Developers answer fan questions after CitizenCon on the 3.0 roadmap: procedural planets and the Stanton worlds, 64-bit precision, instancing, ship docking and refueling, and Star Marine modes. They also cover Spectrum bots and org tools, subsumption crew schedules, and the Cutlass Black revamp.
Not in 2.6, but we are aiming to get that functionality in somewhere between 3.0 and 3.1. So refueling is definitely, especially when you move to 3.0 and we're in a full Stanton system, people are going to travel, maybe run out of fuel, perhaps they're going to have to get refueled, and we really want to get the docking of, say, the Merlin into the Constellation. We've been working on docking with a bigger ship, which is what we need for the Squadron 42 stuff when you come in and land on the Idris. It falls out of that, so depending on where that ends up will depend on whether it's in 3.0 or 3.1.
TL;DRThe game aims to give players systemic, sandbox-style ways to solve problems (negotiation with some characters, brute force, or indirect tricks like distractions), though the deeper subsumption AI is not in place yet.
The point of the whole game is to, as much as possible, put a system in place and then allow players to craft their own unique solutions through the world, as opposed to what you see in a lot more linear games, where there's really only one solution, one way through a particular obstacle. That doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to negotiate with every character, but some of them certainly you would be able to. At other times, brute force will work best, but there will be many other options for you to solve a given problem. We're trying to inject as much in terms of the ability for players to craft the game to something that's actually appealing to them, and having that still work as long as it's logical within the confines of...
I think the other thing I'd say is that what we showed, there's a whole bunch of stuff that we're doing that we talked about, like reputation, factions, which would dictate whether an AI on the ground is friendly to you or not friendly to you, or whether they would let you use their landing pad. You would request it and maybe I could use it, or maybe they wouldn't want you and they would shoot at you. Obviously, in what we did, the sand nomads had essentially camped around the distress beacons to waylay people from space coming to find out about the distress beacon. That's part of a mission component, so that would be one of the things in the mission: recover the distress beacon, like the Javelin, would be a template, but then there were different additional layers on top of it. One of it could be outlaws or pirates, or in this case sand nomads, are basically using it as a honey trap to waylay people to get there, but there may also be other aspects to it that would be potentially different that could be layered on top of the kind of scenario of a crashed spaceship emitting a distress beacon.
Besides the characters themselves, again, given the whole sandbox style of gameplay, it's always possible that you could do things, exploit the system such that you can change their behavior without directly interacting with them. For example, in the case of the sand guys, you could remotely detonate something that draws their attention away from what you want to get to, and then you could basically sneak in. So we're trying to put as much of that stuff in place, again, so that it increases the potential for the player to really craft their own unique solutions, which we think in the end is going to not only give the game a lot longer legs in terms of how long you're willing to play it, but it means that everyone's going to have their own different experience, even when they're playing fairly similar occupations.
And to be clear on the subsumption, that's kind of what the longer-term subsumption stuff is doing. It's not there right now, right? So that's why we would have maybe shown some more stuff if we had all that done there. But we're working on that. That's actually Tony's primary focus, working with that along with the AI team and the mission team to really flesh out that part of our...
It's a much more complicated undertaking on the technological side to make everything systematic as opposed to just crafting a linear solution. If we wanted to do that, then we wouldn't have needed to change many of the tools that we got when we licensed.
That's exactly it. Or at least close to being done. We're trying to put in place systems that we're going to be using for many years to come. And that permeates really all of the big-ticket technological items that we're doing: we're designing for a decade-long run or whatever here, and not just to basically solve the short-term problem and get it out the door. That's not what we're doing at all.
TL;DROrg management functions on the website are planned to move into Spectrum over the next nine to 12 months, while Fleet View is waiting on game design, with org privacy over ship visibility a concern.
Sure. Those are different topics. Fleet View is one and Management is another. As we've looked at how to address those things over the last year and a half or two years, part of the reason we arrived at what Spectrum is today is because we want to do a really good job of those things and we want them to have meaning. Managing your org isn't all that relevant if you don't have a good way to communicate or if there's not alerts or things to do. So what will happen is in Spectrum, as we move through the different objectives that we have over the next, let's say, nine to 12 months, we'll be taking the management and the administrative functions that exist today on the website and bringing those into the Spectrum interface itself, so that you'll be able to do everything you can do today plus a lot more. The technology framework that we're using allows us to develop very rapidly, especially with UIs and some other functionality. So we'll be able to achieve the objectives that we have shared before, plus some other cool stuff that all these notifications and real-time chat and this sort of game presence allows. So we still will be able to deliver those goals, and I think there's a lot of cool new opportunities that come along that'll be good as well.
