Star Citizen Live Q&A: Distribution Centers

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

So yes and no. So the main form, the main structure, that is going to look the same, but there are feathering assets around each DC to make them all unique, I suppose. Some are going to have quite a large footprint. I mean, it's a big thing on the ground anyway, but there's going to be a bit more of a spread on some of them, and some of them are going to be smaller. But yes, visually they will be different from the exterior so that you do feel like you're going to a different place each time. Also we have factions that own each one, and their branding will be on the building, the name of the place will be different. You'll go into the lobby and that corporate-facing area is going to be branded to that faction. So that'll be quite novel, which would be nice. But they are not just a copy and paste of the same, even though I just said that. They do feel different, I would say, when you're flying to them. And also some of them are, where they are on planets, next to interesting features. So hopefully you'll get a recognition of, 'Oh, this is the place on Stanton 1 because it's next to this lovely sea and the sun never goes down.' 'Oh, I know the one you're talking about. I'll meet you there' type of thing, which will be something that we actually thought about rather than just going one here, one here, one here.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You say Stanton when you mean Hurston.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

Yes. Sorry.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

So in this initial release, it will just be planets. We've considered having them on moons, but due to time constraints, we won't be releasing initially on moons. This is just because I believe that the wings should be different when you're in an airless atmosphere. The way you're interacting with cargo and moving things around in zero G is going to be different to when you're in gravity. So because we don't have those things yet, we won't be releasing them yet. So for the moment, for this release, planets only.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And when you say planets, I assume that we can take out Crusader and we can take out ArcCorp. Crusader because there is no surface that we can reach, and ArcCorp because it's not made in the same way as Hurston and Microtech. So these are 13 split amongst Hurston and Microtech for 3.23.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

Yeah.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

I think down the line, yeah, certainly. I think distribution centers are obviously an enormous location and they needn't just stand alone on the surface. There's no reason why potentially in the future they could have outlying structures that supply them and house the people that work there. So they could be very large, and with a large population there's a lot of scope for lots of different gameplay. So like salvaging, like mining, expanding the delivery missions and the hauling missions so they have more variety, more scope. There's tons of stuff to do as well. So for me, the 3.23 release of distribution centers, it's like them in their most basic form. This is where we start, where we take it in the future.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That's the first iteration. We were talking about this before the show, actually. We were talking about ideas like the distribution center was raided and now they don't have the ore that they were supposed to have in stock in order to fulfill an order. So they might send you out to go mine this ore and bring it back and we're just going to put it in the box and pretend like it was always there. Or maybe the distribution center can crank out some kind of detritus. Not toxic waste, but some kind of refuse that then needs to be broken down. Like, 'Hey, we could sure use help. Go in the back and, using salvage, break down all this excess garbage that we're producing through whatever.' There's definitely opportunities to come up with additional mission types and have it tie into other professions in the future.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

Well, there's the hauling. That's the major one. They're distribution centers, after all. So they tie into this new hauling loop. So you're taking massive quantities of cargo between different places. There's all the various what you might call the courier, like the box delivery missions. We're hoping to rework those somewhat so you're more of a FedEx driver than you are now. So there's scope for those. There's scope for delivery missions. Just internally, these distribution centers are so large, you can have delivery missions just inside them, like taking the cargo from, let's say, the storage room to the warehouse, the warehouse to the freight terminal, freight terminal to a little base on the perimeters of the center. So there's tons and tons of scope for just moving stuff around, distributing stuff within the center, you might say.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

Not at the moment, but I think going on the fact that there are rundown or abandoned versions of other locations, there's no reason why we couldn't have versions of the DCs which were in the same category. And then you could have DCs in pirate systems like Pyro, for example, where they are kind of up for, maybe it's a bit of a capture-the-flag type episode on it, but with players. That would be quite cool to have. Who owns this distribution center? Does it change hands a lot? Are you then competing with more established factions in the game? That would be pretty great. But yeah, right now we haven't got plans to do that, but I don't see why we shouldn't do that in the future.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I mean, you're right. We do make abandoned or derelict versions of everything else. These brand new things look cool and then you rough them up and you mess them up and they just seem that much more real. So I would be very surprised if the call isn't made at some point.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

