The developers cover planned 3.6 features: weapon attachments, ship rentals, item misfires and repair, and harvestable spawning. They also discuss the law system, green and no-fly zones, mission payouts, and combat feedback from 3.5. Shareable missions, customs and competitive PvP are ruled out for 3.6.
I think from our standpoint, there's always things to improve on it. I think from my standpoint, I don't use it because I don't want to use it. But I don't use mics in other games as well. So it's just my personal preference. I don't want people to hear me breathe. Or even if I want to talk to somebody, I don't want to have to hold down a button. I prefer chat and being able to do that.
Now, granted, going back to just FOIP and its progress, we'll be maintaining this and improving it as we go. So I can't remember the specific issues that the guys are tackling right now, but I know that there are some FOIP and VOIP things that we are working on for 3.6. There's just maintenance. Maintenance now.
Right now, it's something a little bit further out, I think, because this will fall in Tony's pillar. And if I remember correctly, there's still some baseline stuff that they need to take care of first. And then there's a lot of edge cases that we need to think about, how that's going to work.
TL;DRTodd Papy gives only broad ideas, not promising 3.6: solar-system-level laws modified by zones, edge cases still being discussed, and illicit goods flagged so AI reacts after scanning you.
I mean, right now, basically, we have the Soled, and then at that point in time, we'll be able to say, okay, here is the law for the solar system, and then be able to have positive zones or negative zones which add more laws or take away laws based off of the overarching solar system. And then from there, right now, we're just going through and talking about the edge cases of things. So if you bump another ship, is that really an infraction, or if it is an infraction, how much is it? And then from there, it's going into making sure that we have the ability to flag what we consider illicit goods, because right now there was no concept of that. It was just there's goods, whether that be WiDoW or whether that be gold or any of our commodities. So now it's being able to have those things flagged and then have the AI understand those flags and go to the appropriate responses.
So making it so the AI can tell, when they encounter you, whether you're carrying a full cargo load of tungsten or a cargo load full of WiDoW, their reactions to you will be different.
TL;DRTodd Papy says travel time depends on ship type and floats a pitched idea of optional anomalies to investigate mid-travel, but says they are not planning to act on it right now.
Well, I think it depends on also what type of ship you're in. So if you're in a multi-crew ship, if you think about the Millennium Falcon, when they're doing these long hyperjumps, they get up, they do other things on the ship, they check on how something's working, they go and do other things. It's the same thing from a capital ship standpoint. What they never show is Luke going to Dagobah. And so from a single-seater fighter and even from multi-crew ship, we're talking about different possibilities. I've pitched an idea where along the way you're going through probability volumes and, for example, you haven't done something for X amount of time. You haven't had a story mission. You haven't had a combat. You haven't had anything else. And instead of it being like interdiction where it wholesale pulls you out, it's "I'm getting an anomaly up there. Do you want to go investigate it?" So basically, if you think of open world games, a lot of the fun of it is going from point A to point B. And I think from our standpoint, quantum travel, when we first were looking at it, obviously it was around Crusader and basically around Yela and the moons there. And then when you take it up to now you're traveling from Crusader to Hurston, there needs to be a time... It could be construed as penalty, but it's basically a travel time, that it takes a certain amount of time to do that. Just because, again, if you're traveling with goods, we want you to basically have the ability to possibly be interdicted.
I do like the idea, if I'm allowed to have a personal opinion on that, of not just the interdictions that force you to come out, but by providing sensor data, the anomalies, enticements to come out, where you have to make that call like, oh, I've heard people find great things on these anomalies. It's like, I really want to check that out, but I've got perishable goods or valuable goods. And if I pop out, somebody can see me.
