Star Citizen Live: Adventures in Spaceships

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

The way that I've described vehicle experience is, it's about the feel of certain experiences from the game. So it's the cockpit experience and the way that feels, the way we translate g-forces and speeds, accelerations. And it's the way we do that through the third-person camera. But it's also the balance of the ships and the balance of the game in general. And we're also looking at the combat experience. It's how the combat works and feels and how we communicate that to the player and make it all feel good. So really, I just describe it as the way things feel.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

Well, that sounds like a really cool feature to add. You can do all these cool things with cars, you can even call your car to you in this present time. So that's obviously something we could consider going forward. So what do you think, Yogi?

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

I would agree. It sounds pretty cool, but at the moment it's not on our immediate to-do list.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

So we have a plan, a proper plan. What exactly the plan is or how we are fixing it, we won't say at this point. From next week onwards, we have a huge focus on the PvP gameplay, and this includes checking out why certain things don't work, and how fixed and gimbaled weapons and auto gimbals should work. And the ultimate goal there is that we talk about these things, collect them all together and then decide on a course of action at this point. So we cannot really tell you what exactly we want to do about them, but we can tell you that we're putting a lot of effort in the next couple of weeks to at least have a plan how to fix it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You guys have a summit about this literally next week.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

Next week, here in Frankfurt.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So as far as a giant ship goes, it depends on its overall mass, but also its thruster layout, and also its purpose as well. So it can be a big ship, but big ships can have many roles. You can have an explorer ship, you can have a cargo ship, you can have a fuel ship. So there's certain characteristics we always try and apply to those types of ships and maneuverability. So if we take the Hammerhead, for example, that's actually quite maneuverable because it's a combat ship, whereas ships like the Starfarer are much slower and cumbersome because it's a big, heavy fuel tanker. So we try and put that feel into the ships, that character. And each ship's got its own unique identity based on the balance, but also where the thrusters are on the ship as well. So that defines how it feels, and how close the thrusters are to the center of mass on the ship can have an impact on the feel of the ship as well. So there's several factors that come into it.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So it's probably no secret now, seeing as it was out on the forum the other week. So it was basically some early experimentation that we were doing internally to change the speed of combat. So basically we want combat to engage at a lower speed than it does now, because the higher the speed that combat engages at, the worse the general experience gets. So we don't want to fake it and just artificially force people to combat at a lower speed. We want to look at the way that systems perform at high speed and how that would happen in the real universe. So we're looking at shields: if you go faster, how does the shield react on the outside of the ship? We'd encourage players to engage in combat at lower speeds rather than high speeds, where perhaps there's more risk of being taken out by an opponent. So it's just to encourage that kind of closer engagement in combat, because we found that the experience in combat gets better if it's much closer and at a lower speed than high speed.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

What are your thoughts on that, Yogi?

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

We are not entirely set on what these things are going to be, but part of our process for the coming weeks is to do a lot of gameplay tests to figure out how these actually can work. So the DevOps team supported us greatly by allowing us to create an experimental gameplay system so that we can easily try out new gameplay builds between us and iterate on these kinds of small changes. And the high-speed combat changes that we have planned, we can then test and check if they work or not. So that's going to be a really exciting time soon.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So we don't plan on actually slowing the ships down. It's just that certain things won't perform maybe as well as they do at lower speed. So the racing ships will still be able to go as fast as they go now. So we don't actually plan to stop players from going quickly. It's just there's an element of risk involved in going quickly if you're in a particular engagement with another player. So that's what we're trying to encourage, whereas you'll still be able to go as fast as you can now with the racing ships.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

Yeah, so it's more encouragement than forbidding something.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So the difference with current ground vehicles is the current ground vehicles actually don't go very quickly. So it's not as critical, but we do have several improvements that we want to do with ground vehicles. That's definitely something we consider, because at the moment the ground vehicles are kind of limited by the terrain and the current performance on that terrain, but we're looking at several improvements to the suspension system and the way the vehicle interacts with the environment to actually allow the ground vehicles to go faster. So we'll definitely look at having a certain speed limit around those vehicles in the same way that it works on the ships as well.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

