Developers answer community questions ahead of 3.0: the stamina and oxygen system, which ships are locked for 3.0 (Aurora, Cutlass Black, Nox, Aquila), ship price increases, and the Delta Patcher. They also cover Freelancer variants, Reclaimer, Phoenix, Terrapin and 300 series schedules.
Now, Ryab Rogers is talking about the stamina system segment that aired in yesterday's Around the Verse. As far as the O2 tank and the suit oxygen, they are the same source. Basically, what they're saying is that they've used the room system, and the room system is what holds all the various oxygens. So there's basically a tiny room inside your helmet is how they've managed to fix this. So basically that room that's inside your helmet is the suit oxygen. And the suit oxygen pulls its oxygen from the O2 tank that you carry with you. And of course when you take the helmet off, you remove the oxygen room.
Everyone is alive and well here. We have sunny skies. Most of the crazy stuff going on was south of us. We just had a lot of rain. But yeah, our thoughts are out with everybody down closer to the coast that's having to deal with it.
Matt Sherman has talked about this a couple times in Spectrum chat. Basically, in fitting all the gameplay that they want the Cutlass to be able to handle, toilet gameplay was low on the priorities. So it's one of those things, you can't have everything. It's like specking out a character in an RPG. You can't have 50 strength, 50 stamina, 50 intelligence, 50 charisma. To put something in, you have to take something out, and the toilet was the unfortunate thing. Consequence of the improved gameplay for the Cutlass.
And I would say that kind of dates back to just the very original concept of Drake. They cut corners to make a ship that, and I hate to say this, but everybody say it with me together, to make a ship that punches above...
Stefan, that's not a question that will have an answer until it comes time to build out the other Freelancers. Right now, the current flyable Freelancer is the most recent version of the Freelancer, which has had several revamps over the years, trying to bring it in line with all the current systems. We won't know what the MAX, the MIS, and the DUR have until it comes time to build those out. So stay tuned.
TL;DRThe camera cuts happen in every episode because ums and ahs are edited out and covered with B-roll, and the long stamina segment didn't have enough B-roll to hide them.
So, for those of you who have watched ATV yesterday, you'll notice the camera jumped around quite a bit. This actually happens in every ATV. It's how we get rid of the ums and the ahs and the pregnant pauses, because our developers are fantastic at making video games, but they're not always the most comfortable or experienced on camera. So if you remember ATV back in the olden days, there used to be lots of ums and ahs and you all would make plenty of fun of people who would do that. In recent months, we've gone to cutting those ums and ahs out. We usually cover that with a variety of B-roll. B-roll is, of course, the gameplay that you see that goes over when a person talks. Because the stamina system segment was a whopping 30 minutes yesterday, there was not enough B-roll to cover all the cuts. So basically, you're faced with two options at that point. You keep the ums and the ahs, in which case the 30-minute segment becomes 35 minutes or whatnot. I'm just pulling numbers out of the air. Or you cut them out and you get a more comfortable flow with the conversation. So that's what happened. Basically, it's the cost of doing business. It happens in every single ATV. It's a perfectly normal thing. It's just normally we try our best to have as much B-roll to cover those cuts as we can.
Yeah, and seriously, this is one of the side effects of having such open development, where we're really showing you the raw and genuine side of the project. These developers, a lot of them, they know how to program, they know how to do art. They didn't sign up to be on camera to talk about stuff all of the time, but they're more than willing to, and that's just in the effort of trying to uphold our philosophy of being open. And so with that, you'll get some ums and some ahs.
TL;DRThe Evocati Test Flight comes with specific test instructions, such as particular modes, ships or locations, because they need far more testers than the QA teams, and a list of tests is being prepared.
Basically, the Evocati Test Flight is not just a, we don't just release it to them and they just get to play things early. We release it to them and we have specific test instructions. We want all of you to jump into this game mode with these ships and try to do this. We want you all to fly to this moon in these vehicles and go to this point. That's what he was referring to. There are several specific things that we know that we're going to need a large group of people to test, far more than our QA teams in four studios around the world. So that's what he was talking about. We're creating the list of specific tests that we're going to assign to ETF in order to do.
Yeah, and it is very common for there to be structured test cases. Obviously not everybody has visibility on exactly what Evocati is doing, but a lot of it in the past, we've had Ahmed and BeardedCIG go in there and just sometimes it's like, nobody fire your weapons, everybody line up, right? Everybody should fire your weapons at the exact same time. And then they're running debuggers in the background just to kind of see performance and stuff like that. So a lot of it's structured and organized. And so, yeah, just what Jared said.
I wouldn't hold your breath. We've got plenty of planets already in the pipeline, already scheduled to build. You should check out the star map at some point. I think it would be a hard sell for me to convince them to add one more when we have so many to build already.
