Developers answer questions on merchandise and shipping (Big Benny's items, star maps, posters, soundtrack box set), plus ship status for the Starfarer, small mining ship, Drake Herald, Orion, Caterpillar and Carrack rework. They also cover cargo, first-iteration persistence, AI collision avoidance, ship combat and Star Marine.
We're looking into it.
We are looking into it.
Are we doing the shirt?
Yes, we're also working on that.
The star maps as part of your package, those will be shipping soon, too. In fact, you should have gotten an email a few weeks ago telling you to update your address. If you didn't, that's in your My Profile RSI thing. And we'll email those folks again in a couple weeks to remind them.
And that's the folks who had a separate add-on map. If you have the folder with the package, that'll be a little better.
Oh, right. Yes, sorry.
Yes, we're working on some things.
No. Not yet.
Not yet. Still talking to some folks about the best way to do that. But I did pile up all the tapes next to my desk on a shelf, so it's like a to-do list. In fact, the DLTs are just the first. We've got a bunch of old Beta tapes and some other things that we need to recover.
Yes, there are.
Nothing more than what Chris said the other day, that it's in progress. It's going to be probably our first major career that actually goes in the game.
We will be sorting them out in probably the next week or two. In fact, we were working out our plans for the events at Gamescom. We're going to try to do something different each night, so there will be plenty of opportunities to hang out and talk to Star Citizen and see what we're working on.
Yes.
On the day that it becomes flyable?
When it's flyable.
I don't know about exploration, but maybe salvage.
My goals are to continue, I think, what I've already started, which was making a connection with our backers and acting as a bridge between them and development. Before I took on this role, I spent an unhealthy amount of time in Twitch streams or chatting with backers. And now I get to do that full time, along with all my other responsibilities. And so my goals are just to strengthen that relationship and keep going.
That is Chris's personal Oculus, the one he got for backing the Kickstarter way back when. And we've just been doing some experimenting this week. It's been very fun.
It is sooner than you'd expect. In fact, one of the things we did this week was work on the cover artwork for the soundtrack. So it's not too far off. I think there's one more recording session where we're going to be getting some music that will be on it. But after that, Sandi's working on putting together essentially the metal boxes, the folded posters, the making-of book, the USB drive, and the soundtrack. And we're going to manufacture those in the not too distant future.
I don't have an answer for that.
Although if you looked at ATV this week, you saw some of the AI work they're doing for object avoidance and whatever they call it, ORCA.
I know they're actively in development for it, because when I walk through the studio in Austin, I can see the animators working on various stuff with that.
Given all the art they've started giving us of NPCs, like for the Starfarer thing, I think it's getting to critical mass.
Do we want to talk about yesterday's Fast Forward? The collision avoidance.
It kind of goes hand in hand with that. It's actively in development. AI population.
I don't remember the context of that. Maybe it's the Xi'an Scout, which has human guns right now, and we'll be doing Xi'an guns down the line.
I was not in any 890 Jump lockdown meeting.
I don't think we were a part of that, sorry.
But we would have been if it happened, so maybe it didn't.
Starter package would be the Aurora. My favorite ship is the Carrack, because I love Firefly and that's what it says to me.
No update there.
Oh, the new weapon system. You guys have seen in the last patch we did the shields, and this one was power plants. So the whole kit and caboodle with new weapons and all that is coming, and it'll allow us to have some more weapons to unlock and offer in the Voyager Direct.
Good, it's with the artists now, they're doing revisions, trying to get to that point where we say, this is great, do some marketing paint-overs, and we'll offer it up for sale. That'll probably be late April.
So the first iteration of persistence is not game-wide, 'everything is persistent'. It's more about getting your feet wet with a few things. So some of the things that QA is looking at is not having to change your hangar on the website, but being able to do it in-game and it persisting. And then also things like your criminal level, your ship's damage states and stuff like that persisting. So if you log out with a broken ship and then you come back in, you'd have to go and repair it and stuff like that. And then they're still expanding on it. Jeffrey Zhu in the Austin office is doing a lot of work on it.
Yes. And the current project is the Caterpillar.
In the works, we are working with a sponsor to get it all set up, so a little bit later this year.
Really good, actually. That's in active development again.
In Austin, right?
Yeah, folks in Austin are working on the Herald.
Josh Coons and Chris Smith, the same individuals who did the Constellation rework, are now on the Herald.
Yeah, in fact, Chris just gave a go-ahead for all the changes they said they needed to make to the look and the functionality, so we're expecting to see more soon.
No updates on the Orion. Same status. It's a larger ship waiting for folks to be freed up to work on it.
We'll definitely have a different mechanism down the line.
I don't know how we're handling that.
Maybe docking of some sort.
I pitched that to them a while ago because we thought it would be a good way for people to explore the Starfarer, but instead we just put them in everybody's hangar. Speaking of which, enjoy your Starfarer in your hangar right now through Monday.
Is that Sunday night or the end of Monday?
It's usually Monday morning.
We're thinking about that, actually. In fact, they're doing a couple different payloads for it. A boarding shuttle seems like a really boring thing to pledge for, but we have a couple of utility ideas.
Yes. That's with Shubin's stuff they're doing for Squadron.
I can't say what we're doing, but I do hate that in things where it's always one thing.
It's like one biome for the entire planet. I don't know. We'll see. Stay tuned.
It's possible. But it's not something we're going to sell today.
That's actually something that Chris is really wanting to get working, because originally there were issues with the interior physics grids and how bullets would go from the outside to the inside or the inside to the outside. And they made tweaks to that, and then it made it to where you basically couldn't shoot anybody if you were both inside of the physics grid. And on top of that, they made the pilot invulnerable to damage to fix the cockpit one-shot kills. But there's been a lot of recent email threads trying to address that. That way you will be able to potentially sneak onto somebody's ship, kill them and take it, or just have epic battles, especially now that we're getting ships that are as large as the Starfarer.
The answer is, if you go back and watch the 10 for the Chairman from a few weeks ago, Chris Roberts goes into detail about that, so I would definitely go and check that out.
It is still coming. We went ahead and put the FPS tech that the folks in Germany and Illfonic worked on in Crusader, so we jumped ahead of ourselves, but we will go back and finish Star Marine as a standalone FPS at some point.
And we just got two new weapons in the most recent patch, the shotgun and the sniper rifle.