It makes sense in the gameplay sense, because we have the same scheme in FPS, where you use your mouse wheel to change your speed. And I see no reason why we couldn't do this on ground vehicles as well.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So we do have a balance pass currently planned where we're going to look at giving components individual behavior, so players can spec their ships out to achieve a certain type of signature. You can make your ship and you can fill it with stealth components. And we do need to balance that as far as what stealth means, and balance all the numbers that actually generate the actual signal detection ratios. So that's part of the overall balance pass that we have happening later this year.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So we spend a lot of time talking about the community feedback together, and we work with Mike as well to get the latest feedback on the things that we're putting out there. So it definitely makes a really key difference, and we also have a lot of interaction with the community. Some members of the community will be aware of that. We're always open to talking to the community and really trying to get down deep to understand what the players actually want from an experience. And we've got a really good set of community members who are really good at providing feedback. So it's a critical part of our process in developing features.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

We actually had two instances where this really helped. This was with the head tracking and the look-ahead work, where pretty early during ETF we put the features out and they had a pretty reduced set of options. And a lot of feedback came from the community, and that actually caused the features to be extended into how they ended up in the end. So we really value feedback. Of course, we cannot reply to every thread, but we pretty much read everything and we are aware of the worries of the community.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So with turrets, we're looking at the way that we can fundamentally improve turrets in terms of the way they feel, in terms of the way you move the turret, but also how we communicate the way you aim with turrets, and also the way they interact with the ship and the way they move, to enable players to be more accurate with turrets. And also the general balance of turrets and how powerful turrets are. So we have that right balance between a Hammerhead and several smaller ships, and trying to get that balance where the turrets are the right balance in the game. So if you have a full Hammerhead crew, you've got the pilot and you can fill the six turrets that are on that ship. That's the right balance when you're fighting four or five Gladiuses or Arrows or something if you get attacked. So we're looking at them from a fresh experience and trying to make them more fun, basically, and feel right. And we have several different types of turrets as well, so it's making sure they're balanced correctly.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

Yeah, but ultimately we want to make sure that turret gameplay is a valid choice, right? We want players to actually have a hard time deciding whether they go out with two Hornets or one Super Hornet where one player is a dedicated gunner, the person who uses the turret. So yeah, there's a lot of work to be done and we're aware of that. And we can't tell you when we're going to do that work, but it's going to be us who do the work.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

What it kind of hits on is they're very difficult to do because it's not just one axis. You've got several influences on the turret itself. You've got the ship movement itself. You've got the movement of the turret, but you've also got the movement of the guns on the turret as well. And then the way that works with the aiming system, that's a very, very difficult thing to balance and to get right. So players are struggling to move the turret into the right place when they're trying to aim at something. So they're trying to aim at a moving target while the turret's moving, while the ship's moving. And that's just something that's very, very difficult to do. Turrets don't really work that well in real life for that reason. So it's just very difficult. But we're up for the challenge again, and hopefully we can make those improvements.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

They will eventually work properly.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So as far as the feature development goes, we're working much closer with UI to communicate the actual underlying feature that we've developed as designers, and how we communicate the levels of that feature to the player so they can see and feel what's going on and also understand it very quickly. So it's trying to do a better job on our side, my side, to explain the feature underneath and actually break down all the different aspects of what we want to communicate to the player and at what points, and to make sure that's communicated with the UI.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So as far as the development of the new cameras goes, we put the new cameras in for first and third person, and these are like the first iterations of these new cameras for us. But now we're also looking at the future and asking what features we actually want to include in the camera going forward for future versions of it. And these can include parking cameras, where the camera moves based on the landing pad or the way you're landing, but also just general features, even for ground vehicles, where it's the way the camera moves when you're driving up hills. It doesn't work the same way it does for ships. So we've got to develop different systems on top of the current camera to support different vehicles. And that can include different play styles in terms of parking ships and parking ground vehicles, and how it works with collisions, which is quite a complex problem to solve. That was one of the key things we did in the last year and the start of this year: looking at how we can make the camera work within all the complex landing zones we have, where if you're moving the camera somewhere, it can actually collide with various objects and various other ships. And it's how the camera deals with that collision, so it still feels right, so it's not snapping and it isn't clipping objects. So we've got a lot of features planned for the camera going forward.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

