10 for the Chairman: Episode 01 (2013.12.06)

So that's a really good question. It's hard to definitively say that now 'cause we're still early in the development process.New hardware comes out every year, so generally we've been aiming at the very high end of hardware now is what we think the mid-level will be by the time the game is fully finished. So that would have been a GTX 680 or now a 780 on the Nvidia side, or on the AMD side, a 7970 or now the R9290X on the AMD side. And you should be able to easily run in the highest details in the game in 1080p. If you want to move to 4k, you'll need the very high end cards that will be available, smoothly at 4k that is, next years or maybe current day high-level to mid-high level cards but two of them in SLI.The engine scales really well so it can, it will take whatever you can give it in whatever resolution you give it, but you can also scale it down and it still looks pretty good. So if you don't have quite that highest end hardware, it will still be a pretty good experience. I hope that answers your question.

So the answer to that is we are 100% focused on Star Citizen here.The way that Star Citizen is being created is that once it's released, that won't be the end of Star Citizen. We're going to actually, are planning to, be releasing content on a very regular schedule. We're actually hoping to almost be weekly if we possibly can. So we'll be constantly updating the Persistent universe, adding new features, locations, ships, characters, over hopefully years and years and years and years. I mean obviously that requires people playing the game and still being a viable enterprise, but EVE Online's still going ten years later, so we would love to be in that same position.Then we'll also do some additional story segments, very much like Squadron 42. So Squadron 42 won't be the only single player experience we do, we will be doing additional experiences like that which people will be able to play inside the Star Citizen universe.So the answer is yes we are going to do a lot of stuff in Star Citizen, but not so much, we don't really have any plans for non-Star Citizen stuff. We sort of view Star Citizen as a, it's not a short term commitment, it's a very long term thing, and hopefully you guys will be playing and enjoying it many years to come.

So yes, the answer is yes. Radar shadow will definitely be present in the game.We have all different kinds of radar signatures you can have whether it's a heat signature, electromagnetic signature, a reflective signature, and we're also thinking of different ways that you as a player can shield yourself from someone else detecting you.So there will be an aspect of being able to sort of play the stealth angle. Maybe you can shield yourself behind an asteroid, or maybe you can shut down a bunch of systems so your signature is really small, or maybe you could coat your ship in a kind of armor that would give you a much lower reflective signature.So we'll definitely have radar shadow be part of that and we're hoping, thinking, it's actually going to add a lot of fun to the gameplay and nuance because there's just a lot of different options for people to take things in space and that's kind of part of the things we're really excited about for what we're doing with Star Citizen.

Ok, so the answer on that is: on the very first iterations of dogfighting there will be mostly just arena style shoot-up, head-to-head or flying against some AI. Maybe two teams, red and blue would be sort of the standard teams, but we think we may switch that up to be even more fun than re vs blue.Then maybe later on we'll do some scenarios, but the idea of the dogfighting test isn't really to deliver a fully fledged game like you would normally expect, this is really for us to test the back end of infrastructure for multiplayer, the balance of the ships, seeing if the flight model and everything is fun, so it will be an iterative process.The early parts of any of the modules are obviously a lot rougher than the final, polished versions, but it's all in the effort of making the game as good as possible.So I guess bear with us on that.

So that's a pretty good question, generally in the past and Wing Commander it's pretty much a pitch and yaw set-up, but we're, I'm playing around with the idea that we have g-forces on pilots in our dogfighting part, and obviously in that case, just as a human being you can take greater gravity in the vertical than you can eyes-out/eyes-in or in the lateral g's. So that's why one pilot will roll and then pitch if he wants to, I mean he could do his rudder and do this, but he'll do that 'cause he can actually do it quicker.So that would probably effect whether it would be pitch and yaw or pitch and roll. I mean right now the default is pitch and yaw with roll on the rudder pedals, but that may actually change to be more accurate to a real plane which would probably be pitch and roll on the joystick and then yaw on the rudder pedals.