Yeah, I think in the first release of anything, thinking about Pyro right now, you need an occupied version. And then when you have that, it's kind of like you've done all the setup already. You're just making new overlays, which then dress it in a certain way. So the hardest part is the initial release. But then after that, it's still work to get these things done, but it's not, I suppose, as much work, hopefully. I don't know.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I've seen that when they were making the derelict ships, it's a lot of work to break them up in a way that's not just crap.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

Yeah, I suppose with ships though, it's different because the ship is formed and they have to unform it. Whereas with us, our base rooms already exist. It's just new dressing on top of them.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

Yeah, I don't see why not. Well, I mean, who knows? It could be that there's a motorway from one to the next, but I think it depends on what the next location is. If that's a big town or what have you, then maybe you have roads within it, but then it kind of turns into dirt roads and then blends back into the DCs or something like that. It would be cool to have: this is where the DC is, and then five clicks this way there's a small town, five clicks this way it's like an ore depository or something. And then you've got a kind of a link there; you could just spend your time going between the three places, grabbing the cash, as it were. But yeah, I don't see why not in the future to have roads. It was interesting, when I did the presentation at CitizenCon, it got a big woo for roads and I was kind of like, okay, didn't know this was a thing. So I'm looking forward to when people start doing more races and you actually then have to go through, maybe you have to go into the... oh wait, hold on, no, Sam says don't get vehicles in there. So yeah, maybe you can incorporate some DCs into those races and then have fun getting around those corners quickly is all I'm going to say.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

Oh, I mean, in the future, I think, yeah, there's definitely opportunity for that. You could have it so that the organization that operates it is just the initial owner of the location, and then really it could potentially just come down to manpower, who can actually defend it. Who owns it is just like, well, who's got the biggest gun?

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think when they talk about operate though, I mean like generate missions. Besides just 'I want to hold this and nobody else can have it,' is there room here for the idea that these might be operable, that these might benefit an organization?

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

I think one thing that the resource network might eventually lead into is the opportunity to generate stuff. The distribution center, for example, if it's a Greycat distribution center, it could potentially manufacture things. There's no reason why not. So if there's a player organization out there which essentially owns this facility, then they would have the de facto rights to manufacture that stuff. But then that kind of bleeds into the question of, well, where do they get the materials from? You can't manufacture things out of thin air. So you need a supply chain, and obviously these things that you do manufacture, they need to go somewhere. So you need a buyer. So it's this whole supply chain. Owning the distribution center is just one piece of the puzzle.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We're doing a bit of theorycrafting here right now. The nickel version of the answer is that there's no plan for it at this point.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Well, we already know that. That's in addition to the existing.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

Yeah. They will remain and DCs will just be there as well.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's one of the reasons we replaced the name. We were calling these new underground facilities for a while and it just got confusing. People thought they would replace it. No, we named them because these are in addition.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

