Star Citizen Live: EU PU Gameplay Feature Team

So first off, you need a Starfarer to refuel because this is right now our only refueling ship we have. We at least have two variants. We have the normal Starfarer and the Starfarer Gemini. And what you do there is you start spawning your ship at any harbor that you are at, then you need to open the vehicle maintenance services that you already know how to refuel. But now it looks a bit different, so we improved that a bit to tailor to the demands of the refueling mechanic and the Starfarer. So now you have two buttons, which one is the auto button and the other one is the manual button. And the auto button just refills your internal fuel tanks, while if you click on the manual button, it will open a list of all the available fuel tanks and fuel pods. So fuel pods are the ones at the outside of the Starfarer, the fuel tanks basically you use for the refueling. So you fill them dedicated with whatever you want to pick. So you can fill all six of them with hydrogen fuel if you like, but you can also fill three with hydrogen fuel and three with quantum fuel. And the next step that you need to do is lift off. And then basically you are up for the market and there, sadly, we don't have the beacon system yet. So you are reliant on chat communication or if you are in an organization, you either have Discord or TeamSpeak to talk to them to ask for refueling or offer you refueling services. And once you've found someone that is in need, you basically extend your boom arm, then a docking procedure takes place. You need to set a price for the fuel. You can even give it out for free if you feel like it. And then the docked ship goes through the very same process like you did on the station. So the ship in need opens again the mobiGlas, goes into the vehicle maintenance service, purchases the amount of fuel that the player needs, and you as the Starfarer owner then get the request, and what you do next is open the corresponding fuel tank to allow the flow for, let's say, hydrogen to go through the nozzle, and then you open the nozzle and you can control the flow speed there, so you have an impact on the time it takes to fill the other ship. And once the other ship is filled, you are done, and both can part their ways.

From the system itself, not too much. So we did only some minor tweaks. So we have now a variable flow speed that we didn't have back then. So now you really have to pay attention to the flow speed to not damage your nozzle, because there is this mechanic of the safe flow speed to the nozzle where if you are above it, you will start damaging it. And we wanted to emphasize this, so we added a mechanic that basically, the more pods you have open, the more fluctuation you have in your system. And that can cause the flow speed to rise so that you damage the ship. But the main difference is definitely the UI. So we got a lot of UI work done in the last couple of months. And it shows. I'm really satisfied with that. And something that we did get, which we wouldn't have gotten if we would have aimed for the earlier release, is the direct interaction in the backside of the Starfarer. So right now, you have the direct control screens directly at the pods. And I'm really happy that we got that. It opens possibilities, let's phrase it that way.

Possibilities for?

Like if someone accidentally jumps on your catwalk and then closes the fuel. Sabotage.

So about the bigger rocks, that could be a short-term solution to the momentarily, more or less, unattractive multi-crew mining, but we have bigger plans for that. So we have some ideas of how we can improve multi-crew mining in the future. So some of the visions that we have is that we have some weak points that need to be hit at the same time, and even players need to make them explode at the same time. So imagine a situation where you are with several Prospectors targeting the same stone. Everyone hits the same weak point of the stone and then you have to time it so that you don't damage other pieces of the rock, and then the rock splits and then you can proceed to your mining. Same goes for the ARGO MOLE. And what we also envision there is that we even expand on the functionality of the mining gadget. So, for example, if you have a rock where the weak points are opposite, you could use the mining gadget to actually move the weak spot so that you are able to use the ARGO MOLE. But this is very far off in the future right now.

Right, because we talked about it a little bit with Todd last week, because the team's focus is going to be mostly on resource management and life support and stuff for a little bit before you can circle back to some of these other things.

Right now, our focus is getting all the features done once so you can start iterating over them.

Yeah, that's definitely not on us to decide. It's on the economy side, but yeah, I fully agree. So I'm not a huge fan of Quantanium being the only profitable resource. I have the feeling that it is something that will change once we have crafting there and player demands and maybe even AI demands there so that the values of each item shift. But this is not on us to decide.

I'm thinking in general with those systemic things, it's almost automatically going to grow with time. And I feel like those values will change naturally over the development. So I can see it only getting better, basically. But again, not up to us.

