10 for the Chairman: Episode 31 (2014.07.28)

That sounds kinda like some of that crazy DayZ stuff that I saw, where people would get people on a bus and put them into the equivalent of the Thunderdome. I don't really think right now we're supporting capturing a Vanduul to put in a sort of fighting pit for initiation. It's a cool idea... I'm just trying to think if any of the game systems would allow it, but right now we don't really have a concept of capturing people and keeping them for a long time. We have the concept of capturing people, like if you're a bounty hunter and someone's got a price on their head and you're gonna bring them back. But at some point they just sort of become an item that you're taking, versus a living, breathing NPC.So right now the way the system works I don't think it would be able to do that, but it is a cool idea, so... you never know what happens down the road.

That would probably be a better question for Tony. The economy is actually his... ummm... it's something he's very keen on, and he's working hard on. And we are definitely building an economy module to separate. So we actually have a sort of economy simulation that happens, and there's actually going to be, sort of the brains, that will run most of the Persistent Universe, and simulate where the NPCs are moving around, trading, what the players are doing... all the rest of the stuff.On our side we will definitely have where we'll have the economy simulation and we can sort of see and zoom to different planets or systems to see what's happening. Long-term, once the game is up and fully running the Persistent Universe, and everyone is playing in it, we'll probably have some control room that, we'll sit there and they'll have monitors of the different states of the systems. And we'll be able to see what's happening in the Persistent Universe - what the NPCs are doing, what the players are doing - and then occasionally sort of tweak things if we need to tweak things.Whether or not we will release that as a module for people to play with, my guess is probably not. But we definitely are building that as a module, because we need it as an internal side. So, I don't know, but maybe I'd have to talk to Tony, but I don't see a really good way to release that to individual backers, because it's really a more server-side thing, and so it sort of plugs into a lot of our back-end server subsystems. It's not something you could just release as a client-side module... but we are building it!

I don't think we have "Contellation command" because it's not really a military ship, but I get the idea - like maybe command of an Idris frigate or something like that.So the way the structure of Squadron 42 to Star Citizen works is that you play the game, and at the end of it you have to muster out into the civilian population. We are planning on having stories that... think of it like a mission pack in the old Wing Commander days, where we'll have a story that we will make and build, and make available to backers, for whatever you want to call it - DLC or something. It would have the sophistication of a Squadron 42 story line that will come back online down the road. Occasionally people can participate in that if they so desire, and some of those will be military-based, like you re-enlisting back in the military for a campaign. And we're also thinking about having certain things that you could do as a player, where like maybe the the military needs some contractors to help secure a star system Vanduul incursions, or help flesh out an attack on Vanduul space. Those will be sort of PU missions, so there will be a little bit of that. There's not really a game setup where you stay in the military and work your way through ranks.It is a cool idea, and longer-term I think probably kind of be some of the professional stuff that we would expand once the game is up and running and we're adding new content, because I think that's definitely a career path that a lot of people would to choose. But until then, the way you would get back in the military would be joining up in another sort of story campaign, along the lines of Squadron 42 or taking some sort of ad hoc work for the UEE military.

That's a good question. So the way the shields work on all our ships is, the shields are actually separate collision geometry that is further out from the actual collision geometry that defines where you would hit the actual hull of the ship. And the concept is that the shields are really meant to absorb energy, so if I'm firing an energy bolt, it'll take that and dissipate it round the shields, and ballistic weapons actually penetrate through shields, but they do have some of their energy sapped away. So therefore if you've got really strong shields you can reduce the kinetic energy on the hit of the shield. They're not really built to prevent or save you from hitting an asteroid, or a head-to-head collision with another ship, because the idea is the shields will always stop things at a certain kinetic velocity or energy or whatever.So it definitely would be a case I would think, that you could fly a ship through - assuming the AA of the ship aren't firing at you - through a bigger ship's shields and maybe be on the inside of it, and shoot. So once you're inside that shield proxy, obviously your bullets won't get stopped by the shield proxy - they'll only get stopped by the hull proxy. So yes, it is possible to, as long as the shields have enough room between them and the hull, to do what is suggested by Acebravo.

That is a good question. We don't really have a child character pipeline at the moment. So we may very well be guilty of what most other MMOs are. I would say if there were some children they would only be sort of background NPC stuff, kinda specifically just to add some variety to an environment. But yeah, we're really only planning on players being able to pick whether they want to be male or female - and it's an adult male or an adult female - and then sort of customize or dress up your character. NPC-wise is the only way you'll see a little bit of children, and that really comes down to variety.So it certainly won't be something that we would be doing at the very beginning, because we've got our hands cut out for us just doing the various characters and costume combinations and all the rest of the stuff. But it is a good point, so thanks, Jeremiah.

Not sure about renting out ships, I mean we've discussed it, so that's definitely something that we're going to investigate. You definitely will be able to hire other players to fly your own ships, and so I would think that there probably would be a case where you could rent out ships. We're thinking about some other options like being able to finance a new ship you want to buy, inside the universe, just like you can in the real world. But I would think if you were renting out ships, basically the way it would work would be not so much a used ship lot - although that would be the way, if I'm a player and I just have lost my ship and I don't have the money buy a new one I can go to a, sort of NPC lot and say "hey, I wanna rent this," and they say "well, you've gotta give us so many credits for a month," and you could deal like that. But for a player I would think that it would be brokered on our, what we call sort of a "mission board", because that's where you put out requests for people to fly missions for you, or to do things for you, and also offer services. So that's what you'd do. It'd be kind of like the "craigslist" of space, which is... "Okay - have hornet - good condition. Willing to rent for so many credits per... game-turn-kinda-thing." But we haven't implement, obviously that yet into Persistent Universe, but that would be kinda how I think it would work.