I am in training. I don't have a license yet, but I'll continue to do my license in May.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

But it's good to get that experience in real life, because you're flying gliders, and I flew in a helicopter and stuff like that. And it really helps give a sense, as far as the vehicle experience goes, of just what you're feeling inside a real object, like a real plane or a real helicopter. And just the feeling, the sensations you get are very different in real life.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

The feeling of motion is very, very intense. And of course, you don't have that when you play on your PC, right? So any kind of tiny motions can really help to sell the feeling that you are accelerating forward or backwards or that you get thrown around or something like that. I mean, there's other things like, you can easily get sick or dizzy. I'm not sure if we're going to go down that route.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

The same as before. We have a plan, we have a couple of strategies laid out, but we cannot really tell at the moment what the exact results or the implementations and solutions for that will be. We are aware that fixed weapons, especially in the PvP context, are not competitive. But we should have a good picture of how to fix those over the next couple of months. Including that, we're currently investing a little bit more into analysis tools so we can trace back exactly how ships fly and how bullets and missiles fly around and what kind of motions they do. So that should help us figure out what kind of approach we take.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So it's more additional tweaks to the actual flight model itself. So going forward, we're going to change the efficiency of the thrusters in atmosphere. So they're going to be more reliant on the aerodynamics of the ship. And that's going to make the ship's VTOL thrusters, for example, much more critical to their atmospheric flight. So that's more the direction we're going, where it's going to feel like the aerodynamics are more important and it's the thrusters that are struggling to keep the ship up. So it isn't really a replacement for hover mode. It's more just doing the way that ships hover more accurately now. We're not adding this extra mode on top to solve a problem. We're actually just modeling how the ship would behave.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So moving forward, like I just said, with the aerodynamics we're making the ships depend much more on the real aerodynamics of the ship. So that's the fundamental way the ship is shaped. So we've got fighters that look like jet planes, and they're going to fly more like a jet plane. It isn't going to be a jet plane, because the ships still have thrusters, so they're still going to behave differently, but it's going to be drastically different to the flight we have now on planets. And then obviously the challenge with that is balancing the ships based on the way they look. We've got loads of different shapes of ship in the game, and the way they're shaped is going to fundamentally change their character in atmosphere. So we're excited to get that change out there.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

So I played the prototype from David and it's really amazing. It's still easy to fly, hovering is still quite easy for a player, but the characteristics of the ships come into play once you go above a certain speed. Then all the aerodynamics kick in, and then it's like each ship has a certain character that you need to learn to control. So yeah, I'm having a good feeling about this.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

I think wingsuit is more for the actor feature team. But sure, if it's about some g-force-induced movements or something like that, they can probably reuse some of our stuff.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So it's a bit of a balance, really. In the heat of battle, the MFDs become secondary to the actual HUD itself. But obviously when you're in normal flight, that's when you're looking at MFDs, and you've got more time to actually look at the MFDs. But also the way that MFDs become more critical is the multi-crew experience and the way the ship is managed as well. That's an exciting thing going forward for us. But they're also critical for us as far as communicating the actual balance underneath that we do. So when we create different types of power plants and different types of coolers, it's critical that we communicate what that actually means for the ship and the way it performs. So that's one of the exciting things about MFDs: we really want to showcase the balance underneath, and they're critical to that.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

Yeah, but you wouldn't necessarily rebalance during a fight, right? Stuff that is vital to the flying or the combat, where you need to make quick decisions, those things will always be readily available via keys or HOTAS commands or something like that.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

