Star Citizen: Subscriber's Town Hall - Cargo & Shopping

Obviously, everything starts from Chris. He will outline what he wants to see. The cargo system, we knew it was the basis for everything. We knew we needed to be able to take cargo from place to place. All of these cargo ships needed to be able to store cargo. So it was kind of, what's the most fun way of doing that? We looked at other games where you do it all through a menu, and that wasn't what Star Citizen was, where we needed that physicalized sense of taking cargo from one place. The connection: I have a box and I can go down at any point and see that box. So we knew we needed to physically generate that cargo and show it in your ship. So we needed to set up a cargo grid that restricted where that could go. Just the evolution of our requirements really laid out: okay, well, we need a grid, we need physicalized cargo, we need a way of moving it, we need a way to buy it. We ended up with a cargo grid, and you can physically pick it up, and there's commodity kiosks where you can buy it. I don't want to say it's not rocket science, to downplay your guys' job, but the design of it kind of designed it.

It's a lot harder than what you say.

The design side of it, it was self-explanatory of what we wanted to do, which meant it was incredibly easy to sell that idea to the team of: here's what we want to do with this system, here's how we're going to get there. Immediately, there was no "well, I don't understand this." It was like, yep, that makes sense.

I think the first step is always complain and say, why did you do this to us? But it usually starts with getting a feature request from design, where they will do their best to outline, not exactly how these different designs need to be implemented, because that's our job, but what exactly they expect to see. So there's things we talk about, like user stories, where, oh, we've got Jenny here who's going to go buy 10 SCU of astatine, and it's going to go into her Cutlass Black or whatever, and we expect her to go to the commodity kiosk, and they'll outline images like, here's step one, two, three, four, and then she clicks purchase. So they need to do their best to outline exactly what it'll look like in the game, so we can interpret: oh, all right, if they need it to look like this, here are the underlying systems we'll need that can achieve that end user story.

When we look at a design like that from a technical perspective, you're looking at what it's going to take, the resources that are involved, kind of the timeline. You want to tear it out. You want to immediately raise any concerns, potentially, that may seem like they're not very difficult, but if you understand how the engine works and what tech we have right now, could actually make it take a lot longer. And you come up with a plan. You have a kickoff meeting to kind of hash all that out. You kind of establish a baseline of where you want to start from with the design and kind of where you plan on ending up, especially if you have an upcoming release. And so, yeah, I like gameplay programming. And the reason why I got into it, I imagine Spencer as well, is because of the very reason that it's so closely knit with design that you get to work in that more creative aspect. You're doing something very technical, but at the same time, you're doing it in collaboration to make something that's creative and fun and tangible.

The design is that it... I think it's instantaneous, isn't it?

I have the task on me to make it take time.

Because I remember writing that it should take time.

Currently, it's not on the slate. At least for PTU.

But to be clear, that is a fixed time, after which it will instantly appear in your cargo grid. There has been talk that I've seen about making it more of a physical process. But currently...

Yeah, it's instant. It's important to remember that 3.0 is the very first iteration. It's not the final end-all be-all of how the cargo system will work. This is our very first foray into the system. So when you go to a shopping kiosk, you sell and it goes [instantly]. But obviously you don't want that to happen with a fully laden Hull D.

No, no. That's absolutely one of the balancing systems that we're looking at for the future: if you've got a big ship that can hold thousands of SCU of cargo, if you sell all... go make a sandwich. The amount of product entering into the world and the amount of money you're getting, if that was fast, it would break it. Cargo would be the number one way of making money, because profit per SCU is going to be what it is. We need to make sure that's in line time-wise with going out and hunting criminals or what have you. So, yeah, the time to unload a ship needs to be physicalized as well. And that also means that for piracy in the future, if you steal a ship and you want to unload it, you're trapped in a location for a short period of time. There's all sorts of counterplays to that. Oh, I've got to load a big ship. Okay, well, that's going to take some time, and now I'm in this location. But it feels real, I think.

We want to manually load. For 3.0, we can't, because we are auto-populating, and we can't physically pick up the boxes yet. No, we can pick up the small boxes. Big boxes are beyond the player's strength. So, yeah, the plan is to bring in manual loading and then hopefully auto-loading, either through NPCs or drones. All sorts of different things are being looked at at the moment. Especially for ships like the Hull, where everything is stored externally, we want to have that process take time. But that speaks to the earlier issue of how long does it take to load a box onto a ship? Because even if it takes 10 seconds to pick up a box, fly it over, attach it, we're talking about potentially thousands of SCU worth of cargo, so you could be there for hours. It's whether or not that's like, do we want you to lose your afternoon playing just loading a ship and then flying, and then another afternoon unloading? Is that fun? Potentially not. It's striking the right balance of how fast these drones work as well.

It stays there for a period of time until it gets cleaned up automatically if there's no one around, which will be pretty fast for a small object like that. If you log in again, it depends on which instance you go into. If you end up in the same instance, you could see the cargo again. If you end up in a different instance, you won't see it. If you leave the piece of cargo in your ship, you leave the ship at ATC, you log off, log back on, it will be in your ship, the last place you left it, because that's something that is part of your account and it travels with you whenever you go into different instances. So the moment you take it out of your ship, it kind of becomes free game. So that's because we have instancing in the game right now. Whenever we eventually move to a more server mesh based technology, we'll be able to have either large or single representation of the universe. That means that if I leave something on a planet by a certain rock, it's there for everybody that plays the game. We're not there yet, because that's going to take some rather tremendous work to get us there. But for things that are part of your player account, like your ships, your loadout, your attachments, those things follow you whenever you log off and log back on. I don't want to promise too much. We're exploring currently ways that we can make that experience better, so that if I do happen to leave something somewhere and I log off and log back on, it may be there. But it's still early days for that kind of stuff.

I don't know about replenishing existing derelicts. I know there's plans for more derelicts and having them be generated off the back of missions and other things. This is really our first foray into a lot of the derelict stuff, because we're doing planets for the first time. I'm not sure. It's going to depend on how much the community, how fast they find these, how often they're used. We've got a whole bunch in. Off the back of that, we'll see if we need more, if the algorithms aren't set, because a lot of these are algorithmically placed. We want to put boxes with derelicts so that once you strip them, they're clean. If you go back there, someone's already been here. If they were just constantly dropping, there would be a constant stream of ships going down to the same location. We want to make sure that...

It would just be a camping site.

Yeah, exactly. We want you to discover them. I think part of that discovery of, I've heard on the grapevine, I've heard on chatter, people have been saying a ship went down, I'm going to try and find that and get its cargo. We also have: you destroy a ship, you'll get some of its cargo as well.

It will spew out cargo boxes. A big glorious explosion, just everywhere.

It doesn't matter. If anybody is next to the boxes that could see them and interact with them or whatever, they stay there. But if everyone just goes away, then eventually the system will just clean them up, because nobody's interacting with them.

And if you wake up in an Easy Hab and you open your door and you're blocked by cargo boxes?

You can move the cargo boxes, yes. Although I think making that happen is going to take a lot of effort.

There's going to be one instance where somebody logs in and every door to the Easy Hab is blocked with cargo.

That's possible. So I mentioned earlier there's this thing that kind of manages entity lifetime. That's something that I've worked on called the Entity Owner Manager. And with that, like other things in the game, it has features associated with it, and it's still improving. So one of the things is that for those kinds of trolly situations, whenever we hit some max capacity for a certain region, we can just be more aggressive about cleaning it up. It's like, okay, you're trolling.

It could vary a lot based on the feature. One thing that I was doing recently, which is relevant to this, is the prices of things at the kiosk, because the quantity in which you buy things can be small enough that it's pretty cheap per unit. Currently, the price that I last heard from Pete Mackay for hydrogen, one one-hundredth of an SCU was like one UEC. Obviously, you're talking about a very small quantity there, one one-hundredth of an SCU. But if they price it starting at a very small unit like that, something our viewers might not be thinking of immediately is you probably need to have decimal point numbers for variance, if the economy is like, oh, well, hydrogen price is up right now, so it's 1.1 UEC or 1.2. But currently, everywhere in the game, money is an integer. It's just whole numbers, like one, two, three, four. And it's a very deliberate design, because floating point numbers, if you know anything about computer science, can lead to some weirdness. But the simple answer is, when you're talking about storing important things, like banks do this, like your computer clock does this, you want to use whole numbers, but really small whole numbers, not these weird decimal pointy numbers. So we sort of went back to them and said, hey, we really don't want to change how we're storing the players' money to be these sort of fuzzy decimal point numbers. So what we're actually doing is these prices in the kiosk can be floating point numbers just for these prices, but then when we actually store it and sell it, we'll just round up. So if you bought at 1.1 per hydrogen, you bought like 1,000, it ended up being like 1,067.4 or whatever, we'll just say, okay, you're spending 1,068 here. So we're only using the decimal point numbers in part of this whole process. Then we'll round up. So that's maybe a little contrived example.

I guess what I would say is that for me, whenever I get some design and some user story like that, there's an idea here. There's kind of the overarching idea. The more granular in the detail you get, the more tactical it is. That also means the more granular details are often some of the things that are more likely to change, either because of technical limitations or iteration or whatever. It's an iteration both on design and technical implementation. So it's not like you get a user design story and if I ask a question, the designer is going to be totally offended or something like that. But at the same time, I understand that it's playing a role in our game, and it has a lot of thought put into it. So I'm not just going to point something out and just be like, no, we're not doing that, or that's stupid, or whatever.

It is absolutely an iterative process. I like to say this a lot: no game design survives first contact with a coder. You tell them how you want it to play, and then they will tell you, you can't do that, but you can do it