Very, very, very soon. I want to do a live stream of Special Ops 1 and I want to do another museum as soon as we possibly can. One of the absolutely fantastic things about recovering from surgery: it turns out I haven't been able to see for two or three years. The thing that happened to my eye was slowly happening over the last several years and I just put it out of my mind. I don't want to deal with this. So I've been literally flying blind on all of the previous streams.
We just didn't do one this year. That's all. We had a lot going on. This year, it's just because, when you do something every single year, it kind of loses its charm, I think. It's not a unique item at that point. I like when we shake things up, personally.
Well, we were also between flair teams at the time. I remember Behaviour did the previous ones. When we do a trophy or something that has to be in the game at an event, it gets planned eight months before and done in advance to impact the game. So in this case, I think it just worked out that we were making the transition from the team in Canada to the team in Austin and it just didn't happen.
That's one of the things that you guys will help us determine through testing. So when that time comes, when the first capital ship is introduced into the game and you guys can play with it, that's one of the things where whatever it's introduced at won't be where it ends. The likelihood of us getting it perfectly right the very first time is incredibly low. That's what game development is. So the virtue of having a live environment in the middle of game development is that we don't have to make those decisions ahead of time. We can put them out there with a set of stats and whatnot, and then you guys can play with it and you guys can give us the feedback and we can adjust. So the answer is you guys will tell us when that time comes.
Remember that there is a Subscriber section in every Monday's Citizens of the Stars where Alexis tells you all the latest subscriber information. So if you are a subscriber and you're wondering what's up, I recommend checking that out every Monday.
The build that we had at Gamescom was very, very early. From what we saw, it didn't look like many of the ships had shields at all. I reserve the right to be completely wrong about that, but between DJ and Gamble and Meyer, that was our kind of estimation based on our gameplay.
I think they were missing, and it's important to remember that they were updating the builds on the show floor, to a point where, if you remember, day one we had atmospheric entry and re-entry effects. Day two, they were gone. Day three, they were back. I mean, it's a perfect insight into game development. So the Nox seeming like it wasn't exactly how it should be during one week, I'm sure it was different the week before, different the week after.
TL;DRHow long oxygen lasts in space isn't fixed; the first version will be adjusted over time based on tester feedback, so the current value is not the final one.
It's basically the same answer as the Idris question. Whatever it is today isn't necessarily what it's going to be tomorrow, isn't necessarily what it's going to be when it comes out, isn't going to be what it is three weeks after it comes out. That's a thing where we will put our first iteration of it out, and then you guys will test it, you guys will give us feedback, and then we'll continue to adjust. It's all part of running a live environment during testing. So how long the oxygen will last in space is a fluid concept that will be tweaked and changed as time goes on.
But let me tell you exactly why I'm really excited about running out of oxygen and dying in space. In 20 years, I've killed thousands and thousands of video game monsters and giant crabs and evil knights and so on. But the stories I keep coming back to in my head after all this time are when you run out of food in the Ultima games and your companions have to starve slowly. It's cool to see that again.
No, it's exciting. I only had that small sliver of 3.0 gameplay for the four days on the show floor. But as DJ and Gamble and Meyer showed, we're building the tools, the crazy things that you guys are getting to do with these things. That's what excites me most about 3.0, is watching the emergent gameplay that you guys invent with the tools that we give you.
Based on the four days on the Gamescom show floor, I absolutely guarantee it. Not an official competition that we'll put on, but I have no doubt there will be orgs out there perpetuating and organizing the suborbital release and catch, because it was a lot of fun and quite challenging. It took us four days to fully get it.
I actually don't know the answer to that, Whiskey, but the reason I'm bringing it up is because we are looking to have a follow-up segment with the FaceWare guys in the near future. So I will do my best to make sure that question gets in there, because I would like to know.
I'm confident we will overcome any issue. As with anything in Star Citizen or game development in general, it will take longer than we would like, but it will work out. And that's the positive side of all this, is we have the time to do it right.
If you want to see a very, very, very early look at the physical design process of it, you can check out images that were taken from our Dragon Con panel just last weekend.
Britton, if you remember from our alien language videos from before, he was just in this office earlier this month for a little summit with Dave Haddock and the lore team. So it is still something in active development. So stay tuned.
They were working on the Xi'an language. Getting the alphabet and a doc that helps people understand how to speak in Xi'an, even formal and informal ways. It's really cool.
We even had some new Xi'an for the Nox sale. On the Nox sale page, there were these little vertical banners with Xi'an writing. And a handful of folks spent a good week, week and a half trying their best to decipher it. And they got very, very close.
Yes, they will. Not for everything. The five or six ships that are becoming flyable will go up a little bit. And we'll add a couple more permanent ships to the store.
