Calling All Devs - Of Space Stations and Orbits

There's nothing that's come through to me yet in terms of plans for that. However, we do have some interesting plans for player spawning going forward. With the introduction of player habs soon, we're going to need to look at switching up the player spawn logic in the PU a little bit. One thing we'll probably look at in future is the ability to somehow rent different types of room. At the moment, when you spawn in a location in the PU, we're reliant on having enough bedrooms or slots at that location to fit the maximum number of players that could end up at that location in the universe. So for something like aid shelters, if we didn't want 64 or more beds in an aid shelter, then we kind of need this other sort of spawning logic to come online first and systems in place to allow us to map to just one specific bedroom within a spawn location. But I'm sure if that went into the game, went down well with the backers, then there'd be no reason why we couldn't look to then add locations within the universe that support spawning in smaller numbers of players in more remote locations, for example.

You make a good point with Port Olisar. Everybody's spawn room, even though they can't decorate anything, it's the first kind of basic form of player housing. There's one room for every player on these things. They're not instanced within the area or in shards on the server. So for something like this with the current design for that stuff, it would be like a 64-room hotel. An aid shelter becomes: here's a hotel on the surface of Yela, kind of stuff like that. So it's definitely something, I was talking with Todd earlier, definitely something we're going to be pursuing. You'll learn more about player habs. You see them mentioned in ATV quite often. I would expect to learn a bit more about player habs in the coming weeks, without giving any specific details. But definitely something, I think, we see how the player habs situation goes and how that develops and then take the lessons we learn from there.

Yeah, it should be really interesting to see where it goes, because I think spawning is just something that's gradually evolved based on feedback and how the players have liked it. We've had various things in the past, like spawning in GrimHEX if you're a criminal, and now we're doing it more on the last location you flew to, although we've added the bed spawning as well so you can spawn at the bed. So it's kind of an ever-evolving thing as we look to give you guys playing the game the best experience possible.

Well, that's the biggest advantage of running a live environment in the middle of our game development. We don't have to figure everything out ahead of time. We can take it to a step and then we can put it out for you guys. And then, instead of us having to guess, you guys can just tell us and show us how this works.

I think he stuck a second question in there about turrets right there. I'm going to go ahead and take the turrets one, because that's a bonus question. The turrets one, you've seen lots of turret improvements on ATV week after week after week. We've got our US-1 gameplay feature team; that's one of their main primary focuses. Their work is not done and their work is continuing on that stuff. So expect to see more and more continued turret improvements, including that of the controls, as development goes forward. Now, that's because that was a bonus question. One topic per question, guys. So back to joystick and gamepad support for mobiGlas, terminals and MFDs. What do you got, Rob?

Yeah, sure. That's something that's on our radar. We're definitely going to be looking at improving those parts of the game when it comes to the control devices that you can use for them. I think some of the reasoning maybe why they've been slightly under-supported to begin with is, from a development perspective, it can sometimes make a bit more sense to make sure that we've got the features to a position where we feel like we're done prototyping how these screens and things like that work. So once we're comfortable with the actual features themselves working well, then we can look to expand the different ways to control these. It's always a big challenge with the gamepad especially, in terms of getting all the possible features controllable by that, because unlike mouse and keyboard, we have a lot fewer buttons and ways to control it. But it's definitely something we want to do. We want to be aiming towards being able to play the game just using a joystick, just using a gamepad, so you can have just one experience where you're just holding one control device without having to switch to mouse and keyboard and fumble around just because you've done a certain control action. But yeah, it's definitely on our radar. We're looking at getting guys onto these issues over the next few releases. It's something that comes up in player feedback on the release builds we get now, so it's definitely at the front of our minds.

I'm going to amend your statement a little bit. I'm going to say primarily with joystick or primarily with gamepad. I don't know that any aspect of Star Citizen will ever be completely 100% doable with one control scheme. Anybody who's followed the project from the beginning, from the very first hangar module, knows that our control scheme has evolved quite a bit. Many were the times where even just in the iterative patches, like 2.2.0 and 2.2.1 and 2.2.2, the control schemes would change even between those tiny iterations and people would be like, "I just learned what the buttons are." That is one of the challenges of running a live environment in the middle of game development: we are constantly adjusting and working these things out. And when you work on features, while not everybody will have a gamepad, and not everybody will have a HOTAS or a dual-stick setup or anything, we do know that everybody playing Star Citizen has a mouse and keyboard. So it makes sense, as we're developing, as we're figuring out where all the menus go and all the options go and how the UI gets fully realized in the Persistent Universe, that the mouse and keyboard is our focus right now during development. But Chris has stated many times, as have many developers, including Rob just a few minutes ago: joystick users, HOTAS users, dual-stick users, and of course gamepad users will not be forgotten.