It could be a good Samaritan thing. It could be a trap. It could be all these different kinds of... I think we call them ECM missions, but they're basically just different missions that show up in front of you, and sometimes we use them during interdiction, but it could be other aspects where you're coming across and maybe there's some asteroids there and you want to go and mine them, or you want to go and do something else, or scan them and then be able to sell that information. But that's where I would like us to go. If we did any sort of adjustments, I think Chris basically wants it to be like movies where you see the hyperspace jumps. And then when you take the jump points, then that's a different type of gameplay. That's more like whitewater rafting or something where it's a lot more active.
TL;DRTodd Papy says the tech for spawning harvestable entities is in place, with work on 3.6 and 3.7 to spawn and pick up simple objects, while nested containers like derelicts come later.
The tech will be there. So basically, Paul Brocklehurst and Marco have been working on the tech to allow us to do that. So if you think of trees or plants that are scattered around the universe, but this will also be for crates that we want to do, or if we want to do any sort of gems or anything that basically we want to be able to randomly spawn in different areas. So the tech is there. Now it's actually getting it so that we spawn it on the planet and we can pick it up. And then from there, that also goes into personal inventory, just because we want to make sure that you can carry it. If you go and pick up an apple, you can carry that apple and it doesn't just go into a global inventory aspect.
So unlike the UGFs, the underground facilities that are all designed and laid out, these are areas around the moons that would be a collection of entities that can be collected.
It really allows us to spawn anything. If we wanted to do a deeper nested object container, like a derelict, we could spawn a derelict. I mean, we need to do a little bit of work, but basically for our single object containers, like plants or gems or other very quick, easy things that we can pick up, we can do that. But if it's more like a nested object container, that will come on a little bit later, but we need to see how this base works first. And that's what we'll be working towards on 3.6 as well as 3.7. And then once we have something internally that we feel good with, then that's when we'll go wide with it.
TL;DRThe roadmap only shows features the team is comfortable committing to, and Todd Papy says staff are allocated to server-side OCS, so a missing bubble does not mean it isn't a priority.
It's a common misconception that when you don't see something on the roadmap, maybe it's something that's not being worked on. The roadmap is a collection of anticipated release dates, not an accounting of everything that's being worked on.
Oh, yeah, no, no. In fact, from an AI standpoint, we put up one for FPS, one for ships, one for social, but there's a hell of a lot more that happens in there. But basically to make sure that these things the team feels comfortable with, and making sure that if priorities change within the company... Let's say we're working on something towards AI, okay, but we need to do some optimizations or we need to do some other things that basically pop up in just normal development of, oh, we need to do this real quick. What's on the roadmap are things that we feel comfortable enough with saying, yeah, we feel like this is locked in for that.
You mentioned priority. Oftentimes in questions the word priority comes up. Why isn't this a priority? Why isn't that a priority? And I think there's a misperception that priority equates to something that's going to be released next. Let's talk about server-side OCS or even server meshing. Because that doesn't have a bubble on the 3.6 roadmap or the 3.7 roadmap, some people may assume it's not a priority.
Oh, no, no. We have guys allocated to that right now. And in fact, if we have our feature team hubs, basically key guys on those feature teams have been pulled to work on server-side OCS because of the tech that is needed for it in order to get it working. They need to lay the foundation for those things. The other thing is that we have things that are on the roadmap that might have a lead time of, let's say, two quarters. And then there's also things that we don't have on the roadmap that we like to surprise. And then also it's just, we feel like we'll let this one work without the pressure of it has to go on the roadmap right there kind of thing.
Priority doesn't mean this thing is coming out next. It means it's getting the resources that are necessary to do it. It could be a high priority and still be a task that takes six months, nine months, 12 months to complete. Making something a priority doesn't suddenly make something capable of being finished in three months.
No. And for example, take OCS. I mean, Steve Humphries was the main backbone for that. But there were other guys that were also heavily involved, and their priority could have been working on a feature or it was supporting server-side OCS. And so there was a lot of tech and a lot of coders that went into that and worked towards those things. But I think for Chris, Chris likes a lot of balls in the air and he likes to make sure that these things are being pushed forward. And so some things move forward at a snail's pace. Some things move forward very, very rapidly.