Ok so the PvP slider is an input to the game's matchmaking system to give it a hint of kind of like who it should be matching you with.So what happens is, when you fly around in space, you have you know, you're in your view, your universe view, and the server up there is basically looking at where you are and it's looking at everyone else and all their different machines, and then basically seeing where everyone else in the galaxy is and if it feels like there's someone close to you or there's an AI that's close to you, it basically would tell your local client "Ok, this person's close to you," then that person would be streamed into your instance or that AI would be streamed into your instance.So the PvP slider is essentially an extra variable for the matchmaking criteria. So the matchmaking criteria is on a whole bunch of things. It's on things like ping, obviously we don't want to be putting people together where there's a huge latency. It's on whether who's your friends, who's your enemy, who's your people of interest. Also it would have some level of skill rating in there. So we'll kind of track are you a new player or are you super experienced. And based on that, in most of the areas, because some areas there won't be any, it will be whoever is there verses PvP or not. But if you basically said "Hey I would prefer to have more PvE than PvP," it would give a preference to the AI flying around rather than real player. So if there's an AI pirate and there's a real player pirate, it would drop the AI pirate into your instance to fight if you were more towards PvE than PvP.You defintiely would get other players streamed into your space that wouldn't be hostile, say maybe a friend of yours or something. So you could definitely get a co-op kind of feeling, and that's going to be an on-going process, but the whole idea of it is: you should be able to fly around in the game and if you wanted that more Privateer/Freelancer experience that's kind of what will happen to you.It will just be you'll mostly see AI and then if there's other players it will be probably friendly players, or if you're in like certain areas of space where there's no holds barred, it definitely could be an unfriendly player. But you'll sort of know that ok, well those are the dangerous areas. So if you're a new player and you don't really want to be dealing with tough other players, then you probably should avoid those.I would like to say one other thing, you definitely can have NPCs that are tougher than any player could ever be. It's a computer that runs it, it knows exactly where you are and it can calculate the correct firing solution much better than a player could ever do, so I think it is a bit of a misnomer to think that NPCs aren't necessarily as tough as real players. In some cases, NPCs could be tougher than real players.But essentially the slider just sort of allows you to effect the kind of people that will stream into your space as you're traveling across the galaxy, and hopefully that will mean if you want to play a more Privateer style game, and be just by yourself, you can have that experience. If you want to play with your friends and co-op against AI, that can happen. But also if you want to mix it up with other players, that will happen too.And you know, we'll have some other stuff. I mean I know there's always the question where people are always worried that's an exploit if you can change it dynamically, and we're not going to let you change it dynamically as you're flying around.So it's kind of a setting you have as you fly around, and as I said, there are some areas that are kind of no-holds-barred, and those areas will also have some really cool stuff in, so I'm hoping at some point you'll get brave enough and you get good enough and you'll go to some of these areas to get this one particular kind of weapon that you can't get elsewhere or salvage an alien wreck, but you have to take some risks to get there. So it's a sort of risk-reward basis. So I hope that answered the question on the PvP slider.

I would say that, if the Oculus Rift works correctly, we shouldn't have to do that, and we would not be redesigning ships or cockpits for one peripheral that we're going to work with.Even if it's a peripheral that everyone is excited about and we're excited about, I have a Rift sitting right on my desk right now. I will say that we're pretty in-sync with the Oculus folks. We have the HD prototypes in Austin and here in LA, and obviously the new stuff coming out, we get to see it in a very early stage, and I would say that our current set up is gonna work really well with it. You know we're focused on making that sort of VR aspect of the game work, have the stereoscopic all work really well. So I don't think we'll need to redesign our assets.We probably wouldn't, but we're pretty confident it's gonna work well with the way everything is shaping up as it is.

Ok, so the idea with the Dogfighting Module is that you'll start in the hangar and in the hangar you'll be able to load up the holotable and then you'll basically use that to decide what your loadout is on your ships, what ammunition you've got, etc. and then you get into the cockpit of your ship and you fire it up, and then the outside of the cockpit sort of turns into the holodeck and now you're in space and then you fight there.But when you're flying in the Dogfight Module actually out in space, you can't reload your missiles or anything like that, but between battles you'll be back in your hangar and you can adjust your loadout.That's kind of the fiction, the fiction is you climb into your cockpit and it goes into simulation mode. But that allows us to leverage the stuff we already have in the hangar because the whole point of this is to build our games system so we don't want to do custom stuff just for a module, we want to do it the way we'll do in the final game.

Good question, I mean from our standpoint I think we want to give you Squadron 42, or at least part of it, before the Persistent Universe is "finished" so to speak. We're kind of toying around with how we could do this with Squadron 42 in a way that falls into the methodology that we're using, the sort of development methodology. 'Cause I think giving you the whole Squadron 42 as just an alpha may not work as well because it's a story so it needs to be fairly polished as far as that goes, so one of our thoughts is to take Squadron 42 and sort of release it episodically before the game is fully finished where you play the first "X" number of missions, that are nice and well done and polished, and then the next "X" number of missions a month later and so on until you're done with Squadron 42 which would lead you on to the beta of the Persistent Universe. So that's currently our thinking, it's still in process right now, but we'll see. But when the game is "finished" properly, obviously Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe, Star Citizen, Would all be sort of in as part of the package.