Calling All Devs - Multi-Tools and Keybinds

Vidas Okunis · System Designer, Foundry 42 Frankfurt

Oh, yes. The plan is how it works: we have rooms. Each room has a volume. Each volume can hold X amount of gas. We track the mass of gas in every single room. So we have producers which produce oxygen for you and we have consumers. In this case, it's the players. So yes, technically you can breathe out all the air and die horribly.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And I imagine that the next question that anybody's going to have is how long before that happens. But I imagine that has to change depending on the ship, the equipment, the size of the room. There's a number of factors that's going to determine that, right?

Vidas Okunis · System Designer, Foundry 42 Frankfurt

Yes, naturally. It depends on the size of the room. It depends on oxygen producers that we have on board. It also depends on: are you wearing a helmet? Because if you are, you're not breathing atmosphere from the room. So you're using internal oxygen supply.

Andy Nicholson · Systems Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Yeah, I guess the short answer is yes. The intention is for us to have as many of these as we can get in and available as actions that are bindable. Anything that you can sort of look around and see and interact with, we want to have shortcuts for, just for those players that want to use it, really. I mean, not everyone wants to interact in that manner with the stuff physically. Some do, and we want to cater to both. So anything that probably comes in first as an interactive button, and it's just about when we have the time to open these up as actions. I was just going to say, we could design these as much as we want, but we need engineering time to look into them.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And you started some of this back in 3.0. Some of these things are already in game. I know they mentioned specifically start engines and power on. I think some of those are in 3.2, if I'm not mistaken.

Andy Nicholson · Systems Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Yeah, they should be, I hope so. I remember mapping them to all of our HOTAS devices as well. Should be working.

Dan Trufin · Lead Systems Designer, Foundry 42 Frankfurt

No, PvP is definitely not mandatory. But at the same time, it's close to impossible to guarantee 100% that no other player will ever deal with you in a bad way. Players are very inventive when it comes to creating chaos, so you will get people just crashing into other people just to annoy them. So as much as we try to make it a lawfully enforced space for people who have just started, for people who maybe don't want that type of gameplay, at the same time there will be people who find a way around it. And then the options are: people can open a ticket with us and we will have to take care of people who repeatedly do this. If it happens once, fair enough, it happens once; we take that as fair game. And this is where you won't be able to have 100% free of any other player's involvement type of gameplay, but we're going to aim for that 99%. We're going to try to make the rules as strict as possible in the places where people start and where people try to learn. And we're going to also at the same time try to make it unappealing for more advanced people to go there and mess with the beginners. So the more advanced people will get pulled towards richer areas, more interesting things, more unexplored things. They will have to go there to get the good stuff.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Frontier space.

Dan Trufin · Lead Systems Designer, Foundry 42 Frankfurt

Yeah, that leaves the core worlds a bit more relaxed and more filled with people who either just want to have a slow, steady pace upwards, or they just started and they need to figure out, "Oh, how do I do that? I don't want to get killed 500 times while I'm trying to figure out where this button is."

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We're referring to UEE space, the space that the United Empire of Earth has gone and settled throughout the galaxy. There's a lot of systems that are going to be under UEE control. Even systems like the Stanton system, which isn't necessarily under UEE control, but is under corporate settled control. You've got ArcCorp and you've got Crusader, and they all have their own security forces.

Dan Trufin · Lead Systems Designer, Foundry 42 Frankfurt

There will be a force there. It doesn't matter if it's UEE. It might be that it's organization number 55. It doesn't matter which one it is. They will maintain their law inside their own law bubble, and they'll take care of the players that get attacked there. But when it comes to players becoming very inventive, yes, we'll try to make sure some of these gaps are not... the balance between the gaps we intend and the gaps that we don't, kind of thing.

Jonny Jacevicius · Senior Systems Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Okay, one that I think we've at least touched on lightly in the past is the multi-tool. I think it's called the Pyro multi-tool. It has several different attachments, which makes it kind of like a bit of a pocket Swiss army knife. So if you're carrying the attachments around with you, you'll have the ability to do a bunch of different things. So the main one that we've prototyped the most is the cutting attachment. So you'll be able to cut through specific surfaces. If it's quite a tough surface, you might not have any luck getting through it because it's quite a small tool. It's probably only about this big. So it's kind of like a little pocket welder and cutter. So you'll be able to cut through certain surfaces. Like if you need to get to a panel of some sort that's locked, you might be able to cut through that surface and actually manage to get to it. One of the other attachments is the repair and salvage attachment. As an example, say if your Gladius had taken some damage, you could go up to the damaged wing where you've stripped away a bunch of metal from some laser fire or something. You'll have a repair canister that you can attach to this thing and you could just start filling that in. So you're repairing mostly superficial damage on there. I don't think you'll be able to weld a busted wing back on with this tiny little thing.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Not with that attitude you won't.

Jonny Jacevicius · Senior Systems Designer, Foundry 42 UK

It might take you a while. So if you're persistent, maybe. Another one that people might be quite interested in is a mini tractor attachment. And again, you've got to remember that this thing is quite small. So in zero G, you'll be able to push and pull things. So you'll either be able to pull yourself towards objects heavier than yourself, or you'll be able to pull things lighter than yourself towards you. But obviously, you're not going to be grabbing someone's Reclaimer and tailing along the back of it. It's more meant for pushing, pulling crates around and things like that. But who am I to say? Always with you what cannot be done. Some of the more combat-orientated stuff, like the gadgets that we may have touched on very lightly in the past, these are much more in a prototyping phase where we need to actually get them in game and play with them and actually see if they're a good fit for Star Citizen. We don't want to just come up with an idea and go, "Boom, okay, let's take this hologram decoy or something and it'll be perfect for Star Citizen," go all the way with it, put it in, and then realize that it's not a good fit. So we've looked at gadgets and gone, do we want consumable items? We've got things like that in the game at the moment: we've got the oxygen capsules and we've got the medical pens. So we're playing with the idea of putting different substances in that thing. They'll have different effects on your character. Like, do we want a Stimpak-style thing that will temporarily speed up movement speed? I'm not saying they're going to be illegal substances, but we may be skirting the line a bit there. We want to try out different deployables, so if you think about mines, different types of damage on the mines, so you could even have an EMP mine that might mess with people's radars, explosive mines, more traditional, blow-your-legs-off kind of thing, and even things like remote turrets. Obviously, remote turrets are a little bit difficult to prototype because we need to see if we can make it work with the weapons we've already got. So, like I say, we need to make sure that we can actually do these things. And then we've got things like throwables as well, like explosives and even potentially throwable shields. There's a ton of stuff that we can play around with there. But nothing's set in stone. We've got a lot of ideas we want to play with.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Folks who have followed the project for some time will remember a lot of the stuff like the personal shield generator in our early, early Star Marine prototyping, back when Illfonic was working on the project. Those things were representative of our intention at the time. Many of those things are still our intention, at least to explore the possibilities. So you may see them at some point be introduced into something like Star Marine, and we'll play with them. But I don't believe we have a timetable on that. At the moment, the roadmap is your place to find all questions related to timetable.

Jonny Jacevicius · Senior Systems Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Yep, that's correct. We'll just fit it in when we can.