One of the things that often gets asked of us is, what is the value of pledging early? What is the value of buying these ships at concept stage? And that is one of the biggest things that we can do for people, is offer them the lowest price at concept stage. So some of the ways that we add value to that is through this.
Yes, it's the single-player component of Star Citizen. It allows you to be an enlisted officer and fight against the Vanduul in a thrilling single-player adventure.
For those of you asking more Squadron 42 questions, my answer was my polite way of saying that there's not much we can talk about for Squadron 42. It is the one aspect of our development process we can keep spoiler free. So it's very important to us that we don't spoil any of that for you. So generally speaking, we're going to stay away from Squadron 42 questions.
TL;DRSpectrum 2.6 is independent of 3.0 but development is slower than normal because Turbulent's limited resources are focused on the Delta Patcher, with the next two patches already designed.
No. Spectrum 2.6 is completely independent. It's just that right now a lot of Turbulent's resources are spent on the Delta Patcher and getting that up and running. Like all things, there's only a finite number of resources. Even with 500 people across five studios in the world and then Turbulent on top, there's still only so many things that we can work on at a time, and a lot of Turbulent's focus right now is on the Delta Patcher. So the next two Spectrum patches, they're all kind of designed, they're all kind of laid out with the features that they want. It's just development is slower than normal while resources are attached to the Delta Patcher. We all know how important the Delta Patcher is. So it makes sense why their focus is there at the moment.
We're really looking forward to it. It's basically like any late 90s space sim where they figured out they could add a layer of complexity by having three different power settings and you have to balance between shields and engines and guns. So we're all on guns right now at Turbulent.
Yes, it's my fault that it's not out yet, because I'm supposed to write an article for it that David Ladyman has very politely been on me about. So I'm going to do that this weekend and then we'll get our sample and the process will continue on. But it is 100% my fault that it's not done right now.
Yes. If you CCU to the Aquila, that comes with the Ursa and the Merlin. So the Aquila's at a terrific value at the moment, and one of the ships very likely to go up in price for 3.0.
TL;DRThe new ship matrix is intended to come with the website update, with a second data pass under way, and it won't be perfect on release and will need further work.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is being worked on, and they're currently doing a pretty large revamp to our website just to make it more intuitive and upgrade it. And the ship matrix, I think, might be coming with that, right?
The new matrix is far more complex than the old matrix. That's why the old matrix that's currently available on the website has gotten so far into disarray. With the implementation of Item 2.0 and the ship component system, there was just no equivalence between the old system and the new. So he is helping us out with Turbulent to make sure that the new system covers all the various ship components that are necessary to fully describe to you the capabilities of a ship. We had Kirk Tome first. Kirk Tome did a great job going through all 103 of our ship variants and collecting all that data. And then even after that happened, there were still discrepancies, because it's 103 ships all with 30 to 40 different components and stats and stuff. So John Crewe has made another pass. We will go and do a sanity check with that. If we need a third pass after that, we'll keep going. But yeah, it's a lot of work and we know how important it is to a lot of people. So we're taking our time with it to make sure it's as good as it can be when it rolls out. It will still need work after it rolls out. It's not going to be perfect when it comes out. It will be the first iteration of this new system. But top men are on it.
We have seen your threads on Spectrum requesting it. We have forwarded that feedback and we have followed up with that feedback, because we want it just as much.
TL;DRYes, ships are built independently of patches and slotted into whichever patch comes next once they are ready, rather than being scheduled for specific patches.
Yes. Ships are built independently of our patch system. In fact, one of the most common questions we get is, will this ship be in this patch? And the honest answer is, basically, they work on ships until they become ready, and then when the ship is ready, it goes into whatever the next patch is. So it's not that this ship is scheduled for 3.1 or this ship is scheduled for 3.3. The ships are actively being built at all times. And when they become ready, that's when we slot them into a patch. Like, for instance, when 3.0 was first announced and planned, the updated Aurora was not in 3.0. It wasn't until the development of 3.0 took longer and went on through months that the Aurora became ready. And so now it goes in.
Yes, they did. They did that real darn fast. We thought the Aurora was originally going to be a 3.1 ship, and they got their work done quickly, and 3.0 development is taking what it took, so that's how it goes. When it's ready, that's the patch it goes into. So when we say when it's ready, it's not that we're being sly or coy with the answer. It's the legitimate truth. When it becomes ready, it goes into the patch that's there for it.
TL;DRNo, the Reclaimer is not complete; earlier remarks about three rooms left covered only ship art, and technical art and programming still remain, so it will be some time yet.
