The developers cover capital ship damage from small fighters, Constellation crew stations, body recovery and med bays after boarding, and ejecting in a Hornet. They also discuss Squadron 42 motion-capture voice acting, the Dogfighting Module lobby and May release, a Planet Side social module with Live Driver, asteroid fields, ship wear and repair, and bounty missions.
TL;DRAfter ejecting you would float in zero-g for a minimum period, then choose to respawn at a friendly location via a rescue cinematic, with possible bonuses for friends who rescue you.
Yeah, the idea is you eject out and then you would float in space for a little while, and I guess you can watch the battle, then, after a period of time, which I guess we'll determine, you would hit whatever the equivalent of the escape key is which would basically say "Ok, I'm done now, I'm ready to be respawned back on my closest friendly planet or last location I was on. Then we'll cut to an in-game cinematic with you getting rescued by search and recovery or something like that.Essentially the idea is you eject, get out of it so you keep your life intact, you could zero-g look around and see what's happening out in space, and then after a certain minimum period of time, you can just say "Ok, I'm ready to go back to the last friendly planet or location I was on," and then we'll put you there.I hope that answered that question, and yeah, we may think of having some techniques where, if you're in a battle or other stuff's going on, some other friends who are a part of your organization or whatever, if they rescued you, they could get a benefit or a bonus for that rather than just have the game auto-do it. We haven't quite got there yet, but that's something that I'm pretty interested in doing because I think it would help the cooperative gameplay.
Well, the mission will no longer be valid or achievable, so I would assume what would happen in that case, I'm not quite sure whether it's "You need to kill this infamous pirate and here's exactly the location." My guess is we'll probably have the missions set up so there's a big bounty for high level NPC bad guys, and whoever manages to achieve the bounty first is the one who gets the fame and fortune.So essentially if you're there and someone else has gotten there first, just like in real life, there's no reward in that case for second place. Get there first I guess would be the answer.
TL;DRRepairs would probably even out wear across the whole ship, since one shiny wing would look silly, though it likely won't restore the ship to pristine and details are still to be worked out.
What I'm assuming is if you went back and had your ship fixed up, had the wing added onto it, probably what would happen is part of the general repair and fix up is they will bring up the rest of the ship. At least they would clean it up and not weather it as much, and that will be part of the repair costs.But we have to figure that out, it would obviously look kind of silly if one wing is nice and shiny and all the other ones are all weathered. Generally the overall wear and tear on the ship is on a global basis.It's essentially something where we say "It's got this much wear and tear on a scale from 0-10" and that scale increases over time, over engagements, and occasionally when you take the ship in to a landing port you can basically have it detailed if you want to think of it that way, or put it into a repair shop and they'll roll everything back a little bit. It will probably even it all out and that will be part of the standard repair process.It probably won't roll it all the way back to completely pristine, but everything will get to be a fairly even level across the ship.
I think we're probably gonna have a combination of both in Star Citizen.So there will definitely be asteroid fields in various areas of the system, and then we'll probably have some ringing, it depends... In general if they're in various instances around the system, they're really always going to be in a ring or some broken up ring around the central star.But there will definitely be pockets of asteroid fields around the system. So I guess the answer on this one would be both, but there will definitely be some localized debris fields where you'll find debris and some other stuff in the various systems. I don't know if I answered that question very well, but I guess it will be kind of like Freelancer and kind of like other things. There you go.
TL;DRA planet-side social module is planned with standard text chat plus an experimental webcam-driven avatar mouth-sync with voice, though how to police abusive speech is still undecided.
Yes, we're planning on having a Planet Side Module which also would be the social module. That's really to develop buying and selling stuff down on the planet and, say in a bar, interacting with other players and talking to them. We're looking at various ways to do the communicating. Obviously there will be the standard chat window stuff which you've seen a lot before.So we'll have that, but we're more excited by one of the things we're playing with, this thing called Live Driver which will allow you to have your webcam look at your face and you can sit on your computer and speak, like I'm speaking to you right now, and then if you are playing the game, in your version of they client you would see my actual avatar mouth moving while you're hearing my voice. So if we have that happening, which we've got some early tests that look very promising, I think it will allow a lot more immersion in the interaction areas.Then the only issue we have is that we would need to have some control to make sure people can't be obnoxious or rude or grief people verbally.We're still figuring out how we'll be able to police that, whether we'd allow people, like you'd need an invite to say "Is it ok if this person talks to you?" and you say yes, then you can do all that or not.But we're gonna really try to push is on the communication and immersion side. The Live Driver thing I think would be very immersive and very cool.
TL;DRThe Dogfighting Module will have ranked auto-matching and private matches joined by a shared code at launch, with a fuller lobby system planned for later versions.
Yes, the Dogfighting Module is going to have a full lobby matchmaking system.Dogfight v1, which is the first thing that we'll be releasing in two, three weeks or so, it's gonna be in May. Probably third week of May I would think would be a full roll-out, but we'll see. We could be doing a slower roll-out second week onwards, just to scale it.But in the case of the Dogfighting Module, at the beginning you'll be able to join, if you're in a ranked match you automatically get matched to other people, and then if you want to set up a private game, you can say "Here's my private game" and give your code out to your friends and they can join. You could tell the members of your organization or friends to type this code in and this is how you'll join my match.So that's the basic stuff that will be in the Dogfight v1, but there is Dogfight v1.1 and 1.2. We have a plan for a full lobby system where you'll be able to do pretty much everything you can do in most multiplayer games in terms of lobby systems.So yes, you'll be able to set it up for anyone in your organization can join, you can launch it and make a private match, public match, etc. To be in one of the ranked matches, you have to be part of our matchmaking system, which means you basically get what our matchmaking server does.Obviously we want to make sure that when you're getting ranked it's against random opponents, not people who you've set up to be able to beat easily.
