Star Citizen Live: IAE Free Fly All Ships Q&A

The short answer is that that was not intended. That was more harsh on the fuel than we had anticipated. So that's been fixed for 3.12. So they're back to what should have been the norm for their release. And it sort of spurred some further discussions for future star systems, because at the moment all the fuel is balanced around what's in Stanton to give the best gameplay there. But when we go to other systems such as Pyro, there is significantly less opportunity to refuel. So we're having discussions right now with people like Todd and Tony to go over, right, what's the range time that we're going to support here? And then we'll be balancing the ships around that so it works in a multi-system behavior rather than just contained to the Stanton system. So everything that we have at the moment is sort of designed for what's in the game right now, but we want to move to a more future-proof system where ships can go for... The Nomad and Star Runner were particularly wrong, but the idea is not to be like, you've only got 40 minutes of fuel, so make the best of it. We're talking like an hour, two, three, four is your default range before you need to start considering refueling.

It does have some. I'm pretty sure it has some in there. They may not be component housings like the more modern ships, but there are certainly spaces for them. I don't want to say the Star Trek phrase, but the certain tubes along the edge, there are hollowings there. There is definitely space for the power plant in the engineering room. So there are spaces.

I know there is definitely space in the ship for it. Eventually all our ships are going to need these component housings to be accessible and be available. So we definitely will be going back and giving it a revisit. And what we tend to do with a lot of the ship stuff anyway is, as new features come online, we're going to need to retrofit that stuff to a lot of the existing ships. So I think the component layout is something that we take into consideration right at the start of a concept of a ship, and we make sure that there is space for it, because, again, a lot of this is before my time, but I know we have had issues where, especially with the smaller ships, it becomes quite difficult to fit some of these components in, because new features are ever evolving and ever being developed, and it's only when you have that feature working that you appreciate what needs to be done to deliver that to the player. But yeah, we will be going back and revisiting, going back and adding dashboard buttons and player storage and everything else that is currently required. And I expect lots of future new fun things as well.

We don't want ships that came out a few years ago to be at a disadvantage to the more modern ones when the dust has settled. They all need to perform the same gameplay functions.

I think there's always a balance between visually what you want the ship to look like and functionally what it needs to work. When it comes to making the exteriors and interiors work together, if you've got a big vent or a big access hatch or something on the exterior of the ship and on the inside there's a room that it goes straight into, it just doesn't make sense. And there's a bit of a balance between making the player space and the functionality work, and then the implied functionality of what the exterior of the ship is telling you, and how those two things work together. On the Star Runner itself, I remember actually having a look at this when we were playing with the ship and when it was in development. And although there does look to be quite a large dead space at the front of it, by the time you take into account all of the player metrics and the size we need to actually fit additional rooms in there, it does start to get a little bit tight, with a lot of intersection with the exterior. And also, when you take into account things like the safe space we need between the interior and exterior for damage meshes and for vis areas and all those sort of more technical things... And I think there's also that balance between having dead space in ships. So ships that have got big open spaces in them, and how that feels as a player when you're in it. Because for me, I like functionality. I like that feel that you can go through a room and know that there is functionality in there. And I think, yeah, we could fit some more crawl spaces in there, but you'd have like a little rat maze going around, and it's like, where do they then lead you to? And so, yes, there is some empty space in there. Could we have made it better? We probably could have done, but I'm very happy with what we did.

Nothing super tangible, but I have had a designer go through it and come up with a proposal for how we want to redo the interior; the exterior less so. The exterior is in pretty good shape, but the interior definitely suffers from some weird traversal routes. Stuff like Ben mentioned about just huge spaces, but they're huge spaces that don't really do anything. And then adding some functionality in that should have been there from the start, like a docking collar. So design-wise, we're doing the pass on that, and then it will need to go to concept, because it's not as simple as, oh, just take a look at the 890 and just copy-paste that in, job done. There is some finessing that needs to go on there.

And I think that's it. There's a space for big open ships. That's definitely a thing. You take the 890, and that has its functionality, or has its purpose in the verse. So there is definitely a space for ships that are roomy. But it's not one solution for every ship, every manufacturer. There should be plenty of variation.

Same answer, but that one can at least be quantified with jump points, because they're for mapping jump points. So without jump points, you can just raise an antenna up and down.

Yeah, I was actually in the Max file recently, and looking at it, I was like, oh. They're in, they work, but like John says, until that feature's in... And with some of the other things we've already talked about, until that feature comes online, it's kind of redundant taking it all the way to final when you're not 100% sure how that feature is going to work. And the most annoying thing is spending time getting something looking just how you like it, and then someone comes along and it's like, oh, actually, yeah, we need to change this now. Oh, I just thought I had that done.

It's a time and resource thing as well. We could have a designer and artist spend time doing that, or we could have them fixing issues like people falling out of ships, things like that. And I think I know which one most people would want fixed.

A few things. So in 3.12, it's had a fairly comprehensive rebalance pass in terms of its handling, because it was absolutely not handling where we wanted it to handle. I know it's got some much-fabled shield holes on there that ultimately will get fixed by SDF shields, and every ship that has these shield holes will get fixed by that as well. So in the interim, we have been fixing them up as we find them. It presents itself as a bug, but the code is actually doing exactly what it's being told to do. You're hitting items attached to ships that aren't being registered by the shield because they're not the ship itself. So it sort of bypasses things. So we've been doing a few ways to sort of mitigate that. And then I guess the big elephant in the room is the visuals of the thing. And much like the comments we gave earlier, we will be going back through these ships and bringing them up to date. So the Constellation does have component hatches in there; they're not necessarily the right size or the ideal placement. People will see some minor interior changes when Constellation and Merlin docking comes online, just because we've had to go do some work to the rear of the ship. Sorry, the last thing on that is I did say that when the Taurus comes out, we want to look at the view, because it is a bit strutty.

Yeah, I think, like you say, John, when we go back and do that sort of work that we need to do to bring all the ships up to that same level, when we go into the ships and open up the files, if there's glaring issues, we always try and do that little bit of polish pass. But again, it comes down to what the big focus is for that release. And if it's, okay, actually we need to go through a whole bunch of ships and get them all up to a similar standard functionality-wise, then we have less time to go in and take one through to give it a full refit. We haven't got anything scheduled for a refit as far as I know at the moment, unless John's going to tell me otherwise. So I think when we go in, we do a polish pass and a fix pass, but apart from that, nothing planned to my knowledge.

I'll try not to repeat it about the resource and time thing. I would much rather work on new ships, or ships that we've promised and not delivered yet, than rework a ship four times that someone's already got. Especially if it functions and it does its role, I would much rather put the team's effort into delivering some of the community favorites.

I'm not going to proclaim I know every single bug for every vehicle in the game, but I'm not aware of it having any major issues. Certainly as of 3.12, there were some fixes that were done to the Sabre that hadn't been carried over, because the Raven doesn't come out of the same source files, it comes out of a completely separate one, so you have to sort of do the same fix twice. So we made sure those came over for 3.12. Hopefully it's in a much better state, but I'm not entirely sure what issues there are. If there are major issues, then please put it in the Issue Council, and the guys who monitor that for the team will get that to us.

I just want to reiterate that, just to make sure it's clear. There had been several fixes and improvements made to the baseline Sabre in previous patches that weren't carried over to the Raven because it's a different hull. And those fixes are now in 3.12.

Pretty much the only items that are the same between the two are the seats and the dashboard.

Visually, it's a really pretty ship. I really like it. It's one of my favorites. So hopefully there's not a load of visual issues with it. If there is, again, let us know.

There's a ton of answers to this. I'll start with the bad answer, in that the Super Hornet is probably not where it needs to be or wants to be. When we changed the shields, I can't remember what year it was, but we changed how the items were classified from one size grading to another. And there were quite a few ships that didn't make the transition as cleanly as others, and the Super Hornet was one of them. So I think it's probably a little under-shielded. But just because that Razor, is it the LX or the... I can't remember. The EX or the LX. One of them's faster, one of them's more shielded. But just because it has more shields doesn't mean it's suddenly a super dogfighter, which the Super Hornet is. It doesn't have the armor. It doesn't have the weaponry. It can be very easy to just look at the paper stats and go, this is better. But you have to look at the entire thing and put it together. Just because one thing has twice the amount of the other doesn't make it twice as good.

I think we touched on that in the previous questions, that we are going to make sure they all have equality in terms of gameplay functionality. And yeah, they do have some issues at the moment, but those ships are definitely not underplayed. We look at the stats regularly, both from an ownership and a playtime perspective, and the combat ones and the mission completion ones. Again, that would tie into one of the future questions about what triggers a rework. But for their issues, they are certainly not being ignored, both internally by us and by players.

Yeah, visually with the ships as well, I think we've got quite a diverse range of manufacturers, and that can mean that not every manufacturer necessarily has to have the same aesthetics, but they should all match the same... And there's definitely ships that haven't been touched in a while. And there's no getting away from that. As a team progresses, technology progresses, as our pipeline progresses, we always try and learn from the last ship. If we didn't, we'd be stupid. So we're always learning. We're always trying to push to get things done more efficiently and to look... Yeah, there's no other way of doing it. I want to make stuff pretty. That's what we do, or at least what we try and do. And to probably butcher a phrase somewhere, it's easy to be taller when you sit on the shoulders of giants, or whatever the phrase is. Every time you're learning, every time you're pushing. And yes, that does mean that some of them don't quite match the visual quality we want. And it's something we do want to unify, but it's part and parcel of making a...

There are kind of two things at play here. One is that most games don't operate a live environment in the middle of their development. So this process of building ships, and each successive one learning from the lessons of the other one and getting better as you go along, is a normal aspect of game development. That's not just normal, it's how it's supposed to work. You're supposed to get better at this as you go along. It's just that for most normal games, that period where you go back and you bring everything else up to quality happens behind closed doors. When the game releases, hopefully, if everything works the way it's supposed to, you see everything at the same quality at the same time. We don't have that with the model that we use. Things have to go out as we learn things. And then the second thing is, one of the things I'm quoted saying quite often is, for everybody that's in the chat right now going give us the Banu Merchantman, give us this, I'm like, no, you don't want it now, you want it later, after all the lessons have been learned, after all the kinks have been worked out. The longer it takes to make some of these ships, the better they ultimately end up being. So it's an interesting situation that we're in with Star Citizen, because we operate this live environment during the course of our development. But yeah, as we've seen, we've remade the Freelancer four times, I think. We've remade the Constellation a couple times. I think our commitment to keeping these things updated and bringing them along with everything else has been shown. It's just a question of when is the right time to do it. If we do it now and there's still lessons to learn, we've got to do it again. So let's learn our lessons, let's refine our process as much as possible, and then every ship will have its time.

And that is one of the luxuries of working on the project and using the model that we do, that we can be super reactive to new techniques. And if we work out something that is easier and better and looks better, then we would jump on it. And I have worked on projects before where you could be coming right up to GMing your game, and it's like, oh, but if we did it this way, it looks 10 times better and we can do it twice as fast. Too late for that. You can't do that now. And you've got to just write it off and use it for the next project.

Again, to echo that, it's such a unique position. In other games, where you get it on launch day, you're super hyped, but for some reason you don't like this thing and you're petitioning for developers to change stuff, they're already nine months down the road on the next thing. Nothing's going to change, whereas we actually have the ability to react to things here.

So again, it's something we're discussing at the moment; the vehicle experience team are looking at it. That was quite an old design, so the categories themselves will absolutely stay around, but the actual restriction of 'this ship can only take military and civilian' is something that, the way the discussions are going internally at the moment, is probably not going to stick around, for a few reasons. It's an artificial restriction that doesn't really make any sense when all the components are all identical anyway. It didn't, in theory or practice, really stop people min-maxing loadouts, because there was just so much variety in the categories anyway. And it sort of restricted upgradeability of ships by going, Ben's team has made 5 million components, but you only get access to 50. It's sort of shooting yourself in the foot with long-term gameplay there. And from the balance side, it just made things harder to deal with. So we'll probably be getting rid of those restrictions. Not going to say absolutely yes or no right now. And when we do make a decision, we'll probably update those Shipyard articles to have the latest and greatest info. But the categories themselves will definitely stay the same, and each category will have upsides and downsides for it.

And I think the ship items themselves, they're long overdue a bit of TLC. I think it was 2.6, maybe. It was a while ago, it was when I was fairly new to the company. I remember having taken on those ship items, and yeah, we did a whole load of work getting them ready, and they've not really been greatly touched since. And now we're getting to the point where we are adding them into ships and having the panels open and stuff. I'd really like to see that game loop closed out and really getting that stuff... We went through and made loads of sub-items that go inside your ship items that go inside your ships, and we've got a whole slew of them, and getting all that stuff in, working, feature-ready.

I'm pretty sure the Kraken will end up with one when we actually put it into production; that was almost certainly just an oversight at the concept stage. I don't think the Carrack is the only non-capital ship with a medbay, because we have the Apollo and the Cutlass Red. I guess it's a bit vague what you call a medbay versus what you call a med bed, the different tiers of med beds. But it's certainly not intentional that just those three ships in the game are only ever going to have them. But it is a supremely powerful feature to have in your ship. So we don't want every ship under the sun having a med bed in there that you have as your mobile respawn point. We do want to restrict the availability of those to ships that make sense. So the Kraken would make sense because it is sort of like a mobile space station. The Carrack is a supremely long-distance exploration ship where you're going to be out in deep, expansive space a long time. But having it in the back of your bog-standard Cutlass that you just chucked in there, maybe not. But the Red, again, is designed as an ambulance. And I think we've shown sneak previews of things like the med gun as well; there will be other ways to heal yourself beyond a med bed going forward. So you won't need a med bed in the back of your ship if you break your legs on a planet. You'll be able to use other mechanics to heal yourself. But med beds will be primarily for the whole respawning aspect.

Doesn't the 890 Jump have one?

The 890, yeah, it has one, but I guess the question was about sub-capital ships having them. Capitals tend to, because again, by their nature and size, they're often long-distance, long-duration.

Yeah, I'll concentrate on the room aspect of it, because it's probably the most important and the easiest one to answer. The tech for having swappable rooms is on the schedule for early next year. To not give a super long-winded tech answer, it was blocked by moving some of our data from loose XML into our own DataForge format, so it could tie in with other systems, because those rooms, especially the Retaliator ones, have items inside them. So when attached and detached from the ship, they needed to be able to dynamically connect and disconnect from it so the items inside would continue to work. So that was the reason why it's taken so long to do it. But that work is now scheduled. And when it's online, like I said earlier, the Retaliators will be the first ones to have it proved out, because we have all the assets there waiting and ready. And then once that's done, been in the game for a cycle and we've found any issues with it, we can start going and looking at the other ships with it, that sort of stuff.

I'm going to do my thing where I roll back the idea that the Retaliators are what we intend to be the first implementation, just with the realities of game development. We know these priorities can change, but right now, yes, our intention is the Retaliator will be the first.

It's definitely something the physics guys are looking at. It'd be really good if you could ever nail down one of those guys to get on. I know they're incredibly camera shy, because they can explain it really well. But from my designer understanding of it, what it's doing is it's teleporting or interpolating the lift as it goes up, and if you have a dip in frame rate, or the server has a dip in frame rate, or anything gets out of sync slightly, in that one frame or two frames or three frames where it's out of sync, now the wheels are through the bottom of it, and it has a choice of which way am I going to push this out to get out of this collision. And sometimes it goes up the right way, and sometimes it goes down the wrong way. And then as soon as one wheel's in, it's starting to drag all the rest in, and then it tends to go wrong. But it is something we know about, something we do intend to fix. They have put numerous fixes in almost every patch that make it better. But there are still some edge cases there.

We don't want ramps on all ships. We definitely want lifts.

You don't like ramps?

I don't like ramps. I just think lifts look cool.

You would end up with ships looking very similar. You'd have the Freelancer shape where it loads in the back, or the Carrack shape where it loads in the front, or the Starlifter where it does both.

I think it definitely works on some ships, but a ramp takes up quite a considerable amount of space and has a big impact on the exterior, because it has to arc down and be a certain angle, otherwise you just get problems trying to get up the ramp. If it's too steep, then there's other problems that come alongside with it.

No. We did have a concept ship where it had side ramps as part of the brief. I think it may have been the Corsair, but it never survived.

At one point the Corsair, yeah.

It had side ramps. But a good point on the ramp stuff is that we do have metrics for the angles, and we can't go over a certain amount, which means if you have a ship that has loads of stuff on the bottom of it, it's going to be 10, 15 meters up in the air. You have a 10, 15, 20 degree ramp coming off the back; it could be 50 meters long by the time it gets to the ground, and then you've got to have somewhere to put a 50 meter ramp in the ship.

And it's something that I've been talking about today with the Lifter, making sure that ramps are fit for purpose and are long enough and the correct angle and everything, because you don't want to drive yourself into the back of it and just get wedged.

Definitely plan to do more of them. It's a time/reward thing. The 300 took a lot of development time because it was the first. We learned a lot of it from the dev side. We learned a bit from what players liked on the other side of it, what they didn't like. And it's really just finding another ship to do it on and release it on, because it does add time onto the schedule. So it's a case of, we could release the ship at this date, or we could do it with customization and it's one, two quarters later. And do we want to do that, or do we just want to have the ship out? So those discussions are definitely going to happen in the future, and it's absolutely going to happen for things like cockpit decorations.

Yeah, I think the decoration side of it, when we first started talking about that a while ago on the prop side, we did a whole bunch of ones that we could use to prototype with and play with, and everyone really enjoyed it. And yeah, we definitely want to get to the point where you can go and find these really unique assets that you can show off in your ship and decorate your ship with, things that you can't just nip down to the local landing zone and buy, but things that are a little bit more unique. And every so often that topic of conversation comes up. It's like, yeah, everyone's excited about doing it. Everyone's excited about making the assets and having fun doing it. So I think once that comes online, we should start seeing a lot of that stuff.

Were you surprised by how popular the coffee maker was?

I'm not going to lie, that coffee maker has given me a few headaches. Jens, who's on the programming side of things, he's like, the coffee maker is working, isn't it? It is working, because I keep seeing images of it not working on Reddit. And it's like, yeah, it better be working. But yeah, everyone loves coffee.

Technical-wise, we're actually having to solve a lot of these right now whilst we're working on the Merlin and Constellation docking, because that really brings the problem to a head. A really good example for the Merlin and Connie is, and the guys have fixed it now, but it took an incredibly long time to do it: when you spawned in Arena Commander with the Constellation, it actually put you inside the Merlin, because the Merlin was the last pilot seat in the order of the vehicle. So it just put you in there instead. And it put you in there, but it thought you were in the Constellation pilot seat. So you were flying the Constellation from the Merlin's seat, and all sorts of weird stuff, like the Constellation had access to all the Merlin's items. So it would start trying to fire the Merlin's guns. You could turn off the other ship's items from within the other one. Just all these edge cases that we have to work through. And then you go into the weird... I say weird, but it's stuff that players will do, where you go to your ASOP terminal and you've got a Constellation and a Merlin in your account. But technically, that Merlin is attached to your Constellation. So we need to hide it from the ASOP terminal until you've gone into the VMA and removed that Merlin from the Constellation, at which point it should turn back up in the ASOP. And then you get into weird scenarios like, I've spawned my Merlin from the ASOP terminal and I've crashed it, and I claim it. Does it now go back as a separate loose item to the ASOP terminal? Or is it going back to the Constellation? And all the combinations of that. I spawned a Merlin. My friend has got in it. I've got in my Constellation. I've gone somewhere else. I've logged out. I've respawned; by default that Merlin should have been attached to me, but he's still flying it around somewhere. Lots and lots of edge cases. The technical side of docking and undocking the ships was relatively easy, and it's the time spent on all these edge cases that we have to solve first.

It's weird that it only affected a few ships, because it should have, and did, affect every single ship. So why was it such a slow... like, this patch it was this ship, this patch it was this ship and this ship. It should have been all of the ships at the same time. The 3.12 build that went to Evocati the other day had a fix for it, but we had to roll that back because it caused some other impacts. But we're definitely working on it, and it absolutely shouldn't have been ship-specific. It should have been any ship that required a part of the ship to move before you got in it. So any ship with a moving canopy, like the Vanduul ships, where the sticks do something first and then the massage bed drops out for you to get on, would have been affected.

Now, when you say it should have affected all ships, you're not speaking about an intention, like the bug was intended to affect everything. It was a systemic issue with the way that animations that attach to the cockpit were...

We were surprised that it only ever affected a small... Yes, it absolutely was not intended that, whilst flying around, your canopy should constantly open and close. Or in the case of the Vanduul ships, just dropping you outside the ship every now and then.