I think yes. Sorry, it's a really short answer, but anything that is just a simple click and that makes sense, so if that function would actually be easily reachable for a pilot or be somewhere on a HOTAS, then we would offer a key bind for it. I know that there's a couple of things left there, but I think ultimately we will be adding those.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

It's definitely going to make some ships more difficult to fly, and they're going to feel the effects of a storm. Obviously, we've got different variations of storms as far as how fast the wind's blowing. It's just like real life, because at the moment in the UK we've been having a lot of storms recently, and a lot of planes have been struggling to land and have had to abort landings. So it's definitely going to have more of an impact on some ships. So if you've got a ship that isn't very aerodynamically efficient, or has deficiencies in the wings, let's say it just isn't shaped correctly for that type of flight, it will struggle more in those storms.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

It will struggle. It won't stay on the ground, right? You can still just go up by pointing your nose up and pushing with everything you've got.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So as far as ground vehicles go, we'd love to tackle those and improve those. Because as the planets have got better and better, the V4 planets now look absolutely amazing, and it's great to drive on those planets as well, and take the bikes on those as well. So I feel strongly passionate about ground vehicles. So that's definitely something the Vehicle Experience team will be tackling going forward.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

Yeah, that's pretty fair to say. The big part of that is, as a team, we wanted to make the main focus of our improvements the flight model, because that's what Star Citizen is. It's about flight and flight to these planets. There isn't any point in having amazing ground vehicles if the journey to those planets is terrible. So our focus is getting the flight model to a standard that we're really happy with and that has the feature set that we wanted. And then once we're happy with that, we can move on to the ground vehicles as they become more critical, because as more ground vehicles get released and the planets get better, you can take these ground vehicles around the universe and drive them on all kinds of planets.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

I mean, that being said, some of the technology that was developed for spaceships will also apply to ground vehicles. An example would be the learnings from the spaceship audio passes. They cannot be copied directly, but large portions of that can be used on vehicles as well. So it definitely speeds up the vehicle development as well.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So the answer to that question is yes, you will be able to in the future. So we'd love to have a proper operator mode for the missiles. So in ships like the Vanguard, for example, you have several different types of missile. You've got two different types of main missiles, but you've also got a big torpedo there as well. So we want players to be able to select which one they want to fire, because at the moment there is no way to select it. So you just fire and whatever comes out comes out. But we definitely want players to be able to pick which weapons they fire, especially as torpedoes are bigger and more critical to different aspects. We don't want people wasting torpedoes on something that they shouldn't be firing torpedoes at.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

That's a tricky thing, because there are certain ships and certain combinations you can use where distortion damage is actually quite effective at disabling a ship. But the question is whether we're communicating that well enough at the moment. That's probably the question for us on that side. But there are certain combinations of ships that are quite effective at using distortion to disable a ship. And then you can choose what you do with that ship once it's disabled.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

When I watch streams, sometimes distortion damage doesn't get through the shields. I'm not sure it always works the way it's supposed to with shields and stuff like that.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

That's something for us on the balance side: it might work fine with some components, but it might not work fine with others. It might not have the intended effect, which is where the analysis of the combat side comes in for us, where we're triggering certain events when this happens so we can understand what's actually happening to these systems when distortion is used. And is it having the effect that we want it to? And is it having the right strength to actually bring a shield down? So that's more data analysis for us to do on our side when we're looking at combat: the type of combat that players use and how effective it is.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

As I'm looking at chat, chat's not agreeing with you at the moment. So maybe that's something worth taking a greater look at.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

I mean, it's a work in progress, right? If it doesn't work, we'll fix it up eventually.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So it's a big ship, it has a lot of mass, so it isn't going to feel as agile as some of the smaller and medium fighters. But we do have a big balance pass this year where we're looking at all the ships together, at how they fit together and whether certain ships have the right performance for their class type and their purpose. So it's definitely subject to change going forward.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

Yes. So I'd say expect to see changes. And as Yogi said, we're having the summit to really decide what those changes are going to be and see if the ideas that we have actually end up with the result we want, or whether we have to go in a different direction. But that's what this summit's about, and this is what all the analysis we're doing is about. It's understanding the systems and the way they interact with each other to get the gameplay that we want.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

Well, in the atmosphere, yes, right? Essentially, if you're going forward a lot, let's say you fly a Gladius, and you just really harshly pull up and expose the whole surface of the ship against the wind, you will slow down a lot. So, yes.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So we haven't started yet. But yeah, it's got its own unique challenges. But that's the same as anything in the game. It's always a challenge getting that right feeling.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So the reason why ships are like this is the ships have very fast acceleration on the Y axis, so you can go very quickly. But if we made it so that the size of the thruster defined the actual thrust itself, then with some of the retro thrusters you would take a long time to slow down. So the ship would move very quickly in a straight line going forwards, and it would roll quickly, its rotations would be very quick, but it would feel terrible trying to slow down. So it would feel really strange. Part of the overall balance we're looking for is to have ships that can actually slow down as fast as we want them to. But it depends on the type of ship as well. We've got some ships like the Hammerhead, for example, that has its two retros at the front, and that does actually take quite a long time to slow down. But then you've got fighters which have maneuvering thrusters as well as the fixed thrusters that can help slow it down. But it's just like a car, kind of the opposite, really. With a car, you have acceleration up to a certain speed, but it can slow down almost four times quicker than it can accelerate, for example. So obviously we don't want that with the ships, but one of the feelings behind it is we don't want ships to feel like they take forever to slow down, because it'd be really hard to engage at that point, unless you just swing the ship around and slow down with your mains. But that's not something we really want players to have to do to slow down.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I'd also say that the idea that the retro thrusters have to be larger in order to counter the forward momentum is a bit of a fallacy. Something that's bigger is not automatically more powerful, and something that's smaller is not automatically less powerful than something that's bigger.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So on a typical ship, you have four thrusters on top, and let's say two at the front. When you fly the ship and you rotate the ship, it has those four thrusters moving, so it is using a lot of energy, whereas with the retro thrusters, you're only using two thrusters to slow down, so they can actually have more power diverted to those two thrusters in that axis.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And then things like the Khartu-al don't have retro thrusters at all. It just rotates the main thrusters.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

Yeah, and it's got lots and lots of little thrusters around the ship as well.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

Yes, of course. It would be pretty frustrating if, just because you run out of countermeasures, you always have a guaranteed hit from a missile. So evasion will definitely be an option. It depends how fast you can accelerate away from it and finding the right point when to accelerate away. But yeah, it's definitely an option.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So that isn't something our team is responsible for, but it's something we can communicate to the teams as a feature request from our side to help improve that.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So a lot of the weapons fit a certain size port on the ship. So they're all very similar sizes, so the mass difference you would feel would be very, very minor. But the mass of the items can be more critical, because we've got different types of items on the ship for different reasons.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

Yeah, so that's going to get more critical going forward, because ships are going to rely much more on their VTOL thrusters. So you have big ships like the Reclaimer coming down into the atmosphere, you put loads of stuff in it: can you take off? We've got to make sure we cover that with the tuning, because we don't want a big ship like that stuck on the planet.

Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

As far as so far, I'm pretty proud of the effort the team put in developing the cameras. Yogi did a really good job and Johnny did a really good job of bringing lots of different systems together to get the feel across for the cameras. That was our first feature as a team together, so it was a really good feeling when that went out, and it had generally quite a positive reaction from the community. And as Yogi said earlier, it was great to get feedback from the community as well, and that helped us develop the feature and support the community by allowing players to tune the camera to feel how they wanted it to feel. So we provide the experience of the camera, then the players can actually fine-tune that themselves to their own needs. So that was a really good feeling getting that out.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

I would concur with that. It was a pretty good run so far. It was not a long run, but it was a pretty good run. And I felt like pretty much everything we tried out so far worked out okay-ish. Though the really big things are ahead of us now with the space combat stuff. I just can't say it enough, I'm really excited for the end of 2020, when a lot of that stuff will be done.