No. If you saw ATV, I guess it was almost two months ago now, they said they still had three rooms left to do, and that was just in the ship art phase. Then, of course, once the ship art is done, it goes to our technical artists, where they make all the LODs, they make all the damage. Then it goes to programming. They have to hook up all the game systems and stuff like that. So there was a big misconception about two months ago when our art team said there's only three rooms left for the art. They were speaking only for the ship art. There's far more that goes into making a ship flyable and usable in the Star Citizen universe. And the Reclaimer, being a very large ship, still has to go through all those other phases. So it'll be some time yet before the Reclaimer is in the game.
Yes, it does open up the door to potential hotfixes. And also, I just wanted to tell you guys that working near the DevOps guys here and a lot of the people that have been working on the Delta Patcher, everybody's super excited about it. I recommend you watch the Citizens of the Stars episode from four weeks ago with Mike Jones. He talks a little bit about how the work that they ended up doing was above their expectations with the results that they got. And they're really excited about it coming online.
The 300 series rework has not begun. It is currently scheduled for the end of the year. However, that's a schedule dependent on other things. Like the artist that's going to be doing it, he's got things to do before that. And how long or short those take will determine when he gets to go to the 300. So we're thinking it'll start in December. That's what's on the schedule. But honestly, it's like all other aspects of development. It depends on everything that's got to happen before it.
No, the Cutlass Blue is not ready on the schedule. The Cutlass Blue is scheduled to be worked on in that schedule. It is not a 3.0 ship. Josh Coons is still working on the Blue and the Red simultaneously. So that work is still ongoing. That's basically one of those things I was just talking about. The schedule is the period of time when they were supposed to start work. It's no indication of when it's going to finish. Things will take as long as they take to make.
Yes. Two weeks from today, Josh Herman will be returning for another Happy Hour Game Dev. You create a creature. So, yes, we are going to try this again. So that's our next Happy Hour in two weeks.
Yes, he's on our wish list for something. In fact, without promising anything, I'm going to pursue that for our next Subscribers Town Hall. So, again, without promising, I have to talk to him and see what his schedule's like and whatnot.
Same deal as the Carrack. It's not actively worked on right now, so there's no information. When its time comes up in the schedule, you can be certain we will let you know. So I promise we're not going to keep that a secret. When work on the Carrack or the Merchantman begins, we'll let you know.
Yes, what I'm happiest with about our output in the last year or so is we share the ships when they go into production rather than, the first two years or so we kind of kept it until the ship was totally ready, and now we share the process more and it's great.
It's one of the virtues of having our more in-depth studio reports in ATV and stuff like that. So trust me, when it goes into production, we'll let you know.
TL;DRThe Phoenix is waiting on the artist, who must finish the Cutlass Blue and Red first; recent material tests were side experimentation on an old model, not Phoenix progress.
Josh Coons is moving to the Phoenix as soon as he's done with the Cutlass Blue and Red. That's one of those things we talked about where the artist is tied up in one thing before he can move on to another thing. He is the artist scheduled for the Phoenix, and he's the artist scheduled for the Cutlass Blue and the Red. So he has to finish the work on this before he can start the work on that.
Yeah, ATV about a month ago, they showed some material tests. It was just him on the side playing with some material stuff. But as eagle-eyed viewers pointed out, it was still the existing Connie Andromeda model and not the Phoenix model. So it was just him playing with materials on the side, but his focus right now is still the Cutlass Blue and Red at the moment. So he's got to finish those before he can move on to the Phoenix.
The Terrapin is being built out here in LA. Jin is working on it over in that half of the office along with his team, Elwin and Daniel and others. It's looking awesome. I've gone on the record as saying I was not a fan of the Terrapin concept. It wasn't until Jin started building it out in 3D where I really saw the virtue of the ship for me personally. So I'm in love with the ship now after seeing the work that we've been doing here in LA on it. So I'm excited about getting that into the game when that comes.
Yes, we are. CloudImperiumGames.com/jobs. We have positions around the world. So go take a look. Everything you need to know about the positions is there, and reach out.
For those asking about whether this ship will be in 3.0 or that ship, the 3.0 ships are pretty much locked at this point. It's the updated Aurora models. It's the updated Cutlass Black model. It's the Dragonfly. It's the Nox. It's the Prospector. It's the Constellation Aquila. And the Ursa Rover. Those are the new vehicles being added for 3.0.
You mean different space suits will have different oxygen? I don't know the answer to that, but that's a curious question. I'm going to see if I can find that out.
Just a reminder, we haven't talked about this in a long time, but this is completely normal. Generally, you just don't see the game at this point in its development pipeline. So coming from QA before community, this is totally normal. You're just getting to peek behind the curtain and actually getting to download and play something in a much earlier state than a game is traditionally shared with the public. So no, we don't mind at all. It's all part of the process.
I think there's sort of this sense that, oh, if you work at the hot dog factory, you definitely don't want to eat hot dogs. It's not like that in gaming at all. We are eager to eat as many hot dogs as possible.