The developers answer fan questions on smaller mining and reclaiming ships, pirate insurance, derelict horror encounters, bunk beds as save points, ship repair and locking, and NPC crew. They also cover why Stanton came first, dynamic weather, and server infrastructure.
TL;DRChris Roberts says ships will be keyed to their owner with more security than now, though the first mini-PU iteration is deliberately open and ways to break in, such as via EVA, are planned.
Yes. We're basically going to have a higher degree of security than we currently have on the ships. One of our thoughts was with SC Alpha 2.0 is, various, the, locking systems and how we're going to do it, we sort of figure that the very first iteration that we get out there, we're just making it more open and see what people do and then we'll obviously adjust some things, so things will be more reasonable. People can't steal your ships, people can't refuel as easily in areas that you should not be getting griefed in. Those are all features and functionality that we didn't really want to wait to program a complete nanny state and put it out there and then not have to do all that work so it's kind of better to get it out there and see what happens, but the idea is yes your ship should be keyed to you and you could enter it and then you could allow other people to enter. Then ultimately there will be some forms that people can break in or board like out in space for instance if you left your ship there someone may be able to EVA in and break the lock or blow the seal and get in, but it will definitely have more security than it currently does now. That's one of the things that we will start to do on our, further iterations of, the mini PU.
TL;DRChris Roberts says players will be able to repair components, make minimal EVA repairs and do FPS-style fixes aboard ship, with full repairs needing a Crucible or NPC station, and skill coming from player resourcefulness rather than a character skill system.
We're definitely going to have, I think we may have even mentioned it and discussed it a little bit in the repair design document, it was part of when we launched the Crucible as a concept sale. There's going to be repair of components that you can do, changing out the equivalent of all the valves, circuit boards or capacitors or whatever you want to think on certain things that could be damaged or blown to get your ship back. We're also going to ultimately allow you the ability to do some kind of minimal repair. Like maybe EVA out and seal up an area, that you have to seal up before you can carry on going.So we're definitely going to give you some sort of small personal EVA/FPS style repair that you can go about your ship, like when you're taking damage on your Constellation maybe someone has to run back to the engine room to do something in the engine room because otherwise their reactors are going to overload, so you've got to bring it down to take the safeties off and bring the power down to fifty percent or whatever or change out a conduit or whatever it would be. So we're going to add that as gameplay cause we think it would be cool especially on the multi crew ships to allow some of that but obviously the proper fixing your ship up so that you can take it to a real mechanic, that kind of thing, that would require someone to show up with a Crucible or you take it to one of the NPC repair stations. Of which we have a very simple prototype in the mini PU the SC Alpha 2.0 but that's just a basic placeholder compared to what ultimately we plan to go with. Where you would take it to a repair ship and they would say ok it's going to take you this long and cost you this much to get it fixed.As far as skill based settings for repairing the stuff we're really trying to make it so the player, or your character is based on your skill of playing the game and the equipment you've acquired and how you use it as a player. Now NPC's will probably have their own RPG stats cause we'll just need to determine if they're good or experienced or are they bad and so probably some NPC repair people can be better ones or worse ones based on their skill stats, but for you as a player it will be about just about how you do it. It will be about your resourcefulness whether you kept the extra components you need, so we kind of would think on a big ship you may actually come fly with some extra items and spare parts to fix things up when things get damaged.
TL;DRHe gives limited detail because IT worried about security, mentioning Cisco hardware, fast storage and constant replication between studios, with the game running on Google Compute and the main challenge being keeping huge data in sync.