Great question. Well, what's known is we want them to be the end game. So you've done the story or what have you. You've explored your career as much as you want to. And then you can dip into these end-game missions, as it were. And this is where you're going to find super rare loot or super high-value items. And they're going to take place at DCs which are owned by big corporations or big brands or big factions. And like you said before, they were the new UGFs, underground facilities. And we still have the idea that some of them do go underground, and that's where the raid takes place. So not only do you have to fight your way through the airspace of the DC, then realise it's too hot, so land, get your ground vehicles out and approach on foot, you've got to get into the thing and then down into the raid. So they're going to be difficult. They're going to expect you to be A-game people going in. You have your squad all kitted out. Everyone has a role to play. When the resource network comes online, you're going to have to work strategically, I can't really say long words, to try and get in. Which is going to be great. And then what happens if, when you're in there, reinforcements are getting called in but you've disabled everything, so it's actually even harder for you to get out? We want it to be tough, but we also want you to be rewarded for doing them as well. So that's kind of the general overview that we want. We now have to go and do that.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I want to be real clear. This is not a 2024 thing. Raids are not a 2024 thing. It's not on the calendar for 2024. Don't even ask me beyond that. But as Star Citizen continues to develop, as we continue to harden the systems and it becomes closer and closer to the game that we want it to be, we're going to continuously ask ourselves these MMO-related questions. We don't want every trapping of every MMO that you ever see out there. We're not trying to be every single game that ever was. But there are certain tenets and there are certain tropes, if you will, of an MMO space that interest us, that we like. And I can see us trying a few of them. I mean, organizations are just guilds by another name. So not every MMO trope is bad. Some of them are expected. Some of them are frankly necessary to achieve the experience that we want. Raids will be an interesting experiment for us when that time comes, because we don't have a health bar, a lot of the traditional class systems and stuff like that. So it'll be an interesting experiment when that time comes, and I'm looking forward to us trying it. Will it work? Will it not work? Maybe it's going to be a hover mode. Maybe it's going to be a master mode. You don't know. I like that we try things. But again, that's not a 2024 thing.

John Griffiths · Lead Environment Artist, Distribution Centers product owner

Yeah, I think additionally to that, I've been harping on about how big these things are on the ground for quite a while, and I just don't think anyone realizes how big they are. So I'm really looking forward to them going out and people going, 'Oh, he was telling the truth this whole time.' But if you think some of the missions that they're going to release with are going to be difficult, then think, okay, so if this is how hard it is now, just think where we can get to when raids come online. And you think it's big on the ground now, just think of the networks you're going to have to go through to conquer these raids. So just bear that in the back of your mind when these do go out.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

So I think the first thing to bear in mind about distribution centers is they're very varied. Some of them will welcome players, some of them won't, but they're also varied in terms of level of security. So some of them will have security at the lower end. If you imagine an extremely well-fortified bunker, that's like the lowest level of security for this distribution center. For the highest level of security, you're talking something alongside a rest stop, that kind of level. Lots and lots of turrets, probably a green zone, missile turrets as well. They're going to be about as well fortified as we can make them for 3.23.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

This is the broad sort of gameplay flavor. So we've got distribution centers which we're terming friendly. And on the opposite end of the scale we've got distribution centers which are hostile, and then in between you have a whole range which are just mixed. There's some combination of all the different factors put together in different levels.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

A hostile one, so it's separate to the security level, but a hostile one basically does not welcome players. If you enter, regardless of who you are, what you've done, what your reputation is with any kind of faction, they're going to shoot at you with whatever kind of weaponry they have around. They will have turrets, they will have trespass zones, they will have security guards all over the place. That's a hostile one. It's like Chris when he sees me coming.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

The friendly ones are much more welcoming. They will allow players in, as long as they have a neutral reputation with the owner. They will allow players in and you can just go in, you can land, you can request landing access, you can get in the hangar, you can walk around, no restrictions, no holds barred, just go wherever you please, no problem.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And my understanding is that in 3.23, these have an additional layer of security.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

Yeah, so the friendly ones are going to be more towards the rest stop level of security.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So with green zones?

