The developers answer fan questions on Star Citizen's reputation system for pirate-style ships like the Cutlass, hireable NPC crew for the Constellation, turret behavior under Newtonian physics, and ship skin customization. They also cover mod tools, Kickstarter pledge integration, the referral contest and Citizen cards.
TL;DRAnyone can buy and fly a Cutlass without being treated as a pirate, since reputation, not ship type, determines how others see you, though some players may look askance.
Anyone can buy a Cutlass. That's not going to be the defining factor in people thinking of you as a pirate; it's all a reputation system. So you can fly a Cutlass, you can explore with it, you can do legal bounty hunter missions, that sort of thing, without a problem. Other players may look askance at you, because the fiction is that this company, Drake, creates these ships that everybody knows are for pirates. They're legitimate businessmen, but everybody knows they're making these ships for pirates. Other players may look at you askance, but they'll be able to scan you and see you're a good citizen.
Yeah, kind of think of it like the whiskey runners from the American past, right, where you can still buy a nice Ford two-door coupe, but they souped theirs up and flew them around, and so the cops never knew who was the good guy or the bad guy. Now, they could know by reputation, maybe they've got a certain fender type or a certain... They would know that that was a pirate. Same kind of thing in this situation. They'll know you by your rep, not necessarily by your ship. It's all about your personality. You want whatever ship you want, we're going to support that.
They will, yes. If you pledged the extra money for the special stuff during Kickstarter, we're working on an update to the site that's going to let you go in and assign that money where it was supposed to go. So it's coming, don't worry. We're working on it. So the answer is yes. Yes, absolutely. We did not take the $1,000 for your Corvette and run off.
I know you're not going to want to hear this, but it's going to be much closer to launch. We're still figuring out our own rules right now for how the ships are going to work. We are going to make sure we get that information out to you as early as it's possible to do so, but it's months or a year away at least.
Yeah, we're creating the whole rule set. We're creating the entire pipeline for putting the art into the game. Even though we've got this really badass demo, it's just a demo. We've still got the entire rule set of the universe to create. So bear with us. You'll be watching along the way. These questions will become easily answered as we go. A lot of them you'll be able to answer yourselves, but this is why we do the show.
TL;DRDavid Ladyman joined as Jump Point editor, and Eric Peterson says he is hiring and talking to several former Origin people, hoping at least two join, without naming them.
So first of all, David Ladyman was a huge coup for us. We worked together at Origin, and he is amazing. You saw the first edition of Jump Point. He's come on board as the Jump Point editor, and he'll be responsible for creating that every month for our subscribers. There's a lot more stuff to be announced for the subscribers. We're working on that now. It's a balance, because we want to make sure we support everybody that's supported us to this point, but we also want to give something a little special to the subscribers, because they're giving a little extra for a little more access than everybody else. Now, that doesn't mean that people won't get access, because clearly you will. Wingman's Hangar will always be available to everybody, because this is something we like to do and keep the community updated.
As far as more industry vets, yeah, I'm talking to a lot of people right now. I'm in charge of the hiring for the company right now. Being that we're in Austin, there's a lot of interest in working on the project, and there's a lot of interest from our side in some of the talent that we worked with at Origin and Digital Anvil. The key will be getting the right talent. We are very chemistry-oriented here. I've always found that if people like each other and people work well in an environment, it just creates a nice workflow that allows you to have the magic, right? What you want to avoid is somebody that's so dominant or so over the top that you can't get anything done. So we're currently talking to four ex-Originites, and if I have my way, at least two of them will be coming on board. And I can't tell you who they are. Actually, it's interesting, there is one that's coming on in two weeks. It's our chief visual officer. But I don't think he's actually quit his job in the movie industry. Local. You might be able to figure out who that is. If it was a special visual effects supervisor, perhaps at a local movie industry in Austin...
Yeah, so to further emphasize that, there are going to be NPCs that are a little smarter than others. Just like people. So you'll be able to hire better pilots. There'll be ratings. I think we'll put a rating system in there for the NPCs.
It'll cost you more if you want to have an ace NPC character. Exactly. Just like us, just like everybody in the game, the reputation system is going to be global. So NPCs will be on that too, at least in this instance.
Well, I can't give any more details on it, but I can tell you we are coming to Germany. We're going to Crytek. We've got a couple of Crytek people that have come on board, and we're going over there for some serious boot camp type training with our lead programmers and stuff. Is it public? Maybe. We hadn't really thought about that. That's a good question. Maybe we make it some deal where we have some sort of get-together and have some beers. Because the Wingman and all the people at Cloud Imperium like beers. Especially German beers in Germany.
TL;DRConcept art for big ships is being made now but not released early, to avoid misreadings of work in progress; bigger ships should appear in coming months, with contests planned.
Yeah, and just so you know, we are literally doing all the concept stuff now. We don't like to release stuff too early. You saw how the Freelancer, when it got released, people were saying it looks like a ginormous penis, and they were not happy, but it was just a work in progress. So part of it is we've got to educate. Not you guys; obviously anybody watching this show is well informed. You guys know what the hell you're talking about. But we've got to make sure when we release something that people understand where it is in the process, what's coming up, and that we're releasing it to get feedback.
So anyway, the answer to the honest question is, yeah, they'll be coming in the future as it comes up. We've got a hierarchy of moving down the list of assets. We've got an asset list. We're creating the ships as we go. And there's a lot to be designed. We kind of want to throw some of the stuff out there and say, how would you guys envision stuff? We'll have some contests coming up for you guys to get in on going forward.
Yeah, Constellation, the Vanduul fighter. I've seen the Vanduul fighter. Don't forget, in 12 months here, or I guess it's 11 and a half now, we've got the Alpha multiplayer coming up, which should have all the ships. We've got to start with the ships that you guys bought, and then we'll populate the rest of the world based on that.
TL;DRThe answer is yes to custom skins and nose art in some form, but the extent is undecided; an approval process and options to hide others' skins are being considered.
Short answer is yes, but we don't know to what extent yet. We don't want a universe where everyone is going around with bright pink spaceships, kind of taking you out of it. But we definitely want to give you the option of customizing everything. Your ship is your avatar, so we want it to represent you. So we're going to look at how to do nose art. We're looking at how to do custom skins.
But again, that's going to have to be approved. At some point, there'll be an approval process it'll have to go through, because we don't want vulgar skins. I don't know if you guys ever played the original Half-Life. I think it was Half-Life where people would run around spraying naked ladies on the walls and stuff. And while I was enjoying that myself, my wife didn't enjoy it much, and certainly my kids wouldn't either. So it could be a situation where maybe we have some controls where the custom skins are only seen on your own server?
Yeah, we could maybe do something like that. We'll just see. I guess the answer to that is it's TBD. But we're trying to avoid anything that has the potential for griefing or to be abused. So that's going to require a lot of thought on our part. And so the answer to that is forthcoming, as in not really answerable at this point.
TL;DRWinners are not yet known because many Kickstarter accounts still haven't integrated; referrals are open until Sunday, the winner picked Monday and announced Wednesday, with permission requests going out.
Winners do not know yet. As you may have heard today in the update, the Kickstarter integration has been going slowly. We've got 7,500 people who still have not clicked on the link to integrate their accounts, and we want to give them a chance to add their names to whoever referred them. So we're giving them until the end of the day Sunday to put in their referral, and we'll be picking the winner on Monday and announcing on Wednesday.
We've reached out to a lot of people, and if you get something that says, we need your permission to announce you're the winner, make sure you respond to that. Because if you don't respond, well, we'll just have to go down to the next one.
TL;DRMods apply only to servers players set up, not the main universe; good mods may be submitted for consideration, and selling community creations is being explored but legalities are unresolved.
Modding only applies to servers you set up. So you can't just go in and mod the central universe. The game servers are not going to be moddable. The main server will not be moddable. No, we are coming up with a process where people come up with amazing mods, they can submit them. We'll consider them for adding to the main universe. But that's a longer approval process.
Yeah, we're looking at a lot of things like that. Like if somebody makes something really cool, like a mod or perhaps a ship or something, maybe we find some way of allowing them to sell that in our universe and splitting the profits with you guys. But we've got to figure out the legalities of that and see if it works. Because to be honest with you, the talent out there in this community is unbelievable. You guys have done amazing stuff. So we'd like to tap into some of that.
It depends on when you registered. If you registered before November 26th, I think, you'll get all the same things if you upgrade or buy another pledge right now. If you registered after that, you will just get whatever's currently offered on the site.
The answer is yes, it will. Chris has been very specific about us wanting a Newtonian physics style of ship. So if you're in the turrets and you try to lock... now, you're going to have locks. The idea is some of the turrets will have missiles and locks and stuff of that nature, right, that you can obviously upgrade your ship to get. So maybe once it rolls out of your range, you can still be locked in for a time, and then you pop a missile off that can still track them. But if the ship rolls, your turret's going to roll with it, and your area of view is going to change.
Sandy's making the run on those. I think we're just waiting on the rest of the Kickstarter people again to link. Once the Kickstarter folks link, then we have all the Star Citizen cards and we can run them through. We're going to make one run, because this is a one-time deal only. Star Citizen cards are not available for purchase. They're for early people. Not many people are going to have those. It's kind of like the golden ticket. If you were lucky enough to find us before we announced it, you've got a golden ticket, and that's cool. Now, that doesn't mean there won't be other cool things popping up, because there will be. We'll be having stuff for contest winners and things of that nature going forward. But sometimes people like a little something that separates them from everybody else.
So let's avoid the questions about the Citizen cards, because we're only making one run on the Citizen cards, guys, one. And so we have to cut it off. We're not going to extend that out for everybody. It's just going to lock down.
Okay, so how the office looks will be shown. I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll do a walk-around of the office in the coming weeks, and you guys can see how it's changed, and it has changed dramatically.