Fleet View is a little different. We've looked at, there are some tools that people have made today that we really like, the sort of maps of all the ships and different things. We're kind of working with the game designers to understand how best to address that, because we've gotten different feedback from different people. So the primary thing is that we understand orgs want to be able to control the privacy of how those things would show up, because there's got to be some strategic advantage to either knowing or not knowing what your org has, or maybe there's some privacy that, like, I may have a ship personally that I don't want to be part of the org and all this. So we're sort of waiting on the game design on that side to come along. But like I said, we'll be able to do something really cool with the UI functionality that we'll have. So there's really neat stuff.
Spectrum continues to enhance the immersion, the idea of where this is going to blend in there. Going back to the original adage of building the universe, keeping us all connected.
Absolutely. The goal is also to make it so that your experience with Star Citizen is really ambient all the time. You don't necessarily have to be logged into the game itself, but if you want to connect with people through your mobile device or through the browser or through whatever, you could sort of do that whether you're logged into the game or not logged into the game.
That actually adds a lot of other interesting potential, like what we've talked about in the past. Everything from a friend of yours needs some money and you're on a phone, so you obviously can't play the game, but you can certainly receive a request from him, respond affirmatively, etc. Your friend can invite you into a party so that as soon as you're home, all you do is join the game and you're automatically routed in with your friends who are already in and playing. Many, many other possibilities to just enhance the overall gameplay experience by bringing people together and allowing them to communicate regardless of whether they're at that particular moment in the game or not.
TL;DREverything shown at CitizenCon will be in 3.0 and more, with each system growing in fidelity, size and complexity, and the new planetary tech already very fast while legacy simulation code still needs optimizing.
Everything and more, right? The tech, we're building, as we keep saying, this strong foundation: procedural planets and the atmospherics and everything else that's going in, subsumption as it grows and grows. So everything you saw so far that we put out from CitizenCon will absolutely be in 3.0 and more, right? Each system is going to grow a little bit more, more fidelity, a little bit more in size, a little bit more in complexity, maybe a little more optimized, right?
Pretty optimized, though, I think. People look at the, we call it a Homestead demo because originally it started as a homestead, but it grew into something much more. We actually left the debug frame counter up on it to show what it was doing, and the actual planetary tech is insanely fast, because Marco and Carsten, as they were writing it, were building it with processing on the GPU and also multi-core processing. Blazingly fast. Most of the new stuff that we're doing is built with a completely different paradigm in mind than, say, some of the legacy stuff, and that's what we're spending all the time refactoring. That stuff's fast. What we have to go and get is the game simulation and some of the older, more legacy stuff to be optimized. We're always adding stuff.
TL;DRThe demo ran on a single high-end card with a six-core Intel i7 and 64 gigs of RAM, which they say is not crazy hardware, and they are working to use more CPU cores and future-proof the tech.
We knew that question was coming, so we went to Dennis to actually go, hey, you built the machine, right? So, Intel i7, 6 core, 64 gigs of RAM, with an Asus 1080 with 8 gigs. I'm not sure on the SSDs.
I think it was, we're partnering with Intel, they have this new SSD, so they sent us some of their SSDs and so we had one of them. I don't think it's actually the future one that we may be involved in, which is going to be super, super fast, although I think this one was a really fast, good one.
Yes, absolutely. I find it telling, though, that that was the most asked question out of everything by the time we had looked, right? Because people go, if I think it through, they go, wow, there was a lot going on there. What kind of rig do I need to be able to pull that off, right? And it's not crazy components there. They're definitely higher end, right?
But that's always a big part of the problem, right? There are a number of people in the industry that can basically push things to the next level, but doing it such that you can actually get a playable frame rate is a completely different set of problems. And, as you and Chris were both saying, there's a constant concentrated focus going forward, especially on all the new tech, to basically utilize additional CPU cores.
Absolutely. I have had that question a lot with Frankfurt and engine tech and so on. And I would say, yes, we're absolutely trying to future-proof everything. Trying to build things now to where we can look ahead and go, okay, where's it going tech-wise and hardware-wise, to make sure that we're as solid as possible.
TL;DRInstancing is nearly possible now, but they are instead pursuing one seamless unified world meshed across servers, with the low-level networking rewrite aimed at 3.0 and the unified model later with no date, and gating for crowded spots.