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

With green zones.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So for 3.23, because we don't have the full law and order system, some of these distribution centers will have a green zone. And that'll protect the players, those lawful, unaggressive players. I don't think we'll outright tell them which is which. It's one of those things we like people to discover on their own. But you'll discover, okay, missions to this distribution center and this distribution center are safe. I can be a lawful, unaggressive player and not get harassed. And then there's the super aggressive, where it's just, 'I just want to be a pain in the ass for somebody,' and then there'll be the collection of ones in between.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Players saw it in the Pyro Playground. Some of these stations were supposed to have faction-oriented NPC guards that are supposed to stop griefing. That's all part of this law and order system that's still being developed and still coming online. But this crime stat system, even that's going to evolve to the point of having harder crime stats and crime stats that don't entirely wipe away. Or you got rid of your crime stat, but there's a database that still remembers that you had one, and you start getting too many of them, it's like, maybe you're just a permanent criminal.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

I think there's a drive to make the security side more, how can I put it, robust in their pursuit of justice and more persistent in it. And once you are caught, to make the punishment more severe and fitting. So it's not flat. It scales.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And I want to say, what we're talking about right now is not the theorycrafting stuff that we talked about before. There is actually a very detailed law and order plan in place. Things that we're working towards; I can't tell you what patch, one patch, two patch, three patch, four patch from now, whenever it's ready and online. But obviously we saw what happened in Pyro Playground. We can see what's happening in a lot of these places with griefing. And there are many things in place that we want to attempt. People will then naturally ask, well, why don't you just tell us about it? Because we need to try things. We need to try this, and if that doesn't work, then we're going to try this, and if that isn't working, we're going to try this. You don't just have one idea. You have an A idea, B idea, C idea, and you want to test these things. We sit there and say we're going to do this, and then we end up not going with A and going with C, and it's like, well, you told us you were going with A. Well, A didn't work. We had to test it. So let us continue to do some refinement and work on it. And I promise, like all things, considering that it's literally my job to do so, we will inform and share the design and the intention of it when we feel that it's ready to be done so. But I just want to say that that's not theorycrafting. That's on the calendar.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

So a technical artist will a lot of times bridge the gap between an engineer and an artist. So the artist will make the art content and make all this really amazing stuff. And then the engineers will write all of the kind of backend tools and work on the engine and just give us the ability to do these amazing things that we get to play. But there's this in-between thing that happens where the artists need to interface with this code that the engineers write. And so what a technical artist will do sometimes is they'll write scripts to help interface with some of the more backend code, whether it is you're in your 3D program and you need to export something, or we need to maybe make something faster so the artist can make more content at kind of a faster rate. Or sometimes it's just, things can get complicated and we're trying to figure out, wait, how do we do this? And so it could be as simple as how do we make an explosion, or how do we get this helmet to look as awesome as possible. And so a lot of times we'll take the vision from Chris or a director and then we'll be like, can we do this? Can we hit the benchmark that we want to hit? And sometimes we can and sometimes we can't. And if we can't, we'll step in. We'll figure out how to make it faster. We'll figure out how to make it better. And we'll train up artists. We'll help write documentation. And so our job a lot of times is to help artists be successful, but at the same time really embrace the engineer tools and be able to make sure they reach the full capacity of what they're able to do.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

I came aboard the project in the spring of 2012.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So before we announced.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

That's correct.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

My job was anything and everything. If it needed to be lit, I would light it. If there needed to be particles, I'd do some particles. If I needed to optimize an asset, optimize an asset. If I needed to make an asset, I would make an asset. We had a pretty clear vision of what Chris wanted to do for the initial crowdfunding campaign, but we didn't have funding yet. And I was young and I was cheap, and I would do anything to work on a project like this. Chris asked me if I was willing to work on it. I knew how to do some things, as an environment artist. But he's like, 'Hey, do you know how to light? Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to do that?' And I was like, 'Yeah, of course I do. I can do all that. Yeah, no problem.' He goes, 'All right, you're hired.' And then I got off the phone and I just started Googling YouTube on how to do all these things.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

I want to say that there was probably, gosh, I was working with David Haddock a lot. There's probably five or six, honestly. But we also had, because we were working with CryEngine, access to people like Sean Tracy.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

He wasn't actually an employee yet. He was moonlighting.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

