Dude, Where's My Spaceship?

Well, we definitely need one. And with my mission hat on, I can't wait to get one because you can imagine the kind of puzzle type things we'd be able to do with that. I mean, I need to go away, talk to the system designers and stuff, but I'll hypothesize because I can see exactly how we'd do it. It's quite straightforward once you've agreed on the basics, right? So if you imagine the coordinates ran from, well, what's the origin, right? Is it Earth? Is it the sun? It would be something like that because we're humans and we're the center of the universe. And do those coordinates just run and run? Because you'd end up with huge numbers, obviously. Or do they maybe reset? Kind of like you say, okay, Stanton, you're in Stanton, so you preface it with Stanton and then say 0, 0, like the origin is the sun of Stanton. Just to start again, otherwise these numbers are just going to become absolutely unwieldy and impossible to use. So I think once we figure that out, agree on that, then it should be fairly straightforward because we have the root. We have these zones, right? The game has zones. So there's the root, which is just space. And then you get to a planet. Even inside a ship has a zone, right? And every time you step into that, your local coordinates are in relationship to it. So if you're looking at your coordinates, stepping inside a ship from space will change them. It'd be a huge number when you're in space down to a tiny number because you're only meters away from the origin of your ship. So, I mean, you can easily get around that. I assume you can just use the world coordinates, full stop. You will always be inside a solar system. When you use a wormhole or a jump point kind of thing, you'll come out in another solar system. We just reset the coordinates to that. So either way we do it, if we decide we do it with Earth being 0, 0, you basically just take how far Earth is away on the star map kind of thing and then add on whatever real world coordinates you're getting at the time onto that. And bingo, you've got coordinates. Again, too unwieldy to really be telling your friends. So that's the thing we have to figure out. At one point, I really wanted sectors on planets, so you can be like, oh, I'm somewhere in here, because again, with a mission hat on, that's, oh great, we can say it crashed somewhere in sector blah blah blah, and get you searching for it, get you scanning, all that. And we can still do that, even with coordinates, like we say the last known... these things are not broadcasting constantly, so they broadcast their position every minute or something. And when this thing has crashed, you only get the last known coordinates. So you go there and scan. So basically, the answer is as soon as we figure out how to be able to present it in a way that isn't "I'm at 0429X" forever. And where do we show it as well? That's another question. Where do we show this? Because I can't think off the top of my head of a great position for it. Bring up a mobiGlas or something like that? Or is it always on the screen somewhere? That's probably not the best way to do it. So the UI guys would need some buy-in on this as well.

It sounds like a question of scale. You have to decide how granular you want to drill down into it. Is there universal coordinates? And then there's system coordinates. And then within the system, are there sector coordinates, as you said? And then on each planetary body, does each planetary body then have its own set of coordinates? And then do we have sectors on the planetary body? So you want to devise a system that is granular enough to let people effectively describe where they are.

Yeah, pinpoint position, but in a manageable way.

So I don't want to rule things out permanently forever because salvage is going to be... not strictly for Vehicle Pipeline, but tier zero, no, you're just salvaging the item and everything inside it is just this contained item that goes into it. If you're going to put it in a big grinder, it's obviously not going to survive out the other end. Maybe if you have special equipment, like you have the Vulcan's drones, you would salvage the fuel separately first.

Like configure the drones, say, I'm going out there and you're looking specifically for fuel.

Because those drones can do refueling, rearming, repairing. You could use the Vulcan to do the reverse of refueling on that ship first and then salvage all the parts manually. It's got a cargo bay so you can go out there and cut those bits. But no, to start with, you're just going to grab that item with its contents and you sell or convert it as needed.

I don't think it's really changed from its original intent. Obviously, between it, the Carrack and a couple of other ships, it's the most anticipated or awaited ships. Its broad, high-level goals: it's still a trading ship. It's still got shops or stalls inside it where you can sell your goods, trade your goods. It's still a great little, big ship for being an org headquarters. So it's got the accommodation capacity to keep a bunch of people on board. The writers have said Banu trade negotiations take a long time, so we've built in short to mid-term accommodation for guests. It's still got those huge honking great guns to defend itself. The one thing that maybe it's changed, maybe it's not changed, is the topic of speed of the ship. A lot of things have been said about the ship, officially and unofficially, and they sort of get warped over time. It is a big ship. Big ships in our game are not fast ships. So there's a lot of expectation that this ship is just going to be zipping around all over the place. It's big, it's hefty, it's armored, and it's got the firepower to offset that.

You're meant to have some of those Banu Defenders flying around.

Yeah, that's the reason they are there. And there is some interplay between the two that we've built in but not talked about. So there are reasons and things going on.

I can't say that's currently on the roadmap.

Human trafficking on the roadmap?

Human trafficking, yeah. No, well, there's been comments about it throughout the development of the game where it's just like, yeah, because the slavers are part of the lore and everything, right? So it's come up, but...

Bounty hunting.

Yeah, that's another example of it, right?

A lot of people looking forward to bounty hunting. We've got the Anvil Hawk currently in development, currently being built out here by the LA ship team. That's a bounty hunting ship. Lots of talk over the years about being able to capture NPCs and capture players, and whether when you capture a player it gives you an NPC copy of that player, so that the player itself can be free to continue playing and stuff like that. But has anything been fully hammered out, fleshed out, decided on?

No. We talk about the bounty hunting aspect of it quite a bit because we're trying to flesh out the roadmap for the next few years, and bounty hunting is a part of that, right? How detailed that's going to be for the tier zero implementation, or for that minimum viable product, is still up for discussion. So as a tradable commodity, like being able to actually sell them to another person...

It's a step farther, isn't it?

Yeah, that's like a whole new level of craziness there. So I'd say the safe answer is probably we'll have something available with bounty hunting. Being able to trade slaves, probably not going to be anywhere in the near future. But you never know where Star Citizen is going to go, man. I can't guess on this one. There might be some legal issues. I don't know. We'd have to investigate that.

Let's get bounty hunting going, tier zero stuff, and for now let's put a pin in the idea of trading other players as a commodity. Maybe. We don't ever want to say never on Calling All Devs.

That's one where we might come close to the same. But who knows? Bounty hunting is definitely important to us, though. We definitely want that going, and capturing people and feeling that, but not disturbing the gameplay of other people too drastically. So that's what we're really trying to work out right now. Selling people to other people...

Probably not in the cards, guys.