Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Talking To The Computer

Dan Trufin · Developer

So definitely we don't want you to use force and pull out your gun and shoot them in the head. That is not the way to go. Especially since most of the time, you don't really want to kill those people. They just happen to be on your ship and you just want to do something different. You don't want to piss them off. So, again, you can use not necessarily the criminality system, the law system and security on your side. More or less, what happens on your ship, you are the law on your ship. So what you can do is basically set them to not have permission to be on your ship, in which case they will get a warning that they're in violation, they're in an area that they should not be, and they get a timer to get out. The problem is that the timer might not be enough for them, especially with a bigger ship, if they're at one end and the other end.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And they don't know the interior of the Merchantman as well.

Dan Trufin · Developer

Yeah, or they might be AFK, or they're just there for whatever. Imagine there's a Starliner, and they just were in transit. They're really AFK. They don't care about how they get there. They care that they get there. And once they got there, they're still in the kitchen making food. In those cases, you do not want to kill them. And in those cases, I think we're going to have to look into some more civilized ways of getting people out. So let's say your ship is docked at the station or you're in a hangar. We can have a way of basically forcing those people out: you give something like an evacuation order. And if the people are not out in, let's say, one minute, they get teleported out into the hangar or into the station that you're connected to. So that is one way of doing it.

Dan Trufin · Developer

Yes. So one thing that can happen is that you get a pop-up on the screen that says the captain of this vessel has asked that you remove yourself from the vessel. This will get automatically executed in 60 seconds, but you can cancel that. You can ignore it. And if you click ignore, you stay on that vessel. But after 60 seconds, if the guy turns the security on, you're on your own. You have to evade his internal turrets. He has the right to shoot you at this point. You're in violation. You get flagged as a criminal because you will be in a place you're not supposed to be. You're trespassing. You're in the place you're not supposed to be according to the local law on that ship. The guy can just pull out the gun and shoot you with no consequences. But it's your choice. You chose to ignore it. That thing cannot get teleported out.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I'm picturing people using the two minutes. They have a timer: we have to get whatever we're going to get done before the timer hits and the criminality turns on. I envision that becoming a gameplay tactic now.

Dan Trufin · Developer

So we also have to look at the other side, where you don't want people to abuse the system. Let's say I have a Starliner. I move 50 people across the universe, and somewhere in the middle of the trip, I just go, "Let's just turn security on and see what happens." So that will not be an option. You will probably have to be docked somewhere and connected to a station when you do that process. And we need to make sure people don't just get teleported into space or something like this.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think it's probably safe to say that whenever the tier zero implementation of this system comes in, it will be the tier zero implementation of this system.

Dan Trufin · Developer

And that we'll be watching. As always, we'll start with the simplest version, I think, which will probably be teleport with a timer. And then we'll see how that evolves and see how else we can build it in a nicer way. Obviously teleport is not a nice thing because it breaks the immersion in the game, but for people who are AFK and are not coming back in the next two minutes, there needs to be a way where the captain of that ship gets rid of them and they are also not getting killed in the process, ideally, if possible. We'll see which one is tier zero, because maybe tier zero, especially now with smaller ships, is probably going to be where you can change the security settings. There's going to have to be a warning and you change security settings. But when you're talking about a Starliner or a Banu Merchantman, we're talking about a different capacity of ship, and there might be multiple groups of people on board that are not necessarily part of your party. So right now I think we'll solve the party problem first: what happens when someone in your party doesn't want to get off your ship and stuff like this. And then we'll see about the bigger picture, where you're just transporting some people or some people just happen to be on your ship doing business.

Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer, UK studio

Well, the first answer is yes. We would absolutely love to do that. It's on the roadmap. So we do plan to have an internal voice command solution. We plan to fully integrate it, as we do with everything in Star Citizen, so it will be very much an embedded part of the game experience. One big thing with VoiceAttack is that you have to bind everything that you do to a key action or a mouse action. We wouldn't need to do that, because we'd be a system running completely within the game. So yeah, we definitely plan to do that. As with anything we develop, we would like to go beyond what's already available, because if you're not improving things, then why are you doing it?

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You said it's on the roadmap. You mean your internal audio team roadmap, not the public roadmap that our backers can see?

Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer, UK studio

Absolutely right. That's a good clarification there, Jared. So internally in the audio code team, we have a huge backlog of stuff that we want to get up to, and it's getting closer. It's not on the immediate plan, but it's there.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And when it does come time to begin work on that, people will see it added to the public roadmap.

Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer, UK studio

Yeah, once we actually plan it in and attach it to a release, that's when we'll start to see it on the public roadmap.

Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer, UK studio

Yeah, absolutely. The two completely overlap and we'll have to collaborate with design to figure out the best solutions to that. Just off the top of my head, we could have some sort of push-to-talk to your computer, or we could have something like "Hey Siri" or the "OK Google" equivalent, a trigger word like that that wakes up the voice system. But these are all just options. We could have both. We don't know. But we would sit down with design and figure out those issues. And then, obviously, the question also would be: if you're speaking to your computer, do we cut that from the VoIP communication and cut the facial animation that goes with it? And again, we'll figure that out with design.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Or do you want to see a bunch of people bring up their mobiGlas and talk to their mobiGlas in the game?

Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer, UK studio

It may be nice to see it and hear it, but maybe we can just damp it down a little bit, push it into the background, because we know it's not directed at other people in the game. But it still needs to be there. It still needs to be an ambient thing.

Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer, UK studio

There's a little overlap with what I'm still working on right now, which is polishing the VoIP system. In 3.3, we have our first release of VoIP. I've just been fixing a few issues with it today. This is step one towards a VoiceAttack-style solution too, because the first thing you need to do is get the voice into the game, and we've done that for VoIP, so we've got one of the building blocks in there already. So a lot of work's been done on VoIP and FoIP to ensure that everyone can communicate properly, everyone's face is synced to their voice. And then there's a whole massive infrastructure that honestly has never been done in a game before that is supporting the system, and we're learning a lot as we go. If you're using VoIP and experiencing any issues, just a little patience, because nobody's done this thing before with the facial data as well.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's not just opening up a Discord channel and sending the conversation over. It's got to be synced with all this other face data, even though you're turned away or maybe you're across far distances. You've got to build something that's dynamic enough to be used in all situations.

Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer, UK studio

Yeah, absolutely. And Discord is limited to who joins the chats. We're not limited to that. We're offering some in-world audibility of other people who aren't necessarily in a group with you. So we're pushing the data requirements in all different directions. We've got additional requirements for the facial data. We're probably driving more communicators than you would normally see in Discord, too.

Luke Pressley · Mission Designer

No, certainly not. We're on our way towards Death of a Spaceman, obviously. You look at the game now, it doesn't reflect where we want to be. Look at how many times you respawn if you play for an hour. This is a tier zero of a mission, but we'll have a non-lethal version, a leisure activity, like paintballing or something like that, so people can blow off some steam. It was only ever the start of... this is our stake in the ground for racing. We got so much UI improvement out of it, so you'll see UI creeping into all the other missions as well, all based on what we had to have for a race mission. We just couldn't do the tracks right now. We can't sink that much time into tracks when the planets are changing as much as they are. And for instance, what you were talking about: obviously, it isn't a death race. It's a race where you can kill people. You can shoot people.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It seems like a death race right now because that's where the game is, not where Scramble Races are. Every silly little thing ends up killing you.

Luke Pressley · Mission Designer

Yeah, exactly. Will the deaths that we currently have from being shot actually be a death in the final game? I'd imagine not. I'd imagine you go into an injured state. Medics have a chance to come and revive you, kind of thing. And I see the Scramble Races as that perfect ecosystem for many other careers: being a TV reporter covering this thing, being a medic that's hovering around, being a scavenger that's coming to pick up the remains, or a repairman that flies in, like a pit stop kind of thing. So I see them as that kind of ecosystem. They're aimed towards the future. It's a tier zero. We don't force you to play these. You can right now, and it really doesn't cost you anything. In future, the reward will be much greater given the risk. When we're able to do the EMP-type firing weapons, stuff that we can kind of do right now, but not in the way we'd really like to: I fire a gun at someone and he stops his engine for maybe 10 seconds. That kind of feel of a race. You can see how that non-lethal version will be a lot more entertaining, and a lot more people will join in.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think you touch on a struggle that we have with almost every aspect of Star Citizen, and that's looking at how any game system functions in the game as it is today, but then also extrapolating forward how it's intended to interact with other game systems in the future. That's a tough thing for anybody playing the game to do, because we're used to playing complete, fully developed games.

Luke Pressley · Mission Designer

Exactly. And obviously we're used to designing for that as well. So we plan well off into the future where this is going to be, and then we go, "OK, what can we do right now? What's entertaining right now?" Kind of buy into the fact that you're going to die quite a lot in the current game, and it doesn't matter. Death of a Spaceman really punishes you for that, but we don't right now.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Well, we punish people with insurance costs.

Luke Pressley · Mission Designer

And when it comes to that, we'll be able to rent vehicles specific to this race at the location in future. So you'll be able to rent a cheap vehicle and then you don't have to worry about losing your own. You can take your own and have a much better vehicle, but you risk losing it as well.

Luke Pressley · Mission Designer

Well, sadly last week they vanished and we had to fix that. Obviously it's PTU, so bugs happen. But just keep your eye on the General tab of the contract manager. If there's nothing there, it means one's inactive. And then when one appears, you accept it. It scrolls between three different types: there's a space one, and the two different ground ones, the Gravlev and the wheeled version. The ones on planets, there are six different locations, two on each moon. Sadly, you have to keep your eye on that tab. I do have a task in for the future to allow players to flag the various tabs in the mission manager so that they get an update whenever something becomes available. So if you are interested in delivery missions, races, whatever, you can flag those and then you'll see a little pop-up when something appears, so you get there quicker. So right now, it's a little bit like you've got to keep checking the contract manager, but it's where we are.