When you have a team of over 500 people around the world, it's important to keep them all engaged and all working on something. And not everybody has the expertise to work on [server tech].
TL;DRTodd Papy says the new shield look he has seen is sleeker and fits the ship's surface more closely than a bubble, though he allows it may have been adjusted.
Well, from what I've seen, and maybe it's adjusted, but from what I've seen, it was very sleek and form-fitting versus the bubble effect. And in reality, the way that we did our hit collision and stuff like that was it was actually the surface of the ship. So this will mimic that much closer.
We've done quite a few iterations on shield tech over the course of our development, with different styles and different approaches over the years. That and the damage states themselves. It's such an important aspect of the feedback in combat. This is game development, it's not game construction. You try a thing, you see how it works. And sometimes you try things and go, that's not really what we want to do.
I think it's also just there's things... Okay, this is something we could do two years ago; now we have different aspects of the engine in place, and also the graphics team have adjusted, the way that we do our ships has adjusted. There's things that we've done in the past where we're like, okay, we need to go in and update this.
TL;DRTodd Papy says he hasn't noticed any film grain and doesn't know what causes it, so he asks players to send comments with a video capture for the team to investigate.
I haven't noticed the film grain. Basically, with our RTTs, so our render-to-textures, our comms calls, those types of things, whether that be when things pop up. So if you get a comms call and it pops up, okay, well, we want to be able to have something when it actually spawns, so it doesn't feel like it comes out of nowhere, something when it despawns, and then be able to make sure that when we're doing things, let's say you're inside the Coil or you're inside something that is very disruptive, then you get that kind of spattered look that happens. And even from our UI development, we have things that we consider low tech versus some things that would be considered high tech or alien. So it's just figuring out, from an art standpoint, what feels right for these things. And so the first thing that we're working on is basically just creating those gold standards for the comms calls. So the lighting that happens with the pilot, the RTT, how things come in, making sure that right now the AI will take G-force reactions. In the past, they haven't. There had been no need for them. But now, when you're in a comms call with somebody and then they're flying, you want that kind of movement. And so we have the face animation and then we need to see what it looks like layered on top of their body.
Chat's talking about how some people are noticing the film grain across the board in the game. It's not just the RTT stuff. They're actually noticing it in the gameplay.
I haven't seen it either. So basically, send comments to Tyler or send comments to Bayer, and in particular a video grab of it, and we'll look into it, because I don't know what it is.
TL;DRTodd Papy acknowledges mission payouts need adjusting as an ongoing balancing job, and says he'd prefer payouts to live on the server so they can be hotfixed.
No, we know we need to do adjustments. And in particular, we were looking at some tech today that's being worked on to get better ideas of how we do these things. And then also, we know in particular right now, one of the comments regarding player feedback was a lot of times, okay, hey, I'm at Delamar and then I have to travel to Hurston and then I have to travel back to Yela to complete the mission, versus it being kind of encompassed around those areas. So we cut down on QT times, but then we also need to adjust mission payouts, and that to me is just a kind of constant balance thing that we will be going through and doing. Same with the items and how much they cost and how they work.
That's one of the great benefits of the way our development is working, having a live environment in the middle of our development. We're not forced to figure those things out and commit to them early on. We can put a version out there and let our backers themselves tell us.
Well, in an ideal world, what I want to be able to do is get that so that we can just hotfix it. So in particular for mission payouts, right now, I believe it's done in Subsumption and it's basically kind of baked into the Subsumption nodes for that, versus I would prefer it to be on the server so then we can do hotfixes.
TL;DRTodd Papy says HUDs will be layered (contact-lens style without a helmet, helmet, ship and mobiGlas layers, varying by helmet type), and the team is currently cleaning up and fitting these together.
So we actually have, I want to say five or seven different layers. So one of the layers is basically when you don't have your helmet on, you just wake up, and that would be considered contact lens. And so you'll see a different HUD layout associated with that. Another HUD layout would be when you put on a helmet, and then that contact lens goes away or the information is adjusted accordingly. Another thing would be when you actually get into a ship and how the visor brings up different things, in particular your target information. And then from there, it'd be any other casting, or when we talk about mobiGlas or those types of things, those would be kind of another layer. So from our standpoint, we are actually doing passes on this right now, saying, okay, what is relevant? And in particular, what is relevant from an FPS standpoint, as well as when you're sitting down in a ship, what is relevant associated with that? So, for example, we have what we consider widgets, and we're working on cleaning that stuff so it moves in and out. But for example, if you're sitting there in a ship and you get shot, you don't know that you're getting damaged. There's no health associated with that besides just the effects of you bleeding out. Versus if you take your helmet off right now, you have to do chat via mobiGlas, which we're fixing, by the way. So that would be on all the time. And then if you think about going into third-person camera and stuff like that, any HUD associated with that, then that's entirely [another layer].
So if I understand you correctly, it almost kind of sounds like the way Bluetooth devices pair with each other. When you wake up, there will be some level of HUD available to you on your contact lens, or implants, whatever. So your player character without a helmet will have some aspect of HUD. And then when you put the helmet on, that pairs with either the contact lens or the implant, and then they go, okay, well, we don't need this on this level. This is here on this level.
Yeah, and then it also depends on the type of helmet you put on. So, for example, if it's a combat helmet, then that would give you information on, let's say, your weapons. Versus if it's an explorer helmet, maybe it gives you information on temperature or atmosphere or things that would be relevant towards that career. So that's the way that we'd be kind of, I don't want to say hard theming these, but that's in essence kind of what it is. It's pushing these things towards being combat or utilitarian.
And then when you get in your ship, because some ships have hard displays, some ships have holographic displays, it pairs there too. So now you've got three levels of potential UI and it's got to balance.
That's the difficult part. So, I mean, right now, Simon and Rich and I think John Crew, John Dudley are going through saying, okay, we just bring up all the HUD, we bring up FPS, we bring up ship, and then we overlay it and we make sure that everything kind of has a safe zone and a safe spot and place to live. And then from there, you start talking about manufacturers, you start talking about how these things need to come in and out and what's important, what's really important to us and even to the players.
It's cool that the UI work applies to every aspect of Star Citizen. I'm trying to think if there's any aspect of Star Citizen that the UI team doesn't have to have some input in.
And I guess from my standpoint, we have everything implemented right now and it's not sexy. It's what we consider functional. And from a UX standpoint, a lot of times it's clunky as well. And part of that is just the iteration. And then from there, now we're going through and fixing things. And that to me is where we can actually start making it sexy. We can see, okay, we tried this on the MFDs. It didn't work. It's very hard to read, very hard to use. You've got to zoom in on something. It doesn't give you the pertinent information, what you need right then and there. So it's us looking at the MFDs saying, okay, how can we fix these? Or even basically the information that's your ship versus the target ship. When you're scanning, what is the relevant information there? So it's us working through those and just cleaning all that stuff up.
I'm thinking about the interesting outlier scenarios, like when you're panicked and rushed to get into your ship and you don't have a helmet on, where the MFDs that are in the ship suddenly become way more important because you don't have the helmet aspects.
I mean, again, from a Connie standpoint, we want you basically sitting in a normal flight suit or something like that, versus everybody in a big bulky armored suit sitting in a Connie.
TL;DRPlayers can already change spawn by landing at another location, while choosing an initial spawn is something being looked at for the future, but not in 3.6.
You can spawn in different locations. You just have to travel to that location and make a successful landing on a pad, and your spawn location changes to Lorville or to ArcCorp Area18.
They're talking about the initial spawn. And I mean, the plan for us regarding new users and all these things would be that they choose that initial spawn spot. And then at that point in time, that's their home base. And then from there, they go out and they rent different areas. So my home base is in Germany, but if I come here or to Austin, then I'm staying in a hotel. That would be kind of the idea behind it. Right now, I think for us, it's working okay. It's working well enough for us to focus on other issues. And then once we actually get some of our new user experience in a better spot, then that's when we start talking about it.
This is a pillar under Sean, but as far as I know, it's basically cleaning up some of that code, cleaning up how we pick things up, and then also kind of expanding a little bit. And then from there, in the future, that's going to be starting to get into what we consider local inventory, that kind of stuff.
So that goes into personal inner thought and the way that Chris really wants it, so the idea behind radial menus or those types of things where you'd have, okay, I want to dance, or I want to take off my helmet, I want to pull a weapon, I want to interact with this door. All of these things would be in this personal inner thought menu. And we have the code done, but we don't have the UI aspects of it done. So that is on the backlog for them to do. But right now they're going through and they're fixing the ship HUDs and focusing on that.
TL;DRWeapon attachments cover sights, barrel, underbarrel and magazines for FPS weapons, and the work is in progress, with alignment issues like keeping sights centered on screen still being solved.
So for weapons, we consider that we have four different attachment spots: sights, barrel, underbarrel, magazines. And then from there, it'd be extended magazines, or basically any sort of grip, vertical or angled, and then reducing basically recoil or whatever other parameters we wanted to adjust. Then barrel would be compensator or silencer, and then sights, obviously iron sights versus red dot versus holo versus sniper scope kind of thing.
In progress. I've yet to see it functioning the way that... Well, here's the thing. We could always go through, from a design standpoint, an XML standpoint, and build the weapons with those things there. It just wasn't available from a player standpoint. And so when you start doing, let's say you have a sniper scope on something and you change it to iron sights, well, we need to move the gun around. We need to make sure that everything still lines up perfectly with the center screen when you're in ADS. So it's working through those issues and doing it live.
I imagine things like the grip changes would affect that quite a bit, because we don't fake where the weapon is. So if we change the weapon grip, it's going to come lower or higher.
TL;DRShip rentals let players try ships without buying them with UEC, but rental length and edge cases such as real versus game days and cargo when time expires are undecided.
This is to allow players to go try out new ships without going and purchasing them with UEC. We haven't decided on how many days, meaning if it's a one-day, three-day, seven-day rental. I mean, we want to be able to give those different options. But then there's also figuring out the edge cases, meaning let's say you do a seven-day rental. Okay, is it seven days in the real world or is it seven days in the game world? And then also what happens if you have cargo on that and then it runs out? All these kind of edge cases that we're working through. But it really is just to allow players to try different things. Maybe somebody wants to try out a Reclaimer before they actually save up to purchase one with UEC.
Well, getting the attachments working. So the idea behind a multi-tool is basically just: I want to cut, I want to weld, I want to be able to possibly mine, I want to be able to possibly salvage. So it's getting those things working. And then from there, it's making sure that the gameplay systems are built in so that we can actually have that work. But right now, Thorsten and JJ are really focused on the weapon attachments, just because that hits everything. And then from there, we'll go into the multi-tool a little bit later.
We've talked about showing it up on StarMap, kind of seeing roughly where you need to go, and the best information of saying we think it's around this area. I think us also trying to fix showing where you're at, what kind of information can we show basically in the mission selector? What kind of things you need? So, I mean, there's so many different aspects.
Well, like, okay, do you need a ship that can transport cargo with this? Do you need multiple players for this mission kind of thing? This is stuff that we've talked about in the past, but that is one of the issues that we have in the back of our mind when we're working on these things.
I mean, it's hard to put an actual quantifiable number on it. Let's say you start getting minor misfires at 50%. And if you keep on using it, then maybe that increases into what would be considered a medium misfire. And then from there that could cascade into a high misfire. Whether that happens at 50%, 70%, 30%, that to me might depend on the quality level of the item, as well as the user interface, and making sure that we actually give the player proper feedback on it.
Yeah, exactly. So showing that if a misfire happens, then it's brought to your attention right away, either through an annunciator panel, through an MFD, or just straight up in the center of the screen on the HUD.
TL;DRComponents can be repaired without waiting for them to die, but not back to 100% without replacement, and abuse might limit repair level; details are still undecided.
No, no. So, I mean, the equivalent would be, let's say... Without completely replacing the part, you can never fix it to 100%. But when you repair it, maybe it goes to 99 or it goes to 90. And these are things that we've been talking about; we just don't know yet. We do want some concept of, if you abuse it, then you're not going to be able to repair it to 100%. Or if you've had a lot of misfires, maybe you can only get to 75%, versus if you've only had one or two misfires, you can get it back to 99.
And it mirrors the real world. You have factory-refurbished items that they don't sell for the full market value, because even though it was sent back to the original factory that made it and they did a refurbishment, they're not quite as confident.
So if you haven't managed your money well, you're short on cash, you need to make some money right now, and your ship won't fly because it's got a bad cooler, you can't afford the full replacement cooler, you buy a refurbished one.
TL;DRThe quantum travel and interdiction feel was a first pass that can be improved, and it would be looked at as part of the cockpit experience work across different ship states.
We'll be focusing on combat experience, but it's also the cockpit experience. So how much power is drawn when you go into QT, basically what happens to the different light states, also the feel of that movement. I mean, right now, when you get interdicted, there's a definite kind of slam-on-the-brakes feel to it. I think that it can be improved. It was very first pass. So when we do the cockpit experience and then get the smoke effects and other things sparking in the cockpit, that to me would be one of the states we'd look at, just because now we have these different kind of bespoke states, meaning we're in quantum, or we're flying, or this thing is being interdicted, or scanning or mining. These would be considered kind of bespoke states that we switch between. So making sure that the cockpit experience works across all of those.
TL;DRRestricted and no-fly areas will stay, but the goal is to eventually remove green zones once law and security exist, using things like weapon-stowing at checkpoints instead.
Well, I guess to me, there's safe zones, which are the green zones, we call them. So no matter what, no-fly zones, or what we would consider restricted areas, will be there just because of griefing purposes, so on and so forth. So now, as far as green zones and basically what they're asking: can I pull my weapon or can I not pull my weapon? And I'm sure that this has to do with law. And basically the goal for us is, yes, to be removing green zones in the future. Now, in order to get there, I think that basically you need to have the law in place and then you also need to have security of some type in place. So whether that be automated turrets within the areas or some sort of punishment if that happens. So basically, if one guy starts shooting, then this is what happens to you and you get knocked out or you get killed and you get punished. So that's the part that we need. First is law and then the subset of that would be security. And then at that point in time, I think we start playing around with removing it and seeing what it really feels like.
I know Chris is a big proponent of things that are as they should be in the universe if it were live. And a magical zone that prevents you from pulling your gun out of your holster isn't indicative of what we want to do.
No, no, but I guess at the same time, you want to know that certain areas are safe. So when you go into ArcCorp or you go into these areas, you know that there's security areas. So the idea would be that you need to holster your weapon, or you need to basically drop off your weapon there, so that you're not bringing in something that somebody else can [use].
I find that much more diegetic. You hit a customs thing and it's like, no, you don't get to go into Area18 with your weapons. You stow your things in a cubby. You can get them back when you leave. And now everybody in Area18 is safe because they're unarmed.
Correct. And that's the direction that we want to go. And then obviously from there, if somebody does somehow smuggle something in that maybe we don't know about, or we open it up somehow, then there are ramifications in place, almost like the Hurston security right now where they pop out and [are] aggressive. Yes. We know we need to fix that.