TL;DRRoberts says Squadron 42 will be fully voice acted with performance capture, and Star Citizen NPCs will also be voice acted, with generic characters getting less capture fidelity than specific ones.
Ok, so there's two things here, Squadron 42 obviously is going to be full, we're actually in the process of planning it right now.We're gonna do a full motion capture performance capture, so very similar to what's done in Avatar where you have the full actors running around in body suits with cameras on their heads and that will translate into the game.We have, I think, a pretty strong and compelling story for Squadron 42, I'm pretty excited by it. It's gonna be as big and rich as any Wing Commander I've done, possibly quite a bit beyond that. So Squadron 42 itself will be as big as if I were making another Wing Commander now for EA or someone, Squadron 42 would be that to the same level of polish and presentation.We have that, and then on top of that, roaming around Star Citizen, yes, the NPCs that you would meet and talk to would all be voice acted and we'll probably have some level of performance capture for them.It sort of depends, there will be the more generic people who won't have the same fidelity as the more specific NPCs that you may run across.But we'll have everything from more generic background characters, whether it's a bartender or something, to specific characters in the universe who we would actually do the same level of motion and facial capture on as we would do in Squadron 42.It's going to be pretty compelling and immersive hopefully, so we're gonna start shooting a lot of that in August or September of this year, both for the Persistent Universe, which is Star Citizen, and for Squadron 42. It will be a long process, but I think it will be pretty awesome once you get to wander around in all of it.
TL;DRRoberts says the thinking is that a body recovered to a med bay or station in time gives a chance of saving that player, while abandoning a friend would cost a life.
What we were thinking is that if someone gets killed in a boarding action, and if members of your team who are trying to board the ship or vise versa, manage to recover the body and get it back to a med bay, some of the bigger ships will have med bays, or you've got a certain time limit to get the body to a med station or something like that at a station or on a planet. If you manage to do that, you have a chance of saving the life of that player.In terms of the number of lives you go through, every character will have a finite life. The idea is like a cat. You've got so many lives before you properly die and then you have to move on to a new character in the universe, which was all described in my Death of a Spaceman post a while ago.But what we were thinking is that it would be a nice gameplay element that would encourage people to try and recover either the wounded or incapacitated bodies of friends to get them back.Maybe in a boarding action you'll fail, so you'll lick your wounds, grab your fallen comrades, get them back on your ship, and then high-tail off somewhere to try and heal them, maybe go to some shady pirate doctor so you can get fixed and not lose your life.That's what the solution is, if you abandon your friend there, I think what we'd probably do is you lose a life, and at some point we detatch the body that would be sitting on your ship, which we'd probably allow you to vent or put out of your ship, but that wouldn't preclude, if the person actually lost their life, being able to respawn on a planet. They just at that point separate in terms of characters, we probably don't want a body just magically disappearing on board a ship. Anyway, that's kind of our plan thinking on that.
Yes, the idea is on the Constellation that there's really four crew members, and you can have them deployed, one person piloting the ship, two in the turrets, and then one flying the Merlin in close air support, and if you're not in the combat situation, a couple of the other members of the crew can sit in the seats besides the captain's helm chair that's in the center.So the answer is, it's really a 4 crew ship, but there are options for what stations the 4 crew want to be at.
TL;DRChris Roberts says there won't be an artificial limit stopping small ships damaging capital ships, but localized damage is modeled, so crippling is possible while splitting one in two would need a ship torpedo.
I definitely think that you would be able to do damage to bigger ships in smaller ships, so I don't think we're gonna have an artificial limitation saying "if you're only in a Hornet you can't damage this capital ship," but like anything, the amount of damage that your ship can mete out, is proportional to what you deliver.Obviously something like Retaliator with big ship-to-ship torpedoes can really do some damage to a bigger ship like a destroyer or a corvette, but that's not to say that a team of Hornets working together couldn't cripple a Idris corvette.They will be able to come in, strafe, try to shoot the turrets, and there will certainly be weak spots on some of the bigger ships that you could potentially do some crippling damage to, but in general the goal would be, to take out the bigger ships, what we would like to have is a combined arms situation. You've got some Hornets for the air superiority, then people coming with Gladiators and Retaliators to do the heavy damage. That would be the ideal way, but there definitely should be cases where you'd be able to inflict some damage even if you don't have the heavy guns like the Retaliator.It won't be like Wing Commander where you needed a capital ship torpedo to take out a capital ship, but you certainly won't be able to just put a bunch of laser blasts into an Idris corvette and expect it to blow up.We're modelling damage accurately, we're modeling the different parts of it accurately. So you're doing localized damage, and potentially some of that localized damage could be fairly impactful or crippling on the ship, but if you really want to split it in two, you probably have to put a ship torpedo into it.