The developers cover the upcoming CCU system, the new component system (power plants, coolers, shields), physically based damage, and the Glaive's balance and LTI. They also discuss modular Retaliator pods, the Saitek HOTAS, the social module, CitizenCon plans and ship schedules.
Yes, I was just talking to Turbulent about this yesterday. Basically, the front end is done. They need to knock a few bugs out of the back end, and as soon as that's done... So no ETA, but it is closer than it is farther away. Is noncommittal an answer enough for you?
We're still up in the air, have not decided whether or not we're going to do that.
Yeah, it's not a technical issue.
There's some technical aspects to it. Doing that to the database has some issues. It's an amount of work issue. It's a game balance issue. It's an ongoing debate here. Our feeling is that it'll be more of an issue when we make some changes to the component system. Probably more likely to happen then. But it's not something that's going to happen today, tomorrow, next week.
They're going to have to run a script to change it, but it should be early next week.
It's a lot of work. So it's still coming along nicely, making a lot of really good progress on it. But it's just broad sweeping changes. The very first rollout of it is mainly going to be a full overhaul on power plants, coolers, and shields. But it's going to be setting up the groundwork for everything you need going forward over the next few years. But it's going to be really cool. I'm also really excited once we get physically based damage and the weapon resizing again. Then the guns are going to look right for the size against their ship, but the actual size and scale of things that we have planned out on the largest end is going to be ridiculous. There's going to be a lot of really cool stuff in the coming months, but like anything, it takes time to do right.
TL;DRThe answer is that ship release timing can't be given, since production is reworking the ship schedule and release dates are never answered on this show.
Lots of questions about ships and I have one big overarching answer for a lot of things right now. So our production guys, both the UK and here, are currently reworking our ship schedule to make it way more awesome. And while they're doing that, there's not a whole lot that we can say about any ship in particular because they're making it so we get stuff bigger, better, faster, stronger.
Well, one of the nice things also with even some of this combined stuff is we've got now a lot more standard sizes for exactly, okay, what is a capital ship power plant? So when we're blocking these ships out, we can do less guesswork in our white box and really build out these right sizes, build out these right specs from the ground up.
Basically, standard disclaimer for every RTV, if you're asking us when a ship is going to come out, that's not really something we can answer.
When it's done, 20XX. Soon, TM.
It's never going to be a question you're going to get an answer to on RTV.
So, I mean, it's like actual aircraft. Sometimes you'll have seven different types of F-16s that you manufacture differently for different roles. Sometimes you'll have one base aircraft that you can convert to things easily. So this does not mean that variants are going away forever. It just means that some ships will have this sort of a modular system. And hopefully, the idea long term is that this system will be a little bit more than just every one ship has modules to swap around. Sometimes the modules might work on different ships. Imagine a theoretical medium bomber someday that has one slot for one of these Retaliator modules. It gives us something to build around going forward. There's also interesting stuff that's going to come out of it. But it is not the death of variants, as I've seen some people say.
Well, we're going to find out. What they have told us is they're interested in sharing the whole process. We're already gathering feedback from our community for them, and they want to share. They're going to show where they are at each stage of the way. We'll see how it develops. My hope is that this is the first time kind of the CIG germ has infected another host.
We'll see how it goes.
Yes. We have a wonderful gentleman named Mr. Will Everett who is on top of all those kind of things.
Yes, it's not quite redoing 3,000 animations, but it's retargeting for the new rig. I think on Monday we did the FPS module update. They said we would have a future update when we knew exactly what the timeline for that was going to be. Jason Hutchins is working on the next one of those updates as we speak. So we will know more when we get that, and we'll share it with you.
That is a strong we don't know, but we're looking into it now. I got another message about that this morning. I don't think it was intentional at all.
Unless it was like a last minute fix.
Yeah, maybe it broke some other thing. We'll find out.
I sent a panicked email to Dave Haddock right before the presentation with exactly that question. Esperia is the updated name, Aspera is thrown out the airlock, so it should be Esperia with an IA.
So it does have multiple... you can share your corp together. I'm not sure about shared hangars. We will find out. I heard they did a test in Austin a couple days ago. They had every single computer they could get it on playing together fine, so stuff's going well there.
TBD, but likely there'll be some hints of that.
No. If we undercharge for a ship, that's your benefit, not our loss.
Ships are balanced more around what they're needed to do and not the price that we sold them for.
So I will be at DragonCon Thursday through Monday. The Star Citizen Q&A, which is our big show there, will be, I believe it is Saturday early evening. I'm on at least two other panels, more generic, community management, game design-y type stuff, which I think are on Friday and Sunday. We'll post a whole schedule for everybody on the site probably next week. But ordinary panels, and we'll probably do a get-together with folks if they're interested. I think last year Batgirl organized folks going out to a bar together, and it was a lot of fun. And we'll do that again for sure if we can.
That was scripted. That was a TrackView basically telling it to fly over the map at the end.
I was going to mess with you a little bit. Yeah, it was scripted. I was going to do a whole thing about how a magician never reveals his secrets. Nope, we are not magicians. We reveal our secrets.
No, female characters first. You'll be seeing a lot more of the customization stuff later this year as we move into PU updates rather than AC updates.
Now, yes. Sandi was over there. She's still over there, actually. She's on her way back now, I believe. She was checking out the venue yesterday or the day before.
Yeah, we were discussing plans for CitizenCon the Saturday following the event.
Yeah, we were at our celebratory dinner. We were supposed to be relaxing, and we ended up talking about CitizenCon.
It took a while, but it was good. Erin Roberts was talking about planning CitizenCon after the presentation.
We're still trying. The important thing, and you can look at every single ATV segment and have this idea in your head, we don't force or compel anybody to be on the show. These folks are here to work. They're here to build the game. If they can find some time in their day to help us out with the show, we appreciate it, but we don't compel anybody.
For sure. We've got a couple of ships coming down the pipeline, including the Endeavor, the Crucible, the variants for the Vanguard. And as those are ready, we will make them available.
That is our intention. Yes. Still working out the internet availability at the venue.
I don't think there's any idea on when you can get your grubby hands on the Star Citizen HOTAS. It's still very early in the process.
Yeah, it'll be late next year, probably.
It'll be a while before we even get our demo units here.
Yeah, the one that was up on the stage was just a prototype. I don't think it functions.
It doesn't work.
It looks cool.
It looks awesome.
It looks really cool.
We are very likely not going to be releasing any more CitizenCon tickets. We are sold out and currently at capacity. If we released any more tickets, it would be not great, because there wouldn't be enough space for people.
Yeah. Chris is amazing at coding.
He made games on his own for a while.
I mean, that's how he got here.
Yeah, he's the guy who comes up behind you and redoes everything.
No, Chris, one of the stories I've heard about Chris over the years was kind of the generic, oh, he just wants to make movies, he doesn't care about making games, he didn't do anything on Wing Commander III or IV or whatever. Couldn't be further from the truth. He loves making movies, but he is a coder at heart also.
This is actually the biggest venue for a CitizenCon we've ever had.
We will continue to try to get bigger every year, but nobody wants to spend some crazy amount of money on an impossibly huge venue and have nobody show up.
On top of that, we want to spend your money making a game that you love, instead of throwing giant parties that don't actually get any work done.
And I say that as someone who attended the Ultima Online World's Fair, which rented out the entire Austin Convention Center for a couple hundred people.
The if-you-build-it-they-will-come thing doesn't necessarily work in real life.
So for AC 2.0, I'm not sure that any new weapons will be getting added into the game. There's a lot of rework going on with physically based damage that's going to be impacting all of our weapons. So even if you guys are seeing the intrepid data miners out there going through our code and seeing, oh, there's this XML or this XML, don't rest on that data thinking that's going in as is. Everything's going to be updated for all these new systems. We want to get more weapons added in as soon as possible because that stuff really changes up the gameplay, but it's not the quickest thing.
I wouldn't expect anything like that in the near future. Vanduul weapons and their ships are very distinct to human ships. In the grand long term, won't rule it out completely, but for the near term and at least through getting all physically based damage out, Vanduul ships use Vanduul weapons.
And for the purpose of an effective aggressor craft, you want it using the weapons that you're going to be facing as a design point.
Each according to their own abilities. The cinematics guys there will likely move on to the next single-player stuff. Ship guys may be freed up to do more Caterpillars and Merchantmen and all that stuff you are eagerly awaiting.
TL;DRA pre-flight check would be cool and some interactive cockpit elements are wanted, but not as the standard interaction, and how it works is still undecided and will be tried out.
So that's something I've actually gone back and forth talking with Calix about. There's a certain level of that that would definitely be cool to have, and he's very much wanting to have some of the interactive cockpit stuff that you do see in games like DCS and Rogue System, but not to the point where that becomes the standard interaction and everything else is keyed around that. So it's very much something we're going to have to go back and forth on, try out a few different implementations, see what's going to fit right and play well in our game while still adding to the ships and making sure it feels like, oh cool, I'm really doing stuff to get my ship flight ready, to get off the ground, into space, flying around. How that expands out and how that gets built out is still up in the air.
TL;DRThe speakers joke it away, saying the ship was ready before its UI and that nothing is finished, and one notes that real-world copied designs often keep flaws unchanged.
Shut up. That's why.
It's because it's iterative game development. The ship was ready before the UI was.
I need news to say, Esperia didn't do the recode for the Scythes, and it's like, hey, the only way we can get their replication tech going is really to...
We don't know much about Esperia yet, but ultimately the important thing to remember is that there isn't a single aspect of what you're playing that's finished.
Historically, even in wartime, different countries have ripped off each other's designs, and they've copied it all the way down to copyrights and stamps and trademarks and words that they don't understand. Russian copies of British stuff, Chinese copies of Russian stuff. The U.S. ripped off the Bofors cannon in World War II, the 40 millimeter AA gun. They took everything from the Swedish blueprints and it didn't fit in imperial measurements. So people are copying stuff all the time and they sometimes just don't change things even when you think it's obvious that they should.
You ever hear about the Russian copy of the B-29? They copied it from an example that landed in Russia. They were the Tu-4. Every Russian version has the exact same imperfections as the lone example that they copied it from. The missing screw here and whatever, just because they didn't want to deviate from what they were copying.
They're probably referring to his Danger Zone video. He got shut down because he used the Top Gun music in his video. But it lives on in The Wonderful World of Star Citizen number three on our channel with Pedro Macedo Camacho's music under it.
So, sorry, Sony sucks.
Yes.
That's because we faded in some of the local DJ's music and Twitch smashed us. But you can still watch the full presentation with all of the audio on YouTube. But that's what happened to the Twitch version. And that's why we couldn't do a simple export and I was there until 4 o'clock in the morning doing a more robust one because we lost the audio on the Twitch one.
TL;DRThey're looking at voice control but only where it makes sense, worrying it would work like macros that remove skill, and favor it mainly for wingman orders rather than ordinary cockpit controls.
So we're certainly looking at all sorts of voice control stuff. My conversations with Chris have been that it has to be something that makes sense. I remember adding Game Commander, not our Game Commander, but the Game Commander software, the old Microsoft device. And it had a profile for Wing Commander, and you could tell it, autopilot, fire missile. That's not a fun space. You don't tell your airplane what to do. So as long as it makes sense.
And one thing also that's kind of odd, at least to me from a design standpoint on things, especially like VoiceAttack, is realistically there's no difference between VoiceAttack and AutoHotkey. So it also becomes a question of really how much do you guys want the game to be macroed out? Because if I can do five programmed commands as a single VoiceAttack prompt, I can do those five commands as a G-key macro or some other device macro, and does everyone want the game to become automated like that? Do you want to take any choice and skill out on that side of it versus having that reactive in-the-moment stuff? And like Ben said, that's just about making sure however it's implemented makes sense and feels right for the game as a whole.
Yeah, that exact reason is why you can't make strings of spellcast macros in World of Warcraft anymore, because it took away all of the skill required and people were just exploiting the crap out of it in PvP.
So I've always thought, one of the things that takes you out of Wing Commander is the communication process, ordering your wingman around, C and pick, oh, attack target, C, withdraw. That's what I would replace with voice stuff, the wingman controls, but ordinary cockpit controls, not so much.
It's like one command, one action. That totally makes sense. Those are good options to have when it does make sense. One command, 12 actions, it's like, well, that's garbage.
TBD.
That's a minefield and I'm not stepping in it.
Yes, that's a huge aspect of any Chris Roberts game, taunting people. It's a requirement. I think pretty much the original Wing Commander invented taunting in games. I'll go that far.
Balance is ongoing.
Balance is ongoing. One thing I can actually say on that, we were looking at some of the Vanduul weapons, so not the Glaive in general, and we were noticing the lifespan on the projectiles was a bit too short for our liking, so we are looking at that, so the shots will exist a bit longer, which will also give it a bit more travel time. Any more specific than that, we're still looking at it, but yeah, balance, ongoing.
I've seen Zane's mockups of this. It is in the works. Eventually, there will be a whole set of color scales. All of his UIs are built in modular segments, so you'll be able to take emergency warnings and regular status warnings and frames and borders and color them all as you see fit. So, not today, not tomorrow, but he is working on the technology, I've seen it. So, maybe someday.
Well, there's all sorts of things you can do there. Physically, inability to stuff a ship is one, but life support is a big one for limiting it.
You've got 20 people in a box. There's enough air for three of you. Time to play cold equations.
It has not been assigned an artist yet. It will be a contractor. We want to do a little bit of extra work on this one because we are kind of establishing a lot about the Tevarin. So it's going to take longer, but it'll be good.
I'm excited. The Tevarin are the race that interests me the most.
Next deep dive would probably be with the Endeavor. I can't say when that is. But we'll look at the science stuff. There will be more in the future. We've got to get past Gamescom now.
We don't have any big news that's fancy enough to be worth sharing and getting excited over, but we have non-stop had Josh Coons and Chris Smith working on that in Texas, and they're plugging away, they're doing a good job.
And of course you saw some of that in the demo.
Well, I don't entirely know what the timeline is, but we're back on track, and we're looking at a couple of the renders. So right now, Forrest and Eric are designing some of the artwork that's going up in the office. And we're selecting the spaceship doors, implementing security. So we're going to have badges that open doors remotely. And the experience is probably going to involve entering a building, walking past my office, which is the lobby, and then having a spaceship...
TL;DRThere is no detailed schedule for the Caterpillar; it is probably among the upcoming ships rather than far off, Chris has asked about it, and more information is hoped for in the next few weeks.
So I'm seeing a lot of people talking about the Caterpillar, so even though I don't have a ton of detailed satisfying information, I'm going to address it. Alyssa told me when I came down that you guys already talked about how we aren't going to give any super detailed schedule stuff right now, because one of the things that was put on the back burner for Gamescom was something reliable ship-schedule-wise after that, because we had projections but it all kind of depended on how a few Gamescom things went. I think I have seen it on at least one of the drafts that's been floating around as one of the next several. I think I said before, we always have what we're working on, the next few, and then not even on my radar. I think it's probably going to be somewhere in the second category, and hopefully in the next few weeks we'll have a little bit more information.
I will say that Chris was involved in the process, and it is one of the ones he has asked for. When backers ask, we hear, where's the Caterpillar, where's the Caterpillar, where's the Caterpillar? When Chris Roberts asks, where's the Caterpillar? It's more serious. We'll have an update for you soon.
I've never heard that before, so to my knowledge, no, we haven't considered it, but I'll bring it up with some people and see if they think it's a good idea.
We have been talking about that for some of the ships, especially like the Idris, where everyone doesn't necessarily fit in the hangar. We've talked about doing like a fly-around of just the hull, TBD on all that.
Oh, yes, I love having that discussion. Yeah, we could do a subforum if there's enough unique topics in there. I have no problem with that. We'll kick it around. In fact, it would be good for feedback probably for Saitek. So, yeah, we'll look at it.
We'll take a look at it next week.
That's actually probably a better question for more details for Matt, but I know that we are planning on doing damage for components and all that kind of stuff. You probably won't see that the first time you see components rolling out in the hangar and the first release of all the new stuff we're going to do for you guys, but that is something we're going to be doing.
You actually saw it during the multi-crew demo when the Retaliator's quantum drive component became damaged, and we hadn't implemented the ability to repair it yet. So, yes. Damaged components is very real. And it works.
Not soon.
Can't say more than that, but mm-hmm.
I am not. We'll probably let some designers do that. There will be updates, nothing is final right now. But one thing I've heard is a lot of people are like, oh, you're getting rid of variants, what about my Phoenix, what about my LN? We're not getting rid of variants. Those are still going to be ships that exist. Same rule, no change.