Early Cloud Imperium Q&A on project management duties, forum and login migration from WordPress to vBulletin, and subscriber cards. Developers discuss a possible pre-alpha ship garage, post-launch mods with profit sharing, the economy, death and resurrection, and bounties.
TL;DRMichael Morlan acts like a project manager, making sure the team has what it needs to stay unblocked and hit milestones, while Eric Peterson also notes Morlan will edit the broadcast into a teaser.
Well, as I mentioned earlier, my job is going to be making sure everybody on our team has everything they need in order to not get blocked with their particular tasks. Stay on task, make sure we hit our milestones. So I'm talking like a project manager right now. And that's kind of what Eric is having me do. Eric and I kind of stand back to back. He kind of is looking up and out and making sure that the way is clear ahead for us. And I'm the one looking down at it and making sure our team has everything they need.
And not to mention Michael also, because the last six years he's been actually making feature films, which, we'll be taking the broadcast today and he'll be editing it down to a two to three minute teaser for the people that didn't get to see the Wingman's broadcast.
Well, that's a good question, because I actually showed your stuff to Chris yesterday. I was talking to Chris and to Sandy, and we were all really impressed. And so they were curious. We may actually, we're going to reach out to you, because the stuff you did was really hot and we may want to do something with you in that regard.
TL;DREric Peterson hasn't followed up on it yet, but a pre-alpha garage for viewing and tinkering with ships is possible and he thinks it is exactly what will happen.
No, I think Chris mentioned something about that, and I have yet to follow up, but that's definitely possible, and I think it'd be kind of cool. So if Chris has said it's coming, then my job just got harder. Thanks, Chris! But that's okay, because it just means rearranging some of the content, the way we do things. And because we're making the game with everybody, the audience and you guys involved, it's important to get stuff out to show you what the progress is. And visual stuff is more... something like a written doc that says, hey, look, we're doing written docs, that's really not that interesting. But seeing something visual, see your ship in a hangar, be able to walk around it, mess around with the hard points, that's pretty cool. And it gives you a little idea of where we're going. So, yeah, I think that's exactly what's going to happen.
TL;DRSwapping the names is possibly doable if the user writes to Pete, who handles login issues; a forum-migration nickname fix is expected, probably in January.
Possibly. What you'll need to do is send that in to Pete, who was just here, and he's the one who's handling all those things, the integration and those login issues. We've got some issues because as we're transferring the forum from one to the other, we're transferring away from WordPress. And WordPress allows you to have a nickname, a username, and an email, which is great. But vBulletin doesn't allow you to do that unless you put a mod in. Now, the problem is WordPress also has let multiple people have the same nickname. So we've got to sort that out. Some people are probably going to have to change their nickname on the forums, unfortunately. So we've got a solution coming. Just watch the boards for that. It'll probably be in January. We'll figure something out for you.
And as Pete mentioned when he was in here, if you've already written to him, you're queued up in his stack of emails. So don't feel like you need to keep writing to him. He'll get to you. It'll take a little while, but he's working it as fast and hard as he can.
You're talking about the Star Citizen cards? Yeah, that's a little above my pay grade. And what that means is that's going to be a Sandy question. She's probably handling all that. I know they were trying to get them out by Christmas, but I think there was some sort of delivery deal where we couldn't get them all because of the Kickstarter integration. We need to make sure that we get Kickstarters and ours, because we can only do one run, and then we send them all out. So I don't imagine they'll be too much longer.
TL;DRProfit-sharing for player-made content is undecided and subject to change; a post-launch mod program is planned, possibly with profit sharing, but legal questions remain and the base game likely won't have it.
That's still up in the air for how we're going to handle that. I know we've got a mod program that's going to be put in place after we've shipped, where users can create mods and submit them to us. Then if it's good enough, we run it through tests. Say people can make systems. Then we plan to have exactly what you're talking about, which is a profit-sharing deal, what that's going to be. We have to figure that out and find out the legalities of it, because we could have people in Japan creating them, in Germany, Russia, U.S. We've got to figure out how we handle that. I think in the original game, though, I don't believe there's going to be anything like that in the regular one, but I believe in the mod versions after there will be. At least that's my understanding, but that's all subject to change. I wish I had a firm answer. I just don't.
I mean, we know the basics of what the economy is going to look like, but no, we haven't started even building it. We've got a lot of things to work out on that side of things. And we're probably looking at maybe bringing an economist on to help us with that.
We were just having a discussion about the challenge of that. Much like the economy, when you analyze it, it's a bunch of chaos creating emergent behavior. We're looking at ways of using simple rules to iteratively process and create emergent behavior in the world. So that's a tricky subject. And how do we also manage things so that they serve fun gameplay and don't go completely out of control, and at the same time create a sense of chaos in the world that is natural and makes it feel like it's real.
TL;DRDeath handling is still under discussion, with ideas like limited resurrections with inheritance or weaker body parts, and the team asked for forum feedback, possibly a poll, though Chris Roberts decides.
We are actually talking about that right now, Red Roman. I would appreciate it if you would put a post up in the forums about that very thing, because we're thinking there's a couple of different ways of doing it. We're thinking we may have death where you get resurrected, but there's only so many times you can be resurrected, and then you have your ship and everything else goes down to your son or daughter. Or we let you be resurrected with weaker body parts. There's all kinds of things we're talking about. So that would be a great forum topic.
I think there's going to be a poll out about that, because Chris has one way he'd like to do it. I have another way. Obviously, he is the boss, so what he wants to do is what's going to happen. But I think the audience can reflect, you guys put your thoughts on what you think can happen. And I think that'll influence a lot of us.
I have not commented in the games portion yet. And the reason for that is that we've been focused on getting the office up and running and hiring the people. And we just got our computers yesterday. So I think once things settle down in January-ish and we start working a little harder on the game design documents, we'll start looking at those things a lot.
TL;DRBounty details are far off until the economy is settled, but a bounty would go out over the comm link for hunters to accept, with everything subject to change.
Well, I can answer a little bit of it. Once you do the bounty, it's going to be up in a certain area that will be a bounty for you, and it will go out over the main comm link. Whoever did the trade will be bounty linked, and the bounty hunters will be able to accept that mission to chase after you. It depends on PvE, where it'll be server managed, or PvP. Some PvP people are going to have bounties on them. They're going to be able to pay their way out of them. In the meantime, people can go steal from them.
So let me add a disclaimer to that: everything is subject to change. And I stole that directly from Red.com when they were building their cameras and using this kind of open source experience with their buyers.