Yeah, exactly. So I had a lot of interactions with these really talented, experienced people with these tools. And so while internally we had a very limited staff, we did have some resources to help get the trailer out the door, obviously.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There's this belief out there, when people talk about how long Star Citizen's been in development, I see it often cited that, oh, they were working on it for a whole year before, or it was 1,100 people back then. No. Five people were working on it for the time period before it got out, and some of them were only hired in that same year. And it wasn't making the game. It was making this demo, this video demo.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

Yeah, it was a vertical slice is what we were calling it. We were like, what is the game? And can we create a small section of what that game could potentially be? And we knew that we didn't want it to be an offline render. We knew that we wanted to build everything in-engine, and we wanted the thrusters physically firing, which Chris was working on and coding. And so we just wanted to see, can we really make this thing? And one thing that was very clear after the demo of the trailer is we knew we could. And luckily the fans believed in us too.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

Well, my old boss had worked with him in the past, and then the company that I worked for lost the funding. And so I was unemployed. And so Chris was talking to his own peer and co-worker and friend, who happened to be my ex-boss, and told him about the project. And so he said, 'I know this kid that doesn't have a job, and he'll go for it.' With that recommendation, I got the phone call, and I did not expect it. It came out of absolutely nowhere. I'm at my friend's house, and I get this call, and it's Chris Roberts, and I'm like, 'Shut the dogs up. Everybody be quiet. Chris Roberts is on the phone.' And everyone's like, 'Yeah, right.' And sure enough.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So you knew who he was.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

I knew who he was, yeah. Well, I knew who he was because I was a big fan of Mark Hamill and all that from the Wing Commander games. And so I thought the Wing Commander games were fun, but I was really into the fact that we had full motion video in a game. And I thought that was the coolest thing ever. And obviously, I liked Star Wars. I was drawn to it. And so when I knew that, I was like, oh my gosh, here we go. This is going to be a 3D version of that.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

Well, here's to me the biggest change between then and now. Back then, we had to figure out what to do. And a lot of things were like, is this even possible? And it was just one hurdle at a time. And it's hard to figure out how long something is going to take because it's never been done before. So how do you schedule it? But now we're confident. We know what needs to be done. We know how to do it. And now we're finishing things. And that's the biggest difference: before, we were figuring it out, and now we're doing the darn thing.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

I think they would all get us fired. Back then it was just so fun but difficult. When I was in the Austin office, we were basically in a house and our offices were just hallways. So when you would walk down the hallway, there would be a desk in the hallway. So if the programmer or artist would back up their chair, they'd back into you and pin you against the wall. And so we just had a lot of good times there. And now we're in this amazing spaceship with a thousand devs or whatever. And it's quite different, but it's special in its own way. And back then was special in its own way.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

Yeah, totally. I did this on my own accord. I'm not trying to say that the company is making me work too hard or whatever. I'll blame the backers for this one. I'll go ahead and explain myself now. Once we did the crowdfunding campaign and the funding started coming in, one thing that we wanted to do was keep delivering content, because we felt that if they were going to continue to give us money, we needed to give them content. So David Haddock would keep writing new systems and new planets and descriptions. And I would do renders of the planets and give a visual representation to go with the story and to go with the lore. And we decided every $50,000, we would post another system that was backed. And the backers were giving money so quick that we were not able to create things fast enough. And we were just working around the clock because they were like, 'Hit another milestone, hit another milestone. Let's get another thing going. Let's get another thing going.' Taxing, to say the least.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

Well, the first thing is, just going down this road, thank you to all the fans that have been with us for 12 years. My goodness, right? And they're out there. Besides that, I'm still working. I'm still doing my thing. I'm working on heads. We're working on character creators. And we're just trying to get these characters looking so awesome in the verse. And we got some hashtag-soon things coming. And it's exciting, and I'm excited.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We'll be talking about the Character Customizer in Alpha 3.23. I think it's scheduled four or five weeks from now in ISC. I was just talking to Sean Tracy about it yesterday. We want to get a few more things in there before we show it to you.