Well, we're actually very close if we wanted to do instancing now. I mean, we're already effectively shunting players into instances every time they join an Arena Commander game. That's what's happening. We've already got persistence, so we can already save player state and restore it to a particular configuration as you join a game. And that's already 75% of the way there, but Chris wanted to push the game to a farther level versus what all these other games that approach this problem have done. What we're pursuing at the moment is really more of a completely unified networking model, whereupon there won't really be a bunch of individual sharded instances of the game. There will just be one world, and as you move around within that world, you will be shuttled seamlessly, transparently, from individual server to individual server. This comes with some technical problems and gameplay problems that we're going to have to resolve. We haven't figured out all of those things at the moment, but we're working on them right now. For example, you may have mission givers that effectively act as a bottleneck, and there's too many players trying to talk with that guy at one time. How do you deal with things like that? There are many different things, but it would become an extended conversation to go too far into all the details. But the big answer really is that we're trying to discard that whole players-in-little-isolated-instances approach and put everybody into the same universe, effectively simultaneously.
That's one of the things that stood out to me even back in the Gamescom demo. I had a lot of people come up and talk about the seamless transition. When I was up in the sky and now I'm on the planet and I haven't seen a single loading screen.
Even in the instancing scene you would still have that seamless transition. The fact is there will be a limit to how many players we can simulate on one server. So right now it's 24 in Arena Commander and about 40 when you're running around ArcCorp. But really that's actually eight instances running on one server. So if you just times it by eight and figure it out, we could have 200 players if we could scale the game linearly that way. But right now we can't, because parts of it are built for multi-threading, distributing to all the cores, some of it aren't. But that's what we're doing, a lot of refactoring. So an individual server instance could perhaps run 200 players, which then is obviously a lot denser than what we have right now, and you would still seamlessly go between locations. But on top of that, if you can mesh those servers together, and each server is sort of authoritative over a group of players, generally those players would be based on co-location. Each server tells the other servers what it's done with the players it's responsible for. On a peer-to-peer basis on the server side, you could have thousands of players being simulated all at once, but each server is only doing the work for its little portion. That's the new model. We're not the only people that are working on this or trying to work on this. But it is the new model of using the cloud to give you a lot more game experience. And that's where we're going. At some point, that may allow us to have 2,000 people in the same area or whatever. What if there was maybe 10,000? Then at that point we probably would still have to instance, but at the beginning here we're trying to make it not feel instanced, so you would be gated. If there's already too many people in a location, the landing pads are all full, it's just like you want to get into that bar, but it's busy because it's at capacity and the fire marshal would shut it down.
That's the gameplay limitations that I was referring to, which is just like in the real world, everyone cannot be in the same space at the same time. The question becomes how exactly do you represent that when you're talking about different things? A landing zone is one thing. A guy you need to talk to, isolated on a planet, is a different thing. There's a number of different solutions we've got in mind for how to deal with this stuff. Another thing to point out is there are two major things going on with the networking. One right now is the macro networking model that's going to allow all the players to seamlessly exist with one another. The other one is just the low-level networking rewrite that's going to give us a performance boost, and it's also going to make for a much more efficient code base versus what we got when we inherited the engine. That's going on now. The low-level rewrite is what we're aiming to release with 3.0. The unified networking model is something that's going to be post that. We don't have a specific date in mind. We will aim to do a test of that system at some point next year, where we basically band a number of servers together, creating a shard of sorts, where we're testing the concepts that we're talking about here, but on a much more localized scale. This should ramp the game up to, don't know right now, but it should be hundreds of players in one of these meshes.
No, the intention would not be to allow you to do that. Essentially it was done by Sean and Simon in their tech demo, but we put that in so we could quickly travel to the other planet without having to waste everyone's time. So you're definitely not going to be able to quantum jump while still in the atmosphere.
That would be cool. We could basically have, if you want to make that dangerous maneuver, sort of like Star Trek, you just basically say, I'm going to go straight into quantum in the atmosphere, but I might take some damage.
TL;DRSpectrum's technology stack supports bots and chatbots and they are interested in the idea, but it would not be in the first release and they want compelling real-world examples and community feedback.
Yes. We're building Spectrum on a technology stack that allows for that. Principally, we're using React Redux, which is actually an open source framework that was developed by some Facebook engineers. And so it's really amazing everything that's supported in this technology. So bots and that sort of technology are available. As we've looked at the state of the art today with chatbots, there's not a lot of compelling examples in the real world that we can point to, but we can imagine lots of stuff that you could do with a chatbot in Spectrum, especially as an organization. You could potentially manage org banking, or, well, there's just a lot of stuff that we could envision. It's not something that would be available, obviously, in the first release of the product, but it's definitely something that we're looking at. We're particularly interested in finding some examples in the real world that we think are compelling that we could draw from.
