items and equipment to it. But we're not really right now set up to sort of buy, I don't know, a rear wing and then a fender from a different ship and put them all together and make some hybrid ship. So I'm not sure if we'll be able to build ships from parts. Not at the beginning. We definitely won't be able to build ships from parts. Who knows down the road? But you certainly will be able to buy different equipment and items and add them to your ship, and some potentially could be an alien item that you would have to have adapted to work on your ship. So maybe sort of a small combination of this, but not to the extent that you can build a ship wholly out of just sort of junk parts.
TL;DRYes, players are planned to be able to get refueling and similar help from NPC ships, since NPCs are meant to behave human-like and be hard to tell from players.
The answer is absolutely yes. Those are all things that we want to do. As I said a little earlier, one of my goals is to make the NPC behavior be pretty human-like, and they behave and do the same jobs and same actions that most players will do, and also obscure the fact that it is an NPC from a real player, at least from a distance. So it just feels like it's a living, breathing world that's populated. And you'll run into people and, hey, some may be AI controlled and some may be player controlled. And if we do our job right, maybe you won't even realize that a player is playing a ship and you think it's an AI, and vice versa. But they'll definitely be able to help you out. They'll refuel you. They'll do all those kinds of things. They're all things that we're planning for.
It's great. There is a lot of excitement. We announced it first to the public at CitizenCon and we've provided some updates since then. It's going really well. We started testing the final system before the holidays, and some people actually tested through the holidays in some cases. We have added some alpha testers to the...
That's right. Some of the same folks who helped us test the website before we launched the new website back in June. We invited them back to help us test the new organization system and the new chat system. We've been testing that on the staging site for several days with internal and external testers. And we've had a lot of great feedback.
We're very close, but we're not ready to go live today. What we found is that the organization system is looking great. We did get some great feedback. We made a few changes, but nothing dramatic. There weren't any giant gotchas. We're also launching a completely new chat system that's going to replace ChatRoll on the website. The new chat system, there's just a lot of interconnections. It's connected to the organization system. It's connected to your account. And so when we added more testers, we found some issues with the chat system. So we're planning to add even more testers from the community to put some load on that system.
We're actually going to invite all of our subscribers in, and we're going to send out an email to everybody tomorrow with details. All the people we're inviting will get an email invitation.
And our main goal is to really stress test the chat system. We found that as we added more people to the system and there was more volume, sometimes messages would get crisscrossed and things happen. So we just want to stress test it, and we feel like we're really close to being ready to launch the system.
I know organizations are a big thing people are looking forward to. It'll be interesting to see how chat does, because while we're doing this right now, when we watch Wingman's Hangar, we're in chat interacting with the fans, and there's a limit. There's a 500 person limit. Now, we're not going to have that issue this time. It's going to go above that.