I think the takeaway is that from a design perspective, correct me if I'm wrong on this, Torsten, we don't want there to be just the one thing that's valuable to mine. We want it to be valuable for you to mine different things at different times in different places based on market conditions, nearby shops, etc.

And rarity. So if a material is more rare than another, it should also be worth more.

I think it's good. It's progressing, definitely. I'm enjoying working on it. But I feel like the 'easily' part is probably a bit misleading. It's more than just the room system. There needs to be graphic user interface for all the panels. There needs to be controls for the rooms. There needs to be integration to resource systems. So there's a lot of additional work that we're doing right now. And then also when you have the setup for the ships. But it is definitely progressing and I'm happy with it so far.

We do have a lot of ships to process to get that in a releasable state, so that definitely is a contributing factor. And the question saying the room system is finished, it's not quite accurate either. It's constantly in development, being upgraded to support more new features and things like that.

It's a big feature.

But things like resource management and life support, those are all how we build out the idea of true multi-crew here.

The classic engineer role, yeah.

There will be a lot to make that exciting in the not-too-distant future when we have life support. I'm also thinking about the fire system in development. That gives you another thing for other people on the ship to do other than the pilots. It's, oh, we've got a fire on deck three, send someone to go deal with that. That interacts with life support, resource management, all of that.

Yeah, of course. Because the way it's supposed to work, like on the ISS, you have the scrubber, it removes the CO2 and it has only a certain rate that it can process. So if you suddenly get 20 people inside of a small ship that's designed for two people, then your life support is going to start not managing it. And the rate of flow of the air for the system will be too slow. The CO2 will build up and you'll probably die. But obviously it all needs to be balanced with the bigger ships and the different rooms in the ships.

We don't want to put a hard limit on it. So we want to have it systemic driven. So that means that if you have an Aurora and you want to cram it with five people, then sure, it will work. But what you have to do as the person running the Aurora, you have to replace the scrubber constantly. Because the scrubber just depletes very, very fast because of the CO2 production in the room. And then, yeah, sure. If you decide 'every 10 minutes I have to replace the scrubber', yeah, sure.

And also, life support is not only doing the CO2, it's also temperature and the pressure, and those things will also be hit by too many people breathing in the room, because then there's less time for heating or cooling the room. So it's going to be interesting gameplay there to balance what you want the atmosphere in your rooms to be like.

So one of the things that will have to come along with life support is dynamic atmosphere propagation. Fancy name for just air actually moving between things. So if you have the doors open, you're going to be getting whatever atmosphere is on the other side of those doors. If you open the doors in space, you're going to have a bad time for anyone on there who wants to breathe. But you'll be able to fly around and in a way catch some atmosphere from the planet that you're in. And I think that'll have some interesting implications in future for planets with not human-breathable atmospheres. It'll make your life support system have to work a bit harder once you close those doors to try and clean that up for you.

And we've seen some ships like the Idris or the Javelin, they have the Star Wars or Star Trek force field walls and doors that help keep atmosphere. So it remains to be seen what ships will have stuff like that and what may not.

It's going to be per room. We want to go as granular as it makes sense for this, obviously. You'll be able to set the pressure in the rooms. You'll be able to set the temperature in the rooms. It can be different in each room, and also the rate for the scrubbing. It's going to be a balance for each room: what do you want this room to behave like? There's going to be a decent amount of choice there for a player to do.

One of our big considerations for this is that while you are going to be able to do everything on a per-room basis, we're going to be making sure to have a good focus on usability, and again, the quality of UI will help with that so that it doesn't feel tedious.

Yeah, that's a good point. There's going to be, obviously, a process for just maintaining this room in a normal state for life, let's say. But then maybe you want it to be warmer than others, so you're going to focus the life support on the temperature to keep the temperature higher, and maybe you don't care about the CO2 levels in this room. I think the idea is for the baseline to be very simple. You don't really need to do much. But if you want to go into these details for some specific purpose, you can.

I mean, possibly you'd get more power. Life support obviously uses power, so I guess if you turn it off completely, then you'd get more power.

I like the engineering gameplay of 'cut power to life support, all power to engines'. If you've got a really huge ship where the life support's taking up a lot of power, then that could be a thing.

Or some damage.