TL;DRNo-fly zones are not going away; the current version is a first pass, with plans for AR landing paths to prevent griefing and city-specific gameplay and build reasons.
No-fly zones are not going away. They're a thing that exists in the world today. You can't fly any plane you want over the White House or over downtown Los Angeles. And 940 years from now, when everybody has the equivalent of a Cessna, it would only make sense that this continues.
So the way that we have it right now, it's a first pass, meaning we have the ability to section off certain areas. And then from there, we also have the ability to have the IFCS force you out. The next step from that is basically creating a dome saying, all right, I want to land here, and then us opening up spline paths down to where you land. Because what it will be is basically an AR showing you how you get to the landing zone you need to go to, whether that be a hangar or a landing pad kind of thing. Once you actually get off that path and you start going to the extents, then IFCS will take it over again. So it basically is making sure that we don't get people dive-bombing or basically griefing other players.
Obviously you can't just fly anywhere in downtown Los Angeles that you want. ArcCorp is an entire planet covered in downtown Los Angeles, to an extent.
Well, and also, from a lore standpoint, yes, that's why we have a certain hard deck associated with ArcCorp. It's also just the way that we build that, from a design standpoint or from an art standpoint, the way that we build the palms and everything associated with building a city planet. I don't want to say cheat, but we have our working pipeline for that. And sometimes maybe it doesn't hold up as well as the Sahara or something like that, but it's not built that way. It's built differently. So there are gameplay reasons, from a development standpoint, of also why we don't want them landing in ArcCorp in the middle of nowhere.
TL;DRTodd Papy wants to finish and polish the initial no-fly zone design first, expects them only around major landing zones and towns, and says the ArcCorp hard deck height could be adjusted.
For me, I want to finish the initial design. So basically, in our development, a lot of times we do things via iteration and we say, okay, it's good enough for right now. We haven't finished the initial full design of it, so I'd rather finish the initial full design, get some of the visual aspects out of there, make sure that we are giving proper information regarding the UI, getting the AR paths working the way that we want them to work, getting the ATC and basically the people interacting with you, the voices associated with that, getting all of that stuff polished. Right now it's not very polished. I wouldn't consider it polished at all. Basically, let's slam it all in. Let's start seeing what's working, what's not working, and then do adjustments from there. So I'd rather us finish off all of that stuff first and then be able to really start taking a look and say, okay, now that we have all these things in place, was the initial design good enough or do we need to adjust how this feels getting in?
I guess from there, where we really see no-fly zones would be around major landing zones, towns and those types of things. I don't think we'll have those at any sort of outposts. I don't see us doing it on space stations or anything like that. It really is just kind of these bespoke landing zones. Obviously also when you start thinking about things like Levski, Levski doesn't need it because it's not open. We really needed it once we built Lorville, and then obviously with Area18 being open as well, we need it in order to make sure that the players there don't get some random shots or some random missile.
Exactly. I mean, that's really what it's meant for. Whether we look at ArcCorp and we say, okay, the hard deck right now is 300 meters, and we take that down to, let's say, 100 meters, that's something that we can take a look at and do.
No. The way that we build our missions, we would consider them like ecosystems. So let's say you need to go to a downed satellite, I need to go to that same downed satellite. So that's the way we pull players together. Versus in the future, it might be that there's a bounty on you and then I need to go and get that bounty. But it could be that you log off. These are the edge cases that we need to talk about and figure out. So we prefer to kind of pull players together in different ways.
TL;DRExtending the automated landing activation distance hasn't been discussed internally yet; it would need to be tried out, and could be raised through the new gameplay review process.
When we were arriving at ArcCorp before the start of last week's show, speaking as a player, I called the ATC and I got the clearance and I saw the path, and there was a point where I thought I should be close enough to trigger the thing. It kept wanting me to get closer. It seemed like it should be triggerable farther away than it was.