Yeah. Especially over the last few days, I had a number of really engaging conversations at the event Sunday night with people who had lots of ideas about Spectrum. We had a couple of groups of people here in the office yesterday for tours who also had some really interesting ideas. Specifically, hearing from people who are managing large orgs, or several people that I talked to manage or are involved with multi-game orgs and guilds, some of whom are enormous. We definitely want to get that kind of feedback. That's definitely one of the reasons: all throughout the development of Star Citizen we want to release information early to get feedback, so this is no exception, of course. We'd love to hear that, and I'd love to solicit feedback from people.
I want to call it Spacebook. It is definitely a very specific kind of social network for Star Citizen, if you look at it that way. Because we're able to leverage really cool technology that's in the open source domain now, we're not trying to see things and then invent our own fundamental technology to do it. We're able in many cases to actually leverage the same frameworks that are driving popular platforms. So it's exactly that.
TL;DRNo, the Persistent Universe will be much more realistic, requiring you to physically refuel, rearm and grab items, while the Arena Commander pickups were just a quick way to get gameplay in and may change.
No, the Persistent Universe is going to be very different. Arena Commander is meant to be very much the sort of virtual environment you go into, and also I can't say that it's going to stay that way in Arena Commander the whole time either. It's just at the moment that was a very good way of getting some gameplay in there very quickly for everybody. But in the Persistent Universe, everything is going to be done in a sort of real way. So whether it's refueling or rearming, you have to go to a location, you have to rearm, you refuel, you have to have someone to refuel you. If you're going to pick up stuff, you have to go, you have to grab it. You don't just drive over it or fly over it. You have to stop, you're going to have to tractor it in or you have to go and grab it and so forth. So we want to have that much more real experience in the Persistent Universe.
TL;DRThey don't yet say whether the pickups improved gameplay, since the changes are still being playtested internally, with Evocati and later wider testing to follow, so they have only their own opinions so far.
It would be hard to, I mean, the idea was just balancing, which is like you fire your missiles and maybe if you're doing well you get some more missiles, and you could land on a platform and then be on it for a few seconds and reload. People were sort of worried about what happens if people are spawn camping the platform, so we'll do pickups and we'll see how that goes. So really, we have our own opinions, but we haven't opened this stuff up. We've just done the flight model changes to the Evocati, and they will also get to play with that and give us feedback, and then it'll go wider to the PTU and then obviously out to everyone. But that's what we're in the process of right now. So we're in the process of performing playtests every day on Star Marine, on Arena Commander, and just trying to really make those fun, quick-to-get-into, well-balanced multiplayer PvP situations. So people that want to train themselves dogfighting and train themselves running around doing run-and-gun combat, they'll be able to do it quickly without having to travel large distances or risk having their ship blown out from underneath them and stuff like that.
TL;DRThe Stanton planets are being built to match their lore, with the 3.0 versions expected to be at least as good as the CitizenCon demo and probably better thanks to more time, polish and maturing tools.
No, we're definitely building the Stanton planets to how their lore is. So microTech is this sort of, whatever you want to call it, ice, snow planet. Think Hoth from Empire Strikes Back. And Hurston is a sort of over-polluted, mined-out planet. So potentially some of the stuff you saw in the Homestead demo would have some elements of the more desert-y stuff, but there will be a lot more petrified trees and this whole place will be over-polluted, probably a polluted ocean. In terms of ArcCorp, that's some stuff that we are working on, but we do feel like we'll be able to cover large amounts of the planet surface with buildings. There's a massive object rendering tech that we have that's very efficient, it's all very GPU bound, and that's actually what does, say, all the rocks and all the trees that you saw at the massive scale that you saw. That's actually all pushed onto the GPU and done very fast, which is the same way we would do the buildings on ArcCorp. Crusader is slightly different because it's a gas giant. So you'd be up in the clouds, and then there're floating platforms. So that in some ways is almost like a space station, because it's a platform you land on. But that's what we're focusing on. Of course, it wasn't mentioned, but we're putting Levski in there, which is a more kind of mining, rocky planet. So it'll be looking a lot better than what you saw in the Gamescom demo, because that was Planet V1. It didn't have all the ecosystems that we have and all the extra tools, which are getting better every day. So what you will see when 3.0 goes live will be at least as good as what you saw at CitizenCon, but most likely better, because the other thing is we're going to have more time to work on them, a bit more polish, whereas what we showed at CitizenCon in the Homestead planet was put together in a relatively short period of time, and also the tools were still being iterated on, which meant that the...