So, I did ask our IT department this and they all said, 'Mmm, we don't really want to say too much' because I think they're a little scared that people are going to take some of that information and use that to hack in. I'm not really going to talk about that much as far as that goes, we use a lot of Cisco stuff if that helps. We do on every one of our studios we have sort of a replicated server set up and we use very fast storage so we use this thing called Nimble storage and our big challenge...I mean every one of our studios has gigabit internet connection and we replicate drives perforce depots are various different shared drives between every one of the studios constantly so that way people can put up on our local network drive saying, 'I captured this little movie of the game action' and it will be replicated to all our different studios.There are terabytes and terabytes of data just going back and forth all the time between our studios. It is a lot of data that is getting shunted around, we rely a lot on having a nice wide connection to the internet and fast storage, we have very fast state of the art servers and there you go. Of course the game itself runs in the cloud, right now we're on Google Compute so we deploy up to the cloud from here. So, there you go, I don't know if that gave you as much of a question but hopefully a little bit of it. The challenges are basically shunting all the data around and keeping everyone in sync which for all the data we deal in game making is quite a lot of data. It's fairly painful if you're outside one of our studios syncing from a home machine and don't have a fast internet connection it will take a long time to sync up your build.
Yes we have definitely considered that. There's definitely a longer term goal but we'll be showing something in our livestream later this month that isn't this but kind has some things along that you can sort of see the potential. Yes that's the longer term plan, it won't be day one but all those kinds of things would.. What we're going to try to do is be as accurate to creating the planets and stuff so you should sort of see the day night cycles and if it's night time, maybe you would see some city lights or weather patterns, or if there's a landing location you can go there. So yes that's in our longer term plans and like with everything it will get slotted in the game as we go along, but we sort of have more important stuff to knock out first so to speak.
TL;DRHe doesn't remember why Stanton was first, but thinks it was chosen because it has several distinct planets, offering plenty to do and a good system to build out first.
I don't know why we originally started.I know that ArcCrop was one of the very first landing locations that we were experimenting with the modular building sets and we style and prototyped. Basically we'd picked that and there was a few others, like Terra and a couple of other ones.I think maybe when we were first doing it, we thought Stanton would be a good system because it has quite a few different planets you can go visit. They all have their own different identities and there will be quite a lot to do even if you just had gameplay in just one system. We could have the Stanton system detailed out to the level of fidelity we want to do, run around and that would absolutely be equivalent to most games, if not more that most games, out there. So there's a lot of possibility there, so we thought Stanton was probably the best starting system for us to start building out.
I'm not sure we necessarily discussed that. It's not necessarily a bad idea but I wouldn't say that would be at the top of our list. We do want to encourage to play together or potentially you could hire some NPC crew, so you could have somebody to be your pilot, which would be a bit like autopilot and then you go off and be the gunner and he would be reporting to you.But you never know we may actually engage some version of defensive circle autopilot but I would think the first push is going to be working with your friends and the second push is when we get the NPCs to board the ship and then go from there and see what we're going to do.
TL;DRLiving spaces act as a save point away from planets and add light roleplaying detail such as sleeping, eating and coffee, possibly with small boosts, without heavy survival mechanics.
Well, yeah.We've already mentioned it was one of the stretch goals that if you have a living space, a bunk bed, on a ship that will be a way for you, when you're not in combat and all the rest of the stuff, to save the game without having to be on a planet. So that's really a pretty big thing because the living space is like your save point so to speak. So there you go: I think that's actually a pretty big game aspect. And they're kind of cool.And we are going to do some level of very, very, very light roleplaying: so one of the reasons why Star Citizen captures the imagination and you really feel like you are part of the world is we spend the attention and the time to put the little details in there. You're in the ship and it's not just you sitting in the cockpit: you can walk around it an "oh, here's where I'm going to sleep; here's where I have my meals; here's where I get a cup of coffee; oh, here's where I take a shower; here's where I can go to the toilet". So it's, not that we want to say "oh you have to eat every eight hours" or anything like that but there should be some stuff where you could get a cup of coffee or you could get some food and maybe there's some very small boost or something; there'd be a reason to do that kind of stuff, just to use it, to make you feel like you are part of it. Not to the extent of a DayZ kind of thing but I feel like we want a little bit of light use roleplaying because I think it would be kind of cool. You don't take a shower for a month and then people start to not want to talk to you much: that kind of thing. I think I've mentioned that before but that's all good reasons for the living areas.
TL;DRYes, horror-style encounters are planned, such as derelict ships with hostile organisms or alien wildlife on planets, to add atmosphere and texture.
Absolutely. So, one of the big goals ... we're building a big universe but it's not a universe that's going to have four hundred billion star systems but it's going to have quite a lot of locations like an insane level of detail where you can get down and sort of feel the location you're on or the ship or everything. One of the big things we obviously want to do is derelicts, so derelicts are kind of cool, they're definitely easy encounters to do and yeah, you absolutely should come across that derelict ship and there's some alien like organism. Or creature on it that could attack you or later on when we get space to planet stuff working, you can land down in an area or maybe you've got that Pitch Black scenario where you get attacked by some kind of alien wildlife or animal or something like that. We are definitely going to build some kind of derelict haunted house kind of stuff to put in there with other encounters, more so traditional encounters you can have so that can be a risk.You can go look and explore and salvage this derelict but maybe when you're in there you get attacked by ... I'm not saying Facehugger but the equivalent jumping down from the ceiling or there could be pirates aboard it or there could be nothing aboard it. So, I think we're definitely going to do that, try to have some to give some atmosphere as you can sort of see what we do with Star Citizen, we're really trying to give it texture and atmosphere and make the world feel real. We can definitely do that because we're in this FPS first person engine that we also fly vehicles and do all sorts of stuff so the possibilities are ripe.
TL;DRPirate insurance should work much like UEE insurance through pirate-world providers, with balancing still to be worked out through playtesting so penalties exist but are not catastrophic and abuse is discouraged.
So we talked, when we first talked about insurance, that there was still the insurance cabal for the pirates but it's basically on the pirate worlds where you deal with, whoever the pirate insurance company would be, then you would be respawning back to a more outlaw or piratey planet but it would work more or less the same as people inside the UEE. It's kind of hard to say cause we have to balance the ins and outs cause we don't want people abusing insurance to be able to grief other people but we also want to make sure that if you lose your ship you have the ability to get back in the game without having too much of a penalty. We want you to have some penalty but not catastrophic penalty. I've mentioned before the Demon Souls example where I felt they really had a good balance between losing a lot of things but not losing everything and you really felt like when you actually managed to clear out a level or kill one of the end bosses that it was pretty risky to do it but when you did it you had a great sense of accomplishment and that's sort of the goal that we want.So insurance is in there to make it so you don't go out, the first time you get in combat you get your ship destroyed and bam I don't have a ship now what am I going to do? But we also don't want someone to just take their Aurora and ram it into someone, instantly get their ship ram it in again, instantly get their ship ram it in again, instantly get their ship ram it in again, cause that's not going to be a fun experience for everyone else. So I think we will figure out how to do it in ways that the more that kind of stuff happens you have more penalty, we'll look for patterns and we'll apply kind of the same stuff for pirates and we'll try to balance it but that's going to be very much in the playing and the testing of it, that's why I really like the process we use where we're sharing the game as we're building it with everyone and we're getting the feedback. I think the SC Alpha 2.0 is going to be an absolute, it's a gold mine for that, i'm already seeing what people are doing they're posting their videos and that's without being specifically stable. So it will be really interesting to see what evolves there and then that will help guide us on how we'll deal with stuff. We obviously have got an idea of what we want to do but obviously when we always say the best battle plans never survive contact with the enemy, not saying you guys are the enemy but, we need to play on that.So basically the answer is insurance for pirates will not be too dissimilar for insurance for people inside the UEE it will just be the sort of pirate version of that, and we are going to try and balance it so either side of it can't abuse insurance.
TL;DRYes, smaller mining and reclaiming equipment and a smaller dedicated miner are in longer-term plans, though the ships are not designed yet and timing depends on priorities.
Yes.Obviously for some of the larger scale stuff, reclaiming or mining, having a bigger ship helps because it's a bulk business. But we definitely have plans to have smaller mining equipment and vehicles you can use. You don't necessarily have to be using the Orion that will just allow you do to do it at a greater ... if you are dedicated as a miner that's how you reach that critical mass. But we'll have mining equipment on smaller ships and probably have a smaller dedicated miner. And potentially the same on the reclaiming stuff too.There you go, it will be possible: we haven't designed the ships yet but we have discussed it and it is in our longer term plans. But again, like I've said in a few of these answers there is quite a lot of things we have on our longer term plans so it's all a matter of priorities.