Developers discuss cargo price limits tied to UEE tariffs, AI-offered missions, insurance premiums, disengaging from combat via radar signature, jump point risk, and bank accounts for orgs. They also cover procedural asteroids, the holo renderer and star map, Mannequin animation, and the firing range.
Well, I think the important thing is we're going to do it inside the universe. So it's the UEE tariffs and the government propping up things. It's not us just deciding that suddenly you're all poor.
So when I land on the planet, how's that going to work? Am I going to have to go to a thing and get a mission, or is somebody going to go, "Psst, hey, bud"?
Dev1
Dev1
That is definitely a goal, to have the AI be that involved and come after you and seek out certain people with good reputations, for instance, and say, "Hey, I've heard of you. Would you like to do this for me?" Some things may take longer to get into the game than others, but it's definitely on the list.
That would actually be really, really cool. That's one of those things that over the years is going to just get better and better. It's one of those systems that we'll create and have to constantly be upgrading, obviously with your feedback.
That's an interesting question, but it would sort of tend to sway things towards one type of gameplay and remove other types. We don't want to nerf the pirates, really.
Dev2
Dev2
I mean, there may be some very limited ways of doing that. For instance, if it's still in your hangar and someone's trying to steal your ship or whatever, then you could probably dead man switch it or whatever.
Everything's alpha until it's done. We are constantly improving the game. If Martin Galway comes up with a better way for the engines to sound in six months, we are going to go with it.
That's an interesting point too, because that means that we could change the noises or sounds five years from now if we got something better or something comes out. So, yeah, it'll always be upgraded. Ever-evolving.
Wreaths, yeah. We'll see real-world holidays if it makes sense. Obviously not July 4th, because that's not something to celebrate in the UEE. Or the UK. Worldwide stuff, absolutely. We'll be in the future, and we'll see new holidays like UEE Formation Day and celebrations of all sorts of things.
Exactly. You've read some of the great fiction that Dave Haddock has created. There'll be some main tentpole events that have happened in the lead-up to the Star Citizen universe, and so there'll be some holidays picked out of that that we'll be celebrating ourselves as we go forward. So we're not worried about breaking immersion, because we're going to make sure that it's part of immersion.
So the simple answer is yes. We're actually quite excited when everyone's sharing videos of Star Citizen. It was really cool to watch everyone show off their hangar and how the different ships looked and the fun and shenanigans they got up to. So we're sort of in favor of you guys sharing gameplay, hangar videos, whatever it would be. So we'll be trying our best to not tell YouTube to block the content.
TL;DRInsurance premiums aren't balanced yet, but premiums might rise for suspected fraud or bad behavior like ramming, without punishing mere bad luck; it is not fully decided.
So that's a pretty good question. We haven't fully balanced that sort of stuff yet. We've had discussions about, obviously, if someone's constantly losing their ship or doing dumb things like ramming into other people, then there should be a penalty, because that would happen in the real world. And you don't want to encourage bad behavior. You just don't want to punish someone for being unlucky and getting attacked by, whether it's NPCs or players, it's still you've lost your ship, right? So we still have to balance that. But I would say that the general idea is if there is sort of a sniff of something like insurance fraud or sort of bad behavior, then maybe the insurance premium would go up to dissuade you from doing things like using your ship as a weapon in dogfighting. But not fully decided. That will be a balance thing that we'll tune as we go along.
TL;DRDisengaging isn't fully figured out, but options include running quiet to shrink your radar signature behind cover or outrunning with a faster ship, while still not making escape always possible.
Again, that's another good question, and that's a balance thing. Having 100% figured out, would it always just be about outrunning or would there be other ways? I mean, we're certainly going to allow you to control your radar image in terms of how hot or quiet you are, basically. And so, depending on the situation and the environment, there definitely could be places where you could, say, hide behind an asteroid field and really turn all your systems off, and then you'd have almost no radar profile, and then you would go off people's scopes and then they could potentially pass along. So that would be one way to get out of it. And then, of course, if you had a faster ship, then potentially you could get away too. And we're kind of thinking of some dynamics that would fall into the whole rationale behind why we kept the velocity at the low speeds but we still allow you to reach much higher speeds when you're traveling between, say, nav points in space, because in those cases you're just accelerating in a straight line. So I haven't fully figured all that out, but we're going to try and come up with some good ways, but also have it so you can't always run away from combat, because that wouldn't be that much fun for a bunch of other people. So again, a balance thing.
TL;DRChris Roberts wants immersive ship buying with NPC salespeople and price negotiation, and wants different ships and gear sold in different places so players must travel the universe.
So definitely in Star Citizen I kind of want the buying and selling to be immersive, so you walk into a showroom and there's actually an NPC sales guy there and he's telling you why you should really be stepping up to this particular model, the 300i spaceship. And make it feel like you would be buying something in the real world. On top of that, we'll have some idea for negotiating prices, to make it fun. And also I kind of want to make the gameplay be very focused around forcing you as a player to adventure around the universe. You shouldn't be able to go to every planet and buy exactly the same ships on every planet. So I want you to be able to go to one corner of the galaxy because this is the place they make the best dogfighter, and the other side of the galaxy is the place they make the best information runner. And so you go around and adventure around to buy different equipment and different ships. So you make the trek to go to this one corner of the universe where the guy is the best gunsmith ever and he can increase the range of your long-range ballistic weapon by 20%. And so the idea would be you would fly around the galaxy and cover a lot of light years trying to make sure that you've got the best weapon or the ship you want and all the rest of the stuff. So I think it will be more so than Privateer and more so than Freelancer. I think it will work quite well.
TL;DRThe bank system is early, but organizations should be able to charge membership fees and hold pooled funds for shared purchases, and it will probably be fairly sophisticated, possibly with something stock-market-like.
So we're still in the early stages of the whole bank account system, but one of the points of the organization is to allow an organization, a group of people, to be able to manage joint finances. So you'll be able to charge the members of your guild or organization membership fees. You'll be able to have a pooled account that you could buy things with, or buy real estate, or do stuff that would be able to be shared by the organization and owned by the organization. So I would think that we would probably try to push the bank account system to be fairly sophisticated, not too different than what you get in the real world. I don't know if we're going to have a stock market to the extent that you would potentially have a stock market here in the real world, but we would probably have something that would be fairly similar as well.
TL;DRThere are no traditional levels; improvement comes from the player's own skill plus better equipment, with some gear possibly requiring licenses, much like real-world qualifications.
So it's kind of a two-part answer, because this is not a traditional MMO. There is no leveling. It's not like you start at level one and work your way up to level 20. So a lot of it is to do with your own skill set, but then again the equipment and things that you've got help you in doing these jobs and tasks. So I think doing things like being a better miner will involve going and mining, sort of learning the skills yourself, actually doing it, not learning it as in I've gone from level 1 miner to level 5 miner. And having the right equipment. So you'll have to buy the equipment, upgrade your equipment, maybe go to some specialty place that does 10% better equipment, 20% better equipment. So it's a combination of your actual player skills, you as a person, and then also the equipment you're using, that will be our version of leveling up. There'll be some stuff where perhaps you wouldn't be able to operate certain items or equipment without the right license, and you'd have to maybe do some kind of driving test, right? So like in today's world, you can't just drive an 18-wheeler truck. You have to have a license to do that. So we may have something like that. But in general, the leveling and tasks will be more real-world based, i.e. based on your skill and the equipment you're using, not based on an arbitrary role-playing level. So I hope that makes sense.
So, well, if you are charting the jump point for the very first time, having to fly it yourself, then yes, if you mess up during the charting, it potentially could kill you, or you could be spat out in some random system and you don't know how to get home. But generally, if it's already been charted and your nav computer has the jump trajectory and coordinates already programmed in, then you'll automatically make it and you'll be fine. So really the risk in jump points is for the uncharted jump points that you don't have a nav path already set for. So I hope that makes sense.
TL;DRThe team is researching procedural generation of asteroids and fields within crafted rules, to add variation, and expects to share the work eventually.
So that is a good question. We definitely have quite a few different asteroids, but we're actually doing R&D right now into a bunch of procedural generation of asteroids and asteroid fields. So, I know there's been a lot of talk about procedural stuff and crafted stuff, and Star Citizen is more of a crafted experience, but we certainly are using elements of procedural generation to help us flesh out a lot of the world. So my goal is to make sure that everything feels designed and crafted, but you use elements of procedural generation to give you the variation that you need. So asteroids are a great example of that, where we have certain rules for asteroids, but we may procedurally be generating the asteroid field or the asteroids themselves. And so we're actually doing some pretty cool and interesting work on it, and down the road we'll probably be sharing that with you guys.
TL;DRThe star map was an early prototype that isn't ready to share; it will be driven by a holo renderer still in development, and it will be a while before it's shown.
So, good question. The star map was an early prototype that we'd mocked up inside the engine. It's not something that I'm ready to share yet. First of all, we've got a bunch more stuff to do with it in terms of fleshing out all our systems and making sure that we're happy with them, but also just in terms of the interface and how it works. So we're actually doing a lot of work right now on what we call our holo renderer, which is the system that's going to be rendering 3D holographic objects as well as data and text. And that's going to underpin pretty much all of our systems. So that would be the mobiGlas that you have as you run around, that you've seen in the fiction. Your first-person HUD if you've got a combat suit on. Your ship HUD, which is when you're flying a ship. And we kind of want it all to have this, whether it's an Iron Man feel or a Minority Report feel, or like you've seen in Prometheus, the holo stuff. But the idea is there's a lot of floating objects that you can manipulate and move around. And obviously the holo table, the equipment device in the hangar, was very, very preliminary work and a prototype of using some of this stuff, but we're doing stuff that's well beyond that, that's going to be much cooler, that we haven't shown you guys yet. And that will also be something that will drive the star map and your 3D maps when you're inside your ships and stuff like that. So it'll be a while before we show it to you, but when you see it, I think you'll be pretty happy. It's going to be pretty cool.
TL;DRHe is in Austin doing Mannequin training, the animation system driving characters, vehicles and weapons, and helping sound and design teams use it so the weapon mount can be finished and shipped for the firing range.
It's actually doing some training with Mannequin. What Mannequin is all about is the engine side of things, where it's actually controlling the actual character. So it's basically your marionette on the string, that's kind of what Mannequin's all about. So it's actually driving all the animation that Bryan Brewer and his team have actually been putting together, and how we're putting that all in game right now. So what I'm actually doing is also helping out all the tie-ins from sound, from design, for them to also get up to snuff with Mannequin as well, because Mannequin doesn't drive just the characters. It's actually driving all of our vehicles, all of our weapon animations as well, like the spin-up of the Gatling gun that you guys are seeing with the weapon mount. All that is tied into Mannequin. So all that goes through that whole pipeline of what the engine needs to read in order to see: what animations am I calling? Now at this particular time during the animation, what sounds do I play? What kind of scripting events happen with that? And it's just a huge, huge spider web. So of course I needed to come out here and help you guys out with that, because a lot of guys have got bits and pieces of it. So I just wanted to clear up any sort of issues that we're having with the engine. And so as we roll this stuff out, we're getting the weapon mount fixed up with everything that we need and ship it off to you guys so that you can actually play with it in the firing range.
TL;DRThe firing range began as a tool for attaching and testing weapons without a full ship, and became useful for sound, animation and art to inspect weapons and hardpoints.
For sure. From my point of view, I needed something that was not a fully functional ship. I needed something that I could just easily attach a weapon to, for my testing purposes, and then for any of the other designers to actually have maximum capabilities. So we kind of did some back-end cheats, we're not giving you guys that, to be able to set up any of the weapons so that we can use it for the Hornet destruction, which is the stuff that we're working on right now for Dogfight, which we showed off a little bit just before the Christmas holiday, and everything else with the weapon involvements. And this filters down now, and I thought this would be an excellent tool for everybody to use, such as sound and animation, to look at the weapons and how you can actually view it from all the different angles. And then even for art, to actually look at how all this stuff is actually going to be mounted onto different parts of the ships. So we can actually just use a standalone right now for how this thing's actually going to be utilized and made on each one of the ships.
Exactly. And I saw that you guys actually used this also for the Next Great Starship integrations. And that was actually pretty awesome. I was really happy to see. I got a chance to see a sneak peek at some of that stuff, and wow, I'm pretty amazed at all the stuff that's coming down the pipe with that.