Basically, we've adjusted some of the way we do things internally. A lot of times when we're doing releases, we get a lot of bugs that are criticals and blockers, and those get the love. We've created a gameplay review aspect, and that to me would be under that gameplay review. So if there's any QA, we can talk about that and we can get that entered in just to talk about it and see what kind of adjustments we can do.
TL;DRCombat is the biggest overarching issue from 3.5, with many contributing causes, and feedback is prioritized in syncs, with rough new features polished in later point releases.
Obviously, there's still a lot of things. Combat. I mean, combat in general, whether that be the way that convergence works, missiles... It's not just one thing. It's usually a lot of things. And in particular with combat, it could be that basically the server's in a bad state. The way that we're doing our interpolation is off. In some cases, we've also had some ships that have invulnerable spots that we found out in our fixing, and then even just the convergence or the way that the pips work. And so there's a lot of things that come into play when we start talking about combat, but right now the biggest overarching one is combat, just because I think that's what people use the most. And then there's other things like, hey, I put my box down and then all of a sudden I lost my box, or it didn't work on the cargo grid. Bayer and I and production basically do a sync, and we go through and we talk about these things with Chris or myself or other game directors and go through and say, these are things that the community have brought up, or these are the highest-voted issues. And then we talk about it and we say, yep, let's move that into development, or we know this needs another piece of tech, so let's hold on this, but let's put it on their backlog. And so that's the way that we deal with a lot of this feedback. But part of it is reactionary after we go live, and then there's other things that we know are going to be an issue. And we just try to work through those bugs as much as we possibly can. But then at the same time, there's the release schedule. And when we talk about things, whether it be 3.5 or 3.5.1, usually with these point patches, a lot of times you get a lot of quality-of-life improvements. But if you're dropping new things like IFCS or playable female characters or ArcCorp, a lot of these features are coming in so hot that they don't have the polish that they need. And so that allows us to sweep through in subsequent releases or in point releases to fix a lot of that stuff.
I mean, it's basically some of these teams have six weeks to build a feature and then they've got six weeks to basically get it stable, get it working the best that they possibly can, and then get it out to public, based off our three-month cycle, when we start doing feature locks, and then there's content locks, and then there's, okay, when we go to Evocati, that's still roughly, in an ideal world, three to four weeks before we go live. And then from there, when we go to Wave 1, that's a whole different set where basically myself and other directors are a little bit more hardcore on what we allow out. And then if you're talking about six weeks for a feature, some things work well, some things don't. And then it really feels like you're building the railroad track while the train's going.
TL;DRTodd Papy says whether he would trade live development depends on the day; he likes quarterly releases and quick feedback, but juggling parallel work and context switching can be difficult.
It depends on the day. In all honesty, after this stuff gets released, no. Obviously, when we're trying to get it out, maybe. Again, there are positives and negatives for the other form of development that I've done and everybody here has done previously. And then, obviously, with this we're off road. We're going on a road that nobody knows. And basically part of it is learning as you go. And I think switching to quarterly releases, from a team morale standpoint, and even I think a community morale standpoint, has been an absolutely positive thing. And I like this quick feedback. Obviously, when we're starting to talk about other features and when you're just trying to get things through, there's these kind of hiccups that will happen with the development where things don't always go right. And then you're like, okay, but I've got to do a release. And so I need you to stop what you're working on for this feature because the feature that you did before is bringing the frame rate down, whether it be the amount of AI, or maybe something is running at a certain milliseconds that needs to be optimized. And so it's basically just kind of juggling all these balls in the air. And so sometimes, as a somewhat OCD person, I just want to be able to focus and be able to say, okay, this is done, and then, all right, time to move on, versus having all these things in parallel and trying to jump between everything and do context switching. Sometimes it really is difficult, but at the same time, the opportunity that we have here... Like, yeah, I want to change that part, the way we do development, sometimes, maybe. That's an honest answer.