Developers discuss plans for escape pods, which depend on service beacons, Item 2.0 seats and persistence of detached items. They also cover Reliant variants and cargo, Aurora and 300i storage, Hurston weather, and grouping with friends without teleporting.
TL;DREscape pods don't necessarily require interdiction; they're on the to-do list but still need a few prerequisites, notably a way for detached items like ejected seats to persist rather than be cleaned up.
I'm not sure that escape pods require interdiction. There's so many scenarios where you could use escape pods.
JC
John CreweVehicle Pipeline Director, Foundry 42 UK
I don't know whether they mean a service beacon instead, perhaps, because there's a few bits and systems that need to be brought together first before we can put escape pods in, because after all, there's no point having an escape pod if you are just trapped to freeze to death inside it a few hours later. So service beacons were one of the first things, so obviously you can call for help. The Item 2.0 seat work was another one. And the last bit of the puzzle before we can do a concerted push across all the ships is a better way of handling items that are detached from ships to persist rather than just be cleaned up automatically, because essentially it's a seat that ejects, and we have ejection seats in game. They throw you out the ship fine, but we have to detach the player from them to clean up everything. And we need a nicer way to keep that around, because an escape pod is no good if after 30 seconds it deletes itself and just leaves you there anyway. So yeah, it's on the list of stuff to do. Just a few more little bits to get in place for it.
John CreweVehicle Pipeline Director, Foundry 42 UK
They're pretty Spartan things, so they will eject you out and probably just after a while steady themselves so you're not going at just a velocity forever, unable to be caught up. We'll work out a good distance to get you away from. Obviously, you don't want to be ejected out 10 meters and just left there. But the immediate plans are not for them to be like mini ships. If you want to escape on a mini ship, you should probably get a ship that can have a mini ship inside it to escape from.
TL;DRThe Reliant won't get a complete ground-up rework; the rework isn't officially scheduled, but adding variants will likely make it slightly bigger with more cargo capacity and almost certainly a slight weaponry increase.
JC
John CreweVehicle Pipeline Director, Foundry 42 UK
Right, so off the bat, temper some expectations. It's not going to have a complete ground-up, start-from-scratch rework. The rework phase isn't officially scheduled. It's more adding the variants, but we foresee some need for it to get slightly bigger to accommodate those variants and push the cargo capacity closer to other equivalents. I think it's four at the moment, and it should have been more to start with, but there was a slight mix-up in the construction of it that resulted in it being just fractionally too small to take those extra boxes. So we'll sort that out alongside putting the variants in, and it's almost certainly going to have a slight weaponry increase in some shape or form, whether that's missiles or weapon hardpoints. We want to avoid the trap of, to make something better, just make the guns bigger on it, because then it just moves the problem away from it. But for the size of it, it is slightly undergunned.
John CreweVehicle Pipeline Director, Foundry 42 UK
No, that's still waiting for the ability to have states independently of other states. When we have that, it will be unleashed across so many ships, because it unlocks having VTOL separate from landing gear, which I know is a big pain for everyone. It's a pain for us. So when we have that, there's going to be a whole load of changes to the ships to make them better.
TL;DRSmall ships like the Aurora and 300i predate carryable-box missions, so they're being adjusted (walkable steps on the Aurora, a fold-down ramp on a reworked 300 series) to let players walk in with boxes.
JC
John CreweVehicle Pipeline Director, Foundry 42 UK
It's simply they were designed at a time where carrying a box as a mission wasn't a consideration in their design. So for the Aurora, we're going back and making these steps not require you to have an animation to get through them. So they're going to be adjusted to make it walkable. So you can have carryable boxes and you'll be able to walk into the little cubbyhole area and place them down. Obviously, the CL has the storage box, and that'll be enabled and usable as well for those people. The 300 series, when it has its rework, it's going to take some cues from the 100 series concept, where it has the business jet fold-down doorstep ramp thing rather than the humongous ladder that you have to climb up to get into it. So again, you'll be able to just walk inside with stuff or put anything else inside that you want rather than having to go through a baked animation to get there.
Todd PapyStar Citizen Live Game Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
It'll be coming later. So for the tier zero version of Hurston going out, it will have Lorville. It'll have the associated biomes with it. As far as weather goes, this is something that's been on Carsten's backlog, who is our tech director, and he's been working on it in his free time, as well as working on performance issues and getting everything ready. But basically, I think he needs a bigger chunk of time to actually implement weather the way that it needs to be done, where it wouldn't be like a one-off thing. It would be more procedural.
I'm going to probably say it's a little too early to say.
TP
Todd PapyStar Citizen Live Game Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
Well, I think that's the goal, to see clouds and be able to, just like pictures of Earth, you see cloud formations and all of those things. I think that's truly what he's aiming for. But he would have to go into the tech a little bit more and actually try it out and see what he can actually do.
TL;DRNo instant teleporting to friends: players can see where friends are and load into the game, but must then travel to them, to protect the economy and sense of travel.
TP
Todd PapyStar Citizen Live Game Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
Right now, the current thought is, if you have friends in the universe and everything, so say for example, you and I are friends and we want to play online together, and you're at Lorville and I'm way across the system at Area18. Well, I'll see where you're at. I will not be able to instantly teleport there, because that breaks so many different systems that we have regarding economy, just the overall feel and travel. Chris's thought process is very much like the real world. Since I'm in Germany and you're in L.A., we're going to have to travel and meet somewhere, whether that be in L.A. or Frankfurt or somewhere along the way. So that is the approach that we're going in.
And just to clear up some minor confusion that may have arisen from Kirk Tome's answer a couple weeks ago when he was talking about the party system and the presence system, being able to see where your friend is and click a button and load into the game, he meant just that. See where your friend is, load into the game, and then once you're in the game, you go to them, not the instant teleport to where your friend is.
TP
Todd PapyStar Citizen Live Game Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt