Developers answer Invictus-era questions on ground vehicles, ship living quarters, new weapon types and swappable ballistic magazines, mobiGlas door control, and missile rack options. They also cover Maelstrom damage and weight in the PU, Polaris handling nerfs, RSI ship styling (Galaxy, Perseus), and the Caterpillar and Reclaimer cargo issues.
Yes. Obviously, we have a range of ground vehicles at the moment, but they're pretty much a select few manufacturers and either wheeled, tank tracks and a couple of hover ones, but they don't really cover the full range. I know you've had Alberto on SCL in the past doing the chopper and the Origin hover tank. And I'm not going to say which ones we want to do, but we do want to do more in the sort of gaps we have, like, let's say, combat hover vehicles rather than transport ones.
TL;DRA large mobile ground base has been discussed, but garages and hangars aren't big enough for it yet; they say never say never, though nothing is committed.
It's definitely something we've talked about and looked at in the past. We have, obviously, ground vehicle garages, and we have ship hangars. And the slight problem that has always somewhat interfered with that plan of a larger ground vehicle is our ground vehicle garages aren't big enough. Our ship hangars are. But not necessarily every ship hangar you can hover or drive a vehicle out of, especially the ones with the ceiling. So it's coming up with a solution to that. And then, yeah, we could have maybe not, I always forget the film, with the big roving cities.
Probably not that big. But we've both been here long enough never to say never, ever. Plus, I think if we're being real candid and honest, I think we need more gameplay systems that utilize ground vehicle technologies. I was just at a meeting with Rick Porter, design director for the PU, last week, where I wanted to pitch, when weather comes online and stuff, being able to keep ships out, but having giant Sturgis-style hog wild kind of events that require hundreds of ground vehicles in place would be super cool. And again, that's just casual conversation between me and the design director. It's not a commitment to an idea, but I think there's a lot more we can do to incentivize the use of ground vehicles.
We have a lot of ground vehicles at the moment, but there isn't a lot of use, and the use they have sometimes is not ideal. So when we can incentivize that use more, then I think it'll be a natural kind of progression.
TL;DRLiving quarters depend on the ship's role, from bare bunks to luxury apartments, always including a bed and, where there is food, toilets and possibly showers, with gameplay systems for them still to come.
So in terms of gold standard, living quarters really depends on the role of the ship. Obviously some ships don't have living quarters, and that really is a soft gate for how far and long you can use that ship. If you don't have living quarters, eventually food, drink, hygiene and I guess tiredness, they sort of become your limiting factors. So if you want a ship to go a long distance, you need living quarters. And then they come in different scales. We have the bare bones one with beds that currently let you log in and out. Beyond that, if you have food, you need somewhere to get rid of the food when it's been processed. So they all have toilets or showers. And then for the more grandiose and luxurious ships, you go from here's a bunk bed with a food machine in the wall, and you sit and eat your food or stand and eat your food, to you have a room which has a seat, bed, toilet. Military ships follow real world military ships, and everyone doesn't have their own quarters. You have bunk rooms with shared mess and galley, all the way up to luxury ships like the 890 where everyone has essentially their own apartment with everything in it. So it really depends on the role of the ship and the type of the ship. And it's got to have a bed. If it has food, it's got to have toilets. If it's got a toilet, might as well have a shower there as well.
For me personally, yes, that is something I want. Ultimately, that is not my area of responsibility. It's more of an overall game direction thing. But I don't see why we wouldn't allow that in the future.
There are a couple that, if I get my dates right, people will be seeing very soon in game. Again, things trickling from Squadron into Star Citizen. Beyond that, we haven't really looked into new weapon types. It's more expanding the range of the existing ones. So at a very simplistic level, we have ballistic ones, we have energy ones and distortion ones. And then within that you have cannons, repeaters, gatlings, and we have gaps in those lineups because you also have the size ranges within that. So it's filling those out, giving them different flavors first before we chuck in another archetype.
TL;DRThey definitely want swappable physical magazines on ballistic weapons, plus an internal ammo-feeding system for large ships, but not every ship will work that way and no timing is given.
Yes, that is something we definitely want to do. Chris mentioned this to me again last week, week before. Going back to the previous topic about filling in the gaps, we're looking at filling in some of those gaps, and some of them are ballistic ones. And as part of the design for them, they do have or will have physical magazines that you can reload. So if they're on the outside of, say, Gladius, maybe Gladius is a bad example, let's go Avenger. When they run out, you will need to go and restock. Well, if you brought spare magazines or ammo housings with you, you can go replace them. A friend could go replace them with their supplies. Not every ship will be like that. It's not, say, practical on a Hammerhead to have all 24 guns ballistic and someone's going to spend all their time outside the ship, EVAing around in combat, trying to plug magazines in. For some ships, they will have essentially an internal reloading mechanism, and that will take the format of there will be a designated area in the ship, which should hopefully be near the cargo supply. And it's similar to how base building will work in that you'll be taking your resources, in this case boxes of ammo, feeding it into the machine, which then will put it into the ship's internal storage. And then the ship itself will resupply to the weapons that need it. So rather than you having to manage 24 individual magazines, someone will just be feeding the crates of ammo in as needed.
TL;DRThey badly want remote door control from the mobiGlas and are pushing for it, but it depends on other teams' schedules and isn't coming anytime soon.
Desperately want this to be a thing. Pushing on it internally. Again, it's not directly in my wheelhouse, so it's subject to other teams' schedules and directions, but yes, being able to unlock, lock, open doors from your mobiGlas for your ship.
At the beginning of this year, we had Benoit on and talked about the big change in focus of this year. This year's focus for feature teams is on closing Squadron 42 out and improving stability and performance without introducing the stability hits that come with new features. We don't know how long that's going to last, but we're definitely still in that period right now where we're still refining, we're still fixing up the PU. So it's not an anytime soon kind of thing, just to put a little expectations management on it.
I know that the team that's doing it has a lot of stuff, and there's a lot of stuff that players have asked for, like the 3D landing camera on the radar. They're doing that before this.
That is something, not those two specific things in particular, but again, not to give too much away, in the very near future we're going to start experimenting with some alternative options for what missile racks can carry.
Yes. So you'll see a couple new items that you can swap out, both on the exterior of ships, on the hardpoints, and interior. Some component upgrades and stuff. So look out for that.
TL;DRDrop seats already protect against G-force ragdolling, which they want to make less binary, and dropships still need more health to survive the drop before players will use them.
Assuming this is drop seats. Yes, they sort of do already, but it's sort of an underutilized or unnoticed feature, in that we do impart G-forces onto loose actors within ships. So for dropships, if you have 20 people crammed in the back of a Valkyrie and the pilot does a hard turn, you're all ragdolling and falling over. It doesn't happen really as much as we want or the way we want it. It's very binary at the moment, like big impulse happens, everyone falls over. Whereas the way Chris has talked to me about it is your gravity generator on ships, which is not yet a physicalized item but will be, sort of lags in its compensation of gravity. So rather than being too much gravity, everyone falls over, it's hard turn, gravity's failing, everything starts getting loose, and if it continues, then people start, not necessarily falling over, but almost like EVAing inside the ship because the gravity cannot keep up with the force and the directions. So then being sat in the seats, you're not having to deal with any of that. But the counter of that is we want to make dropships be more utilized. At the moment, they're probably not tanky enough. They don't have enough health to survive the drop-in versus other ships, so we've got to bump that up to get people using them.
Yes. Obviously we talked about at CitizenCon doing the RSI ships in sort of sequence. So we've done the Polaris, doing the Perseus at the moment, and then the Galaxy will be after. The difference in the Galaxy is it's a civilian ship, it's not the RSI military theme. So the Polaris and Perseus share a lot of visual cues together and materials and lighting. It does take bits from the Zeus, but not everything, and you will see more of the Zeus styling in the Galaxy, and other RSI ships this year will have that Zeus aesthetic rather than the Polaris and Perseus one.
TL;DRThe Caterpillar is stuck with two-state doors, and a third open state is wanted but not available now; the Kraken concept will be revisited, with hopes of pre-production towards the end of the year.
The Caterpillar's an interesting pain point. So we recently changed the side doors to go down to the ground to sort of improve that. And it sort of improved some things, made other things worse. That's not how we want to do it. I think retrospectively, if we were to design the Caterpillar today, it would not have doors like that, knowing what we know today versus what we knew in 2013. So we're sort of hamstrung by that design. Whether we will entirely redo that, I don't know yet. But if it stays in that design, we do still want to have the three-state doors. The current limitation with the existing door tech, and I saw someone moaning on Reddit about this today: doors in Star Citizen have two states, open or closed. The Caterpillar side doors are doors, so they are closed or they're open, and it's just where that open state is. So we chose to move it all the way down to the ground to improve things. We can't currently add a third interim state, so open and keep it there. We do want to have that state, but again, it's a feature. Anyone that's ever worked in games knows how horrendously complicated doors are. It's the big meme. Doors and elevators. And we can't use elevators or transits, because they're essentially using platforms, which we could get to rotate and translate, but you wouldn't be able to have all the synchronized animation for all the pistons on the side. That's why we have to use doors. That's why we're stuck with two states.
It just all falls out. Drops everything off. But we are going to be looking again at the Kraken concept soon, because hopefully towards the end of this year it will be going into pre-production.
TL;DRThe Reclaimer's cargo platform issue is known and a quick fix will be made only if one is easy, but its whole interior needs a redo, and it will get an update rather than a Mk II.
Again, another ship, knowing what we know today, would not exist in its current form. The Reclaimer's an interesting one. I'm aware of that issue. It's something, if I can find someone free to do it, but it's a snowball effect with the Reclaimer. The way it was built back in the day is not conducive to quick and easy changes. You change that, you end up having to change a lot of the rear rooms. And this is an interesting quirk we found when we did the Hull C. So obviously the Hull C took forever to come out. We did a lot of the work 2017, 2018, and then we waited years for the features to be ready. And when we came back to it, the way we build ships now is different to then. And the rooms we hadn't done, we did, and the two clashed visually significantly. So we sort of ended up having to downgrade the current art style and slightly up-res the old art style to make it not look so jarring. And the Reclaimer would suffer from the same thing. So in my opinion, if there's something quick and easy we can do, we'll do it, but that whole interior needs a complete redo, a reimagining.
Obviously we've started seeing Mk IIs with the Hornets and stuff like this. And I imagine some ships will probably just get a Mk II. Other ships like the Reclaimer, the Caterpillar, need some more TLC, need some more time going back and fixing those things.
The question that is starting to pop up more and more is what necessitates or drives the reason for a Mk II versus just updating the existing one. And really that comes down to: we can do a Mk II for something that functions and we just want to sort of deprecate the visual style of it. The Hornets, for example, there's nothing wrong with the Mk I Hornets. We just wanted to have the cooler Mk II Hornets visually out there. But for things like the Reclaimer, if we made a Mk II Reclaimer, we've still got to make the Mk I Reclaimer actually function how it's supposed to function with the salvage mechanic, at which point that's redoing a lot of it. So there won't be a Mk II Reclaimer, the amount of work will just be an updated Reclaimer.
TL;DRModules follow the same rule as any new ship, becoming available in game some time after release because pledged buyers must be served first; the speaker is unsure of the details and will look into the Retaliator's modules.
The modules is an interesting one. Part of it's an economy reason, part of it's a marketing reason, and part of it is pledge law, stuff like this. The Retaliator is really the only one that we've released with modules, and it sort of had an awkward... There were two ways to get the Retaliator over time. There was the original pledge, which was a bomber. It wasn't modular. And then there's the modular version. When that was announced, you couldn't get the bomber one anymore. So people were pledging for the base one with no modules, and then you opted into the modules after that. So when we came to deliver it, we had to deliver both of them. So there were a lot of people that had the bomber one as a loaner ship for their one without it, and were surprised that they didn't have anything. And the current rule set is it's the same as any new ship, that it will be available in game after X amount of time from its actual release. I know the amount of time; I just can't remember it specifically. I don't want to say the wrong thing right now. But it comes down to, again, I'm not going to get into it, but there's general marketing stuff, and then there's actually some laws in crowdfunding and pledges that you have to deliver the thing to those people who paid money before you can give it to others. I don't have to worry about that stuff, which is why I don't have the information. I don't know if it's the case right now, but the Retaliator modules, maybe they're not in the in-game shops. Maybe there might be a technical reason why they're not in there. I genuinely don't know. But we can look into it.
TL;DRYes, that is the plan: Squadron's ships are well along in being converted to the new physics-based damage system, hero ships are getting extra breakup work first, and PU adoption is not dated.
Yes, that is the plan. Maelstrom is full speed ahead in Squadron. My team and a lot of other teams are working on it currently. I think they are, at the time of recording, about, I'm going to say 70% of the way through converting the ships required for Squadron to Maelstrom. So it's been built in a way that facilitates: we take the existing damage model that's in Star Citizen, press a few buttons, that's the Maelstrom version. It visually behaves the same, but it's using all the physical behaviours under the hood. That's converted to Maelstrom. That's the 70% quote. After that, tech art and art can go in and chop it up more if they wish. Make it better, more dynamic, shinier, break into more parts, make it more believable. And that's being done on a case-by-case basis. So we're doing all the hero ships. All the ships you fly and fight the most are getting that first. So the actual fully Maelstromed conversion is a lot lower percentage, but overall we're quite a long way through it. There's a lot of ships used in Squadron, but a lot of them are only used once, so they're just going to get the PU damage model ported to Maelstrom, done.
It's a whole new way of thinking about setup. Again, like you said just before, things we did years ago, in the case of Maelstrom, things we did weeks ago, is not how we need to do things going forwards.
Yeah. And it all does genuinely work, and it behaves physically correctly, and you see the visual result. All those ships in the CitizenCon Squadron gameplay video, those were all Maelstrom, and they break up differently to how things do in the PU now.
TL;DRIn Squadron weight is derived automatically from materials and thickness, while Star Citizen uses designer-set mass from hull volume and density; removing parts or loading externally mounted cargo affects flight, interior cargo does not.
Yeah, it's all related. There's two answers to this. Both are the correct answer, but it depends what project you're working on. So obviously in Squadron, it's Maelstrom, and that does a lot of the work for you. So depending on the material you apply to the ship, or per parts of the ship, like you could have left wing be one material, right wing be another, you set the thickness of it. It calculates the surface area of that part based on the physics mesh of it, does some clever maths for the thickness value provided, and then that part is that weight. So you apply a titanium wing, it's lighter than a steel wing, and it all just goes into the physics engine and just works, TM. Star Citizen is different because we don't have Maelstrom, in that it's more designer-y numbered, and the process we've done for years is you take a rough volume of the ship and 3ds Max calculates the volume of it. And we put it into an Excel that I made years ago. And you take that volume, you take away the volume of the interior space, which is another mesh. That gives you a volume of the hull. You multiply that by a density value we decided, which has some plus or minus, like plus 5% for Aegis because it's a combat manufacturer, versus Origin, which is all high tech and carbon-fibery, plasticky stuff. That gives you a mass for the entire ship, and you put that on the entire ship, and then the game engine goes, about 50% of the volume of this ship is this part, so I'm going to put 50% of that mass here. And that's why occasionally you see things behave oddly, because the physics is misinterpreted. Maybe the asset has a slightly dodgy physics proxy and it thinks it's got 5% of the mass when it should have 50% of the mass, and it flies off into space, or the reverse. So again, that's the reason for having Maelstrom: those designer numbers go away, to be replaced with ones that are actually fully derived from the assets themselves. And it does impact flight in both games. In Star Citizen, if you strip weapons and components off your ship, you will fly slightly faster. The ships are quite heavy, so removing a hundred kilo gun off your 60 ton spaceship isn't going to move the needle that much, but it does. And cargo will impact it. It doesn't currently for any ship where the cargo grid is inside, because we're intentionally ignoring that at the moment. But for ships like the Hull C, Hull A, the Raft now, everyone's new favorite ship, if it's on the outside of a ship, it does account for that. So you will feel like if you've loaded your Raft up with gold, it's going to fly a lot slower and heavier than one that is empty.
TL;DRThe Polaris and other capital ships were made slower and less agile because they were too fast, so bringing them into atmosphere is a big commitment; fuel and insurance changes may follow, and more tuning is expected.
So out of the box, the Polaris was too fast and too agile. We were a bit concerned about making it too slow. It was the first proper military capital ship in the game. But we played it safe too far on the agility side. And hopefully now what is live at the time people are watching this is much slower. The Polaris in lore was a fast capital ship. It was supposed to be fast and agile, but that's relative to other capital ships, not to a Gladius. You're not going to be dogfighting Hornets in your Polaris. So we did slow it down pretty much in all aspects in terms of speed, boost, rotational rates and accelerations, and done the same across the other capital ships. So technically the only other capital ship is the 890. The Reclaimer's sort of weird. It wasn't a capital ship, but it now has capital items. But we've gone back and looked at them all and made sure they're all...
The same whenever an NPC Javelin turns up. They are all slower. They're not designed to be good in atmosphere. So hopefully all the sights of Polarises nose-down over mining craters should start disappearing, because bringing a capital ship into atmosphere needs to be a big event. This is a big commitment. You should be a sitting duck. Some of them can't even get back out of atmosphere unless they have dedicated VTOLs. So we just don't want to see these big ships everywhere. They should be big events when you come across them, not ten a penny everywhere.
I think there's other levers we're going to start pulling as well on them, in terms of fuel and insurance timers, because they are big events. If you're bringing one out, sure, you can use it as your daily driver. There will be downsides and consequences to that if you don't protect it.
We have a lot of ships in the game. There's still a fair amount to come. So it's always a delicate balancing act between balancing for the game we have now and the game we have in the future. And sometimes we go a bit too close one way or the other. So you'll see things like, oh, this isn't that much better than the others. And then we have to do a realignment to spread out the range. Like we did a pass recently on the heavy fighters, this is all the F8 owners complaining about it, but to make space for there to be a slow, heavy, tanky one, and a fast one relative for a heavy fighter, and gaps in there to slot other options in. And it's the same across all of them. And that range is going to grow and contract as more ships get added in the game.