But you said we had a fix in 3.12, and we had to roll it back because it had other knock-ons that were unintended.

Yeah, it had a strong chance of not actually letting you get out of the ship again. So the canopy didn't open and close, but you could never get out of the ship.

There is no singular criteria for organizing it. It's a combination of what staff we have free to work on things. Obviously, if we only had one person free to work on a ship, we're not going to put them on working on a capital ship for multiple years. About two months ago, so Q3 of every year, I sit down with the execs, so Chris, Erin, Tony, and some of the other directors like Todd, and anyone that has a vested interest in a vehicle coming out into the game. And we sit down and we look at the backlog of ships and go, right, what ships do we want to release, actually? What is going to add to the game? And we give our, like, these are our top five. And then we go and see whether there's any consistencies there. And that usually pulls out a few. And then I go away and work with production and go, right... and they go, you can only have one of these, because this is a big ship that's going to take all of next year. You can have this ship, but that's the only ship you're going to get next year. And I go, well, I don't want that. So then we go backwards and forwards. And we spend a few weeks going, we want this one, and we'll have these two, these will fit. We have this event at this date that needs this ship for it because of X reason, so that has to go in. And if we have any time left over, then it's sort of internal team choice. We have a free-form period. So are there any small little ships that we want to squeeze in there? Or do we want to look at doing a rework of a ship? And that's how it goes.

In a lot of ways, it's important to keep everybody busy, to keep everybody working, to keep everybody engaged. And I think there's this misconception that anybody can work on anything. There's this idea that everybody can work on everything, and even within ship artists, artists have different styles, artists have different aptitudes. There are people that you would put on Drake, like, okay, these are the people that should work on Drake, but you wouldn't put them on Origin because it's outside of their aptitudes.

Every member of the team is a capable artist, but definitely people have things that they feel more comfortable with. And sometimes people just click better with certain things. And then within the team, you always want someone that's a bit more technical and has a bit of a better understanding of the whys and hows, as opposed to necessarily the ones that can make stuff that's just super pretty. Otherwise, you end up with a ship that looks great, but everything's broken. And then comes the real frustration of having to go backwards and forwards with design and tech people to try and get that stuff working. I guess that goes with any walk of life. You always want to make sure that the right people are focusing on the right things. And that's something you do as a lead and a manager: trying to make sure you're playing to people's strengths. And when we get on to doing some of our more alien ships, and things that are a little bit less hard surface, that we may or may not tackle in the future, there'll certainly be a learning curve for a lot of members of the team with that stuff. And it might be that certain aspects of the ship may require more specialist skill sets. So you have to make sure those artists are free and ready to jump on it. And then, yeah, I think it is just about managing time. Sorry, I'm rambling.

The manufacturer point is a really good point. It was never intentional, but the different studios have ended up being the go-to teams for different manufacturers. The US guys are really good with RSI and Drake ships. So if we decided one year we want to only do RSI and Drake ships, those would primarily go to the US team, but there's only so many of them. And the UK guys would be able to do it, but it would take them that bit longer versus if it was an Origin or an Aegis ship. So then that's where you see things start moving around. Or we have an event where there is a request for one thing and it turned into two things, and that's a non-negotiable request, and we suddenly need to adjust course and go, well, actually, we're going to pause this ship for a bit, and then we'll do this, and then we'll come back to it. And then that's where, often, I do read the comments quite often where it said, John Crew said this team is going to be doing this ship and then they're going to move on to this ship. And that absolutely was the intention at the time. Just something happened in the middle that caused that to be paused, and then they'll get back to it.

It's in concept again. Anyone that's a BMM fan knows that the concepts were quite different depending on which version you saw. So it's bringing them all in line, making everything fit in it. It has got bigger, but it has not gone up a landing pad size, so it's still in the same size category. It still has the same amount of cargo as it was concepted with, so we've not cut the cargo. And we're working on the interior to bring all the stuff we learned from the Defender inside.

Concepts for the interior. And folks, as far as when you can expect to see that, I would say when the Banu Merchantman actually begins active development, when things actually start being built, is probably the next time you can expect to see some of that stuff. It's not going to be soon. Just put it that way.