Yeah, which meant that if they build an ecosystem and they do height maps and everything, and then the tools change a week or two later, they've got to redo it all. So that was happening a lot. Things would change in the tool set that would invalidate a lot of the work that was done, so we're redoing a lot. So as that tool set matures, which it is doing, and the artists get more familiar with it, use more of it, and we do usability improvements, I think it's going to be spectacular. If you look at where our spaceships were when we first launched in 2012, and they got better in 2013 and 2014 and 2015 and 2016, now you look at what the vehicle team's turning out, and it's amazing. The same you can say on the characters. So I'm just excited by the gameplay possibilities of the tech, because we catch a lot of flak for, oh, well, you're taking the time and the scope's increased, but the kind of gameplay that opens up because we can flesh out these worlds. They're not just a very isolated landing area, where maybe you'll have a loading screen, or you're still streaming it in and you're on rails going down there, which was the original design, to whole play areas that are open planets with very different ecosystems. You could have all sorts of gameplay that you normally, traditionally would not have in a traditional space sim game. You could have people stranded on a planet playing basically a version of a survival game. You can have people playing domination to control their own parts of a planet that there's minerals they're fighting over. So the possibilities of gameplay or adventuring or exploring, it's like watching every sci-fi movie you've loved, and you can create all those scenarios now.
It's a good point, because I think that given the level of detail we're going to be able to inject into these things, and the fact that the occupations will be able to take advantage of this in so many different ways, from a design perspective, the difference between being able to land on realistic planets and control it to that level of fidelity, in addition to all the stuff that we can put in space and the transitions between them, it's completely mind-blowing. And I think that there's going to be a lot of players that are going to have all the content they want in just a small part of one solar system, much less the rest of that solar system or all of the other systems that we're eventually going to be in.
I think the story and the adventures people will be able to experience in the game when it's a little further along, it's going to be like nothing else. I'm as excited or energized now, more so than I ever have been, because I can see all these pieces there. We've got them all there and they're close enough. Yeah, we've still got to create a bunch of extra content and we've still got to make sure everything connects properly together. But we're very far along on it. And so I'm not looking at any piece of technology to create this dream game that I don't feel we're going to have. So what we're really focusing on now is connecting everything, making sure that it scales, it will run efficiently, and we have the tools for our artists and designers to work with. Next year, I'm feeling like it's not the sky's the limit, it's, whatever, the infinite universe is a possibility.
Well, this is actually having ripple effects all through the occupations and how we were going to implement them, and it's opening up dramatically different possibilities that we would not have had if we didn't have this technology. All of a sudden things like discovery and mining and farming will take on, just many, many new doors will open that I think players are just going to get a complete kick out of.
TL;DRTheir first focus is delivering what backers asked for, while the new tech opens many more possibilities, such as dynamic scanning and economies and large explorable planets, which they see as opportunity rather than just challenge.
I think we have to focus ourselves. Our first and foremost focus is delivering what the fans, the backers, have asked for. People have funded us and they've said, hey, it'd be really cool if this and this and this. So that's really first and foremost our focus. But yes, with that tech, it has opened up so much. And we have lists and lists and lists and lists of stuff.
Yeah, just on the scanning, which recently came up. So now you've got effectively a real world sitting right there in front of you. It plays to what the game has always been aspiring to be, which is we don't want to have these simplistic mechanics where you press the button, you do some sort of little dexterity challenge, and now everything is revealed to you. Just like in the real world, there are companies that have been hunting for oil for the last century on just one planet, Earth, and they're still finding vast new formations, deposits, to pull this stuff out of the ground. It should be like that in the game as well, such that here's a planet and it's in a fairly populated safe zone, and all of a sudden some prospector goes out and he discovers an incredibly valuable ore deposit right there. Then the economy is going to respond to that immediately, and what that's going to do is it's going to have all sorts of changes in the economic system, and what type of combat is occurring there, what types of missions are being offered to the player, et cetera, until eventually the system gets back into a state of equilibrium.
The moment we got the first planet completed and we were putting together the Pupil to Planet video, we were behind Hannes Appell's machine. He said, hey, come over here, I got this together. And he's working with Marco and a few of the guys. And we saw this little dot on the screen, and he started flying towards it. And we stood there, 10 minutes went by, the dot was a little bit bigger. And we were like, really, what are we waiting on? So he was speeding the ship up, and we got a little bit closer and closer and closer. And you didn't truly understand scale, right? Seeing this tiny dot, and we flew in and flew in, and it occupied the full screen, and then we went in, and you're there on the surface. And at that point, just realizing that the whole surface area can be navigated somehow, and we're going to have hundreds of those. And you just went, oh my god. The possibilities that you have, the real estate that you have to work with to apply gameplay, to push for more mining, which then pushes potentially for more careers and so on and so on. So it definitely has more challenges, but I look at it as it gives us more opportunity, and more opportunity to expand this game in ways that are unique to Star Citizen.