But I think that question was more aimed at offensive uses of life support. And yeah, you'll definitely be able to turn off the air if you've got boarders.

Oh, for the boarders, yeah. Of course. And you can heat it up, cool it down.

We'll be rate limited on how much the life support system can actually suck out of that room in a given time.

Obviously rate limited. And also, once you suck out the atmosphere and you don't put it in the tanks, it's going to be gone. You can vent it outside, and then it's lost. So you also have to think about that. If you have room in your tanks, then it's fine.

So our goal there is to give the whole resource distribution of any ship into the player's hands. So we have fuel that is consumed by the power plant and by the engines. And you are in control of how much fuel those engines and the power plant get. And depending on how much fuel the power plant gets, it will create energy, and you can distribute that energy. So for example, you could even say, OK, I don't need any light in my ship. So none of the energy goes to the lights or the doors. So all the doors stay open the full time, but all the energy goes to the weapons, for example, or the shields. So this is something that you will be able to manage on the fly, dynamically, any time, any day, on any ship. You will be able to have full control over the resource distribution of your ship.

Yes, quite significantly, actually. Because we have some legacy systems that work but are not the ideal way that we intended to have it work. So there are some optimizations that we have to do so that it runs performantly and that we don't put too much stress on everything, which is already quite stressed. There's a lot to do on our side. So every ship needs to be touched. And every item that is existing also needs to be touched.

The good thing is that it's going to be a bit combined, I think, with the life support, because they both use, obviously, resource systems. So at least it won't have to be done twice, hopefully.

That's the big benefit of the system. So because we now have the opportunity to work on life support in parallel with the engineering, they all tie together. Our aim is also to have them release at the same time, because it's sharing the same UI, it's sharing the same systems. So it is the same system, it just does a bit more complicated stuff with connecting it to the room systems and so forth.

And it's not just your team. It's the UI team. It's the VFX team. It's the sound effects team. This is a major component of fulfilling that vision of ship life in the Star Citizen universe.

Every team is involved there. Every team has to do some update stuff on their systems to utilize the new resource networks. So, like you said, every team has to be involved here.

So the why they're not there is a question for the level designers. But as to what's needed to put them in, we are fairly confident that we have everything needed for that on the tech side. So it's down to level design to put them there if they want them, and decide what goes where.

I'll add a little context to that. That is part of the work that Montreal is doing with the complete revamp of derelicts from the ground up. Part of what you saw in ISC yesterday is them building out the interiors and all that stuff. And as part of that, there will be loot generation spots and stuff like that. So that's all part of the new derelicts 2.0, if you will, for lack of a better term.

Yes, I should add that we have been in constant contact with the level designers, including the Montreal team. So yes, they are aware that this is a thing that we could do. They are considering it, etc. We're all working together on this.

They definitely don't have colors. We're not doing that. It would not fit with the level of realism that we're going for. We do have some fixed rarity tiers of loot boxes. And at the moment, off the top of my head, I think we've got common, uncommon, rare. But what that means is not a global setting. So how likely you are to find a rare loot box is not going to be the same in every location, and its contents are not going to be the same in every location. It's something that the designers are thinking a lot about: how to balance what crates and what contents you get where. And it's also something that we are having ongoing discussions with the economy team about, how we balance the amount of value you can get out of containers.

Also, rare for Stanton doesn't mean that it's rare in Pyro, for example. So items that you are more likely to find in Stanton are probably less likely to be found in Pyro.

Service beacons. There are some gameplay features that didn't make it that we envisioned for the refueling. So I think most of you are aware that there is this mechanic of the hidden stash fuel: if you are stranded in space and you completely ran out of fuel, you theoretically cannot dock to the boom arm anymore, so you have this reserve fuel that is dedicated only to docking, to be able to dock to the Starfarer again. This is just something there because we didn't get the tractor beam right. So there's supposed to be a tractor beam functionality that can pull you in. As well, we envisioned more direct nozzle control, because right now the nozzle is very static, it's a stiff nozzle, but we also wanted to have some direct control over that. And tying to that, we also wanted to make it more interesting in flight for the player attached to the Starfarer so that there's tension gameplay. So if the forces to one side or the other are too high, you as the attached ship have to maneuver against them. So this is something that we also wanted to have there, but it didn't make it for T0.