Yeah, I think from a developer's point of view, we understand that the majority of players are using mouse and keyboard, but those that aren't are often some of our most passionate players as well. So we don't want to under-support those just because there's fewer of them. So they're definitely just as important to us.

Well, it's that age-old thing where, when you try to get out a release, you have to do a very basic implementation to do a subset of features. And one of those was: if we have a ship, we wanted to make sure to solve the problem that someone can't just go and run up onto the platform and steal it. So we made sure to lock the ship to you and only to you. And then as more stuff came on with the group system, we extended it out to allow other people to take control of it. But it's one of those things where you start working with a little system here and a little system here and they don't link together until you throw the problem at a designer and they go, "Okay, I see the whole big picture. I want to connect it here, here, and here, and here." And the good news is we have thrown this issue at some designers and they have picked out a way to solve this, but we needed some systems like the group system, better faction, and how the player reputation system grows and how you get things and how they interact, and then how they talk to Subsumption. So we have all these little pieces that are slowly getting built so that we can develop them all and have them interchange. So the big answer is, it's coming. The small answer is, we're having these little pieces built; the building blocks are coming, so that we can get this interchange working.

We talk a lot on this show and other shows about the advantages of having a live game environment in the middle of our development. One of the biggest challenges is having to work with these intermediate systems that can't be fully fleshed out before they go to the players, and then finding that one system on its own works okay and one system on its own works okay, and then when they combine they tend to have some unintended consequences. And I think that's what the question here is alluding to.

Oh, yeah, and we implement little by little because we don't want to break things, and we don't want to add some weird complex behavior until we know that those things work before we build on top of it.

So while we have nothing to point to directly right at this moment, this is one of those times where all we can do is say that we're very aware of it. We've got a couple irons in the fire, and as soon as some resources free up and some more systems come online, we hope to have something out for you that'll be a much better experience than what you're having right now with getting CrimeStat for defending your own ship.

On the trip between Crusader and Hurston, how will you ever know where the heck they are if everything is rotating?

I think for now the answer is that they won't maintain a constant meaningful location between the two planets, because these things can rotate so vastly differently. What we are doing is we've turned to these Lagrangian points, and these are, I'm going to butcher the science, so please go out and look this up in your own time.

Lagrange points: it's two planets, and it's a spot between two giant bodies where the gravitational pull works on both of them.

The Sun and Earth, huge bodies. But an example is the Earth: we have these five Lagrange points. So this diagram can do it better than I can try and explain. The yellow dot is the sun, the blue dot is, in this case, Hurston or Crusader. And these points here are like gravity wells: if you put something there, it will stay there and it will rotate relative to the planet. You see these used a lot in sci-fi, and it tends to be things like, "Oh, you'll find a wormhole there," or something like that. We tend to use them a lot more realistically, I guess. These are like the out-of-town shopping mall of our world. So you can find rest stops there and various other things, but also they tend to collect asteroids and such, so you'll find clusters of those there. And what that means is, while you won't get things kept between two planets, you will get things that rotate between the sun and stuff. So you will always be given lots and lots of points, and enough points to get you out of trouble, as it were. You'll still constantly have to go, "Okay, at this point in the orbit, where is the best place to jump? Because it used to be this one, but time's passed and we've rotated around, and now actually I have to jump to this one to get there quicker." Because we don't want to take that out of it. We don't want to just continually give you the easiest way. I'll leave it up to you to figure this out.

Since when has Star Citizen ever taken the easiest way?

Exactly. So this image I'm showing here is an example of how the Lagrangian points are organized with the current static layout of where these planets are. Blue points here being the Lagrange points of Hurston, yellow points being Crusader's Lagrange points. And what you'll see, if I skip on to the next one, this is if all the planets were aligned along this axis. What you see is that you have a Lagrange point behind the planet in relation to the sun, and one in front. These are the weak points. I believe also that the third one is a weak point as well, but the third one down here is on the absolute opposite side of the orbit. And then you get the stronger points here, about 60 degrees either side of where the planet is. And what you can see from this is actually it gives us a really cool... [gap in transcript] That's what we're going to do. Obviously, this means that every planet has these five other points that could have rest stops in them, and probably likely will have rest stops in them. So while you can't keep these things directly between planets, there'll be enough there to get you where you want to go. That's the plan. Obviously, we don't have these things rotating and we don't have all of them in. So that would be 20 points for this, because it has four planets. We don't have all those spinning around, so it still needs testing, but that's the plan.