TL;DRChris Roberts explains that moving vector math from 32-bit to 64-bit gives millimeter precision across huge distances, and planet-relative physics grids let players move with a rotating planet.
Well, we've obviously talked about the fact that we shifted to 64-bit mathematical precision. I do notice a lot of people get confused between 64-bit binaries and 64-bit vector math. So it's not really 32 or 64-bit binary stuff, because that's not the issue here. We've moved the vector math from 32 bits to 64 bits, and that's important because it's floating point, and with floating point, even though a 32-bit floating point number can describe a very large number, billions in size or much bigger than that, the problem is when you move to the big numbers, your precision at the low end becomes not very good at all. All of a sudden, your precision becomes in the meters or the kilometers that you get in really big numbers, as opposed to the millimeters, which is what we need, because no matter what, we're in first person. You can see your hands. There's not much distance between my hand and here. All this kind of detail up close that you expect to see, yet all this detail has to exist in a star system that is millions, billions of kilometers across. You just need a bigger range in your floating point to be able to describe very high precision, but also the large numbers. And that's why we had to move to 64 bits. So that's one of the things that enables the scale, say, that we showed in the demo at CitizenCon, where you can see this planet, you fly past that space station. And we could have been way further out. We had what was called TrackView, which is the in-engine, in-game, that was all real-time rendered. You can see on the video, you can see the frame counter going. TrackView is where we put a camera on a spline path and fly it in. And we basically did it there instead of you flying in a Constellation because to cover that distance that we were covering in a short period of time for a demo, we don't want everyone sitting there going... So we could have been further out and the planet could have been just a dot. Or you may even see it and then you fly in and you go past it. But that's what you're doing. So you have to have this massive scale, but then get down on the ground and you're driving around or walking around, and it has the resolution, the texel density, the detail of the models, whether it's a plant or anything, that hold up to what you've seen in the most recent first-person game on the highest-end PC or high-end next-gen consoles or whatever. So you need the 64-bit to do that. So we've talked about that. That's one of the things that enabled 2.0, the large world.
And then the second thing that we have on the planets, which is also an extension of what we did for the multicrew, is we have our physical worlds that we simulate. And so we have more than one that we're doing, which we call the physics grids. And so we had the big global grid that is basically the star system's physical space. And then if you're flying around in a spaceship, there's the local grid, so the interior of it. And that's in essence its own separate physical world simulating inside a bigger physical world. Well, a planet is really just a big version of that. And we have a special version of a physical grid that is projected around a planet sphere, where we determine the transition is actually the atmospheric level. That's how we detect when we do the atmospheric effects and everything else like that. There's a certain distance above the surface of the planet that the atmosphere emits. When you enter that, you basically transition into the grid. The grid of the planet is relative to the planet. It's in what we call the planet zone. If we start rotating the planet and you're inside that grid, you just move with it. As far as you're concerned, you're relative to the world. You don't care about where you are relative to the star system. It's essentially just a very big version of what we use for spaceships, but projected onto a sphere, and in some ways it kind of simulates, it's a very coarse, rough simulation of what really happens in gravity, because at some point you enter, say, the Earth's atmosphere and via its gravitational pull you come into the frame of reference of the Earth, and essentially when you're in the local grid of the planet you're in the frame of reference of the planet. We don't have to be rocket scientists to figure out all the kind of trajectories that NASA's figuring out: okay, we're going from Earth, we're going to Mars, or whatever it would be. But that does allow us, if you're flying around in your ship and you come to whatever the planet is, rotating on its axis, you come in, once you enter its grid you will now be in its frame of reference. That's how we can do it, and that's the important thing. The sunsets and the sunrises are not moving the sun, it's the planet itself moving.
I would add one more thing, which is this is just one of the classic examples on this project of building the proper foundation and how it has so many benefits down the road. Back when the company was much smaller, there were a number of engineers devoted to this conversion. In other words, it was a real investment when there was nothing to show for it, and then all of a sudden that functionality was done and now you could start to build upon that. If we didn't have the 64-bit space, we wouldn't have interplanetary travel. We could have basically done a little area where you can run around, but there would be no way to get from that area to another without doing the instancing. Now that we have the 64-bit, now we have the option to basically have this seamless transition from planet to space station. We could not have those if we were limited to 32-bit space.
If we had 32-bit, we couldn't even have, even on the planet itself, the range we do, because that's typically why most games, whether it's a Battlefield or whatever, they have a certain limit to their map size, because when you get to the edge of the map size, you start to have precision errors. And if anyone remembers back in the old days of Arena Commander, when we had map sizes, if you got to the edge of the map size, you would probably see some hands shaking because it was having precision errors. But for us, when we say, yeah, no, that is not a skybox, that's a real mountain you can go to. You can. You can only really do that when you're doing those.
Doing things in this way, it inevitably makes the initial parts of the game much more difficult, much more time consuming. You tend to see less up front, and then as you get these pieces in place, you do start to get this exponential...
It's the systemic stuff. It's like while you're down on the planet and you look in the sniper sight and you can see the space station you flew past. And that is the space station. That's not something we faked in. That is literally the space station in the system map.
But when we build the system map, everything is sitting there. All of a sudden, you can see, it's like, hey, there's a raging battle going on there. And I know, just because I looked up at the sky and I saw it, I run over to my ship and I get up and I go to assist those guys, et cetera, et cetera. And so all of these things start to play off one another when you basically do them to this level of fidelity.
TL;DRAI combat modes will come, but not in the first Star Marine iteration, which targets player-versus-player; AI is expected to first appear in a later release, possibly enabling modes fighting AI.
We certainly will, but it won't be part of the first iteration. The first iteration, basically the balancing we're working on, is all towards player versus player. So we're refining the animation sets, the combat moves, the way in a first person slash third person you can basically use cover and all this kind of stuff and so forth. Throw grenades, the works, it's that kind of level. So that's what we're refining to get players into the game. And then that's what will come out with 2.6. But then shortly after that, when the AI comes online, the AI basically will be in the game properly. The first you'll see of that will be in 3.0. You'll probably see some in Squadron as well. But basically the first version where people will play will be in 3.0, and so that would be the time when we'd actually probably have a mode where you can actually go in with some of your buddies and actually fight AI and have that level of going in, trying to take stuff out.
But the really interesting thing is, yes, that's a scenario you can set up in Star Marine, but the really interesting thing is actually the 3.0 stuff, where you can be in your spaceship with your buddies, and you come across an abandoned space station somewhere, and in the actual Persistent Universe, you have to go in and take them out. For me, that's the really exciting stuff.
Yeah, we'd probably do more of that. And if you did something in Star Marine, it'd be more like a horde mode where it's just wave after wave. Space zombies.
When AI and subsumption matures, it gets more and more and more, then the designers just start going crazy. So that's when it opens it up for us to create more play scenarios.
Yeah, but there's loads of stuff. Obviously this was specifically about Star Marine, but just with the AI stuff, we're looking forward to it, because there's so many things we can do in terms of having bases which are actually protected by AI and so forth. We can bring in lots of different things where you can deal with griefing in some ways, which at the moment we just have to have green zones and stuff like that.
That's another interesting point, because Chris has said before, well, there was kind of no point to bring out Star Marine way back when, after we wound up releasing that same level of functionality, players going up against each other, within the actual Persistent Universe. Now, however, things are starting to change. We're very close to basically having the AI out, and so all of a sudden you see, oh, well, Star Marine will actually be a quite effective testbed for some of these AI concepts. So if we'd released Star Marine six months ago, we were still too far away on the AI to really realize any sort of significant benefit. But now these two things are coming together. For the same reason we used Arena Commander to test and tweak the responsiveness of the ships and basically get that polished, so that when we were actually able to release players in the Persistent Universe we had things working at a pretty good level, the same is going to be true with Star Marine and AI and all that type of stuff.
We will do Saddleball. It will not be for 2.6. Star Marine, the first iteration, will be, as we talked about at CitizenCon, a small map, essentially PvP, and a large PvP map. Saddleball would be in one of the later iterations, wouldn't be in 3.0. The ones later, we didn't really call it out, but it is on our roadmap for Star Marine, one of the game modes. It's also something that we want to put into the universe itself. For instance, we've talked about racing. Racing is a mode in Arena Commander, but really some of the most fun racing will be the in-fiction, in-universe racing. People can already see in GrimHEX that there's part of a race course that's already laid out there. And in a later iteration, we're going to open that up, where players would compete and maybe bet against each other with UEC.
We want to have, you'll basically get a message going on that says, the championships are on, make your way to GrimHEX or wherever. And everyone will meet there and they'll have races.
We'll definitely have, everyone looks at the Dragonfly zipping along and you're going, okay, yeah, that's pod racing. So we're going to have all that sort of stuff, and Saddleball, while it's not racing, is another in-fiction sport. So we'll have it in Arena Commander, but potentially we could even have Saddleball competitions of teams that are happening in this universe. We want huge arenas.
You go land your ship, you go in and you walk inside the big space station and you enter the arena and you go play against people and have other people watching and that kind of stuff. That's what's going to be really cool. It's almost like going to Sunday Night Football.
TL;DREnvironments are meant to be real opponents, with dynamic weather like sandstorms, acid rain, heat and electrical storms that can impede or hurt players and push them toward suits or rovers.
Yeah, I think the environment in many situations should be at least as big an opponent to you accomplishing your objectives as other players or AI NPCs would be. It will be much more than just sandstorms that can impede visibility or that could potentially actually cause you to lose health. We'll have on these planets volcanic vents, some ships, some armors. Some sandworms.
We're definitely going to have dynamic weather, and weather that can impede or affect you or hurt you. Like we showed in the demo we did: you arrive in your Constellation going to the beacon, and then there's bad air basically over that desert, and it was unsafe to fly, so you had to find a landing pad that was safe. So that's going to be much more systemic. I mean, that's our goal, right? Obviously for that particular case we'd set up some of the events that would happen, but they were sort of on triggers when you're in that event. Actually, I mentioned it in a Gamers Nexus interview, we are looking at doing full cloud weather simulation based on, here's the planet, here's the hot, here's the cold areas. And we want to have that entry into a planet, if you think of Prometheus when they come in, the entry to the planet in Prometheus. Have all these things, and also have encouragement for players to use different suits, environment suits, or vehicles. You can't always fly somewhere and get out. Maybe you have to land, take your rover to go somewhere, which is kind of what we did.
That's exactly it. Some of the ore that you'll attempt to mine will give off so much electromagnetic interference that you effectively have to touch down in your ship, and now all of a sudden you've got a real reason why you want to have that rover to make that last 10-kilometer trip. But of course that opens up many more gameplay possibilities, now that you're traipsing around.
TL;DRNPC crews will follow normal daily schedules, with possible exceptions for key characters in some Squadron 42 missions, so players will need to account for crew downtime and shifts.
Your NPC crews will basically follow normal 24-hour schedules and stuff. Now, in Squadron 42, it's a little bit different, where you go on a mission, and it's possible, we were actually just discussing this the other day, me and Phil, where we may want to make it such that on given missions you're able to have key characters effectively remain awake, so that you can communicate with them regardless of how long you're actually out doing that, because the clock is always turning and yet your character may be out there for a 16, for a 20, for a 24-hour effective period. And so if you need frequent callbacks from the captain of a given ship, etc., then he may be willing, just like you, to basically put his schedule aside and stick it out with you. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew, this is really on a design basis. They'll determine when it's appropriate to rigidly stick to the rules and when we want to apply a little bit more flexibility to the system. But the ultimate objective will be that the characters within the game will follow a schedule that you would expect to see in the real world. The captain is sometimes on the bridge, sometimes he's in the mess hall, sometimes he's sleeping. The gunners, sometimes they're at their station, sometimes they're in the rec room, et cetera, et cetera. This will have, again, just like we've been talking about with a lot of these things, a lot of follow-on effects in terms of how you go about accomplishing missions.
It almost becomes like the concept of food or fuel or anything else, which is allowing your crew downtime is something that you're going to have to take into account. If you expect to head on out into space and you've got a large NPC crew and you just want to sit out there for hours and hours and hours, then you're not going to want to leave yourself that entire time in a dangerous situation, or else you'll have to worry about crew shifts or whatever.
TL;DRYes, crews will work like mini-Sims that need pay and food and breaks, and overworking them makes them unhappier and less effective, though without becoming tedious micromanagement.
There's a lot of different ways. Well, it's going to be like mini-Sims for the crew. They're going to need to be paid. They're going to need to be fed. They're going to need to get pets occasionally.
You've got to have bathroom breaks. If you push them beyond their limits, they will basically take it, but they will start to become less happy. They will start to demand more money. Eventually, their effectiveness at their job will start to deteriorate. You can do this, but there will be effects to it all. The idea is that, as with fuel, you don't have infinite fuel. You don't have the ability to absorb infinite damage. All of these things need to be replenished. There's a cooldown period of sorts for all these things, and your crew will be similar. I've said before, we don't want to become Sim Citizen, we don't want to make it this tedious micromanagement sim, so it will be nothing like that, but we'll have the concepts. They'll be very easily understood and accessible, you'll have the ability to control this to the level that you want, while at the same time adding a whole lot of different possibilities in terms of gameplay that you haven't seen elsewhere.