Yeah, the current implementation is the generic CryEngine "use" implementation. We've definitely talked about the need to have a more sophisticated, higher fidelity... because we are planning on having you, like, if you want to turn on your engines, and turn them off, and turn on your HUD, you have to hit the switches to turn the stuff on on your dashboard. So we sort of need a little better idea that just "use" when you're generally in the area. We're sort of thinking about things where like, maybe the object gets slightly brighter, or has a shine on it, or you know the default would be it would have an outline around it - so you know which it's telling you you can use, and go from there. But that's still in development in terms of how that would work or what it would do, but that's definitely part of our plans to be able to do that, because we want you to interact with the world, and use and turn things on, and not have it be as imprecise as it currently is.

So yes, absolutely we're gonna allow it that there's actually a whole kind of setup where you can go and get plastic surgery and change your appearance. It's actually the device that we use at the beginning of Squadron 42 to be sort of in-fiction, but allow the player to determine what they look like. The concept is that you're involved in an opening battle and you kind of heroically save the day, but you're really badly scared and injured, so you wake up in hospital and you have to give input on how you want your face reconstructed. So we're definitely going to allow that; we'll definitely have parts where you'll be able to - you know, it'll be expensive - but there'll be places where you can do that, and there definitely will be some places where you could do that "off the grid" so to speak. So you can do it and not be tracked, so if you wanted to change your identity and do all the rest, in sort of the outlaw planets, you could do that, and it will definitely not be a cheap thing to do. But I think it will be very cool.

Yeah... so I mean, I read this on the forums where everyone argues about what "pre-alpha" or "alpha" or "beta" test is. So to just give you my concept, the reason why we call Arena Commander "pre-alpha" is because my definition of "alpha", which is sort of a more standard one is, "alpha" is not content-complete, but generally functionality complete that you start testing. And then "beta" is content and functionality complete, but you're trying to fix bugs, so you're still honing and tweaking and adding stuff in alpha, but you've got pretty much all your features in, but you don't have all your content in. But in "beta" you have content and the features in, but you're just making sure its debugged.Therefore with Arena Commander, we're not even on Arena Commander v1.0, so you could say right now we're "pre-alpha Arena Commander v1.0" ... When it's 1.0 it will be "alpha" and then it will roll to "beta". But really the "alpha", the "beta" descriptions we originally had the start of the project were alpha and beta for the overall game, which means Star Citizen, the Persistent Universe, Squadron 42 - all that stuff rolled together. And so one of the reasons why we say "pre-alpha" on each one of the modules is because we're rolling out sections of that bigger overall game individually to sort of beat on them, test on them, get feedback, make them better. All the elements are sort of "pre-alpha" in all these sections, and they will all roll into an "alpha" that will be Star Citizen, that will roll into a "beta". That's kind of why we say "pre-alpha" versus "alpha" versus "beta", and that's kind of what the process is.So the process I can see us doing is, each of the modules gets released in a pretty rough state. Much rougher than I would ever release anything to the public normally, and much rougher than a lot of times we would release on a wide beta test just to get the stress tests, get feedback on whether things work or don't work, or see where the problems lie. So we hone those, and then of the modules themselves, we go along and it's not just, "okay that's the final module," it's like, "no, this is a set of the full feature set," and then we're adding more features and functionality as we go along. Which is again why I said "pre-alpha" because it doesn't have all the functionality. By the time we get to all the functionality being there it should be joining the other modules that have also been doing the same process, into a place where we're like "okay, we've pretty much the alpha of Star Citizen together," but we're missing some of the content - say some of the planets, some of the locations, some of the ships... but all the functionality is there. Then at that point you go from the alpha to the beta once all the content is in there, then you finish the tests out, and then the game is... "released" or "live". "Done" is a bad word because as far as I'm concerned, as long as you guys are having a great time and we can keep a viable business going (basically paying the people working on the game) then we will continually work on Star Citizen to make it cooler, and bigger, and add more and more of the features that just would make this the "best damn space sim ever!"I mean, you know, there's a long way to go there, so I don't want anyone out there to think that I'm saying that's where we are now. That's just our goal and ambition. That's what we're working towards but we recognize there is a huuuuge way to get there, but we're very committed to always making the game bigger, better, all the time. That's the beauty of being online, because you can constantly be sharing it - we're sharing it right now. So I know people are always worried about things like "feature creep" and stuff, but look, you know, people have code they can sit and play and interact with, and as we get more of it we keep adding it, and we keep making it better. It's just an ongoing process, and I hope we'll be around long enough but it would be really interesting, in 10 years time, to see what the universe looks and feels like and what's happened in it compared to what we all talked about now. Because I definitely thing it's gonna just get cooler and bigger and better, and also take some maybe unexpected turns. You can certainly just even see the process as we go along - you can see what the Hornet looked like in the original prototype in 2012, then we did an upgrade when it went into the hangars, and now there's another upgrade that went in when we went into dogfighting. You can sort of see the constant iteration and improvement we're doing, and you guys are along for the ride, which is pretty damn cool. That's kinda one of the things I think is pretty exciting about the process we're taking. I mean it does take people to understand that this is early, it's gonna get better, and you're sort of seeing the sausage get made, but umm... it's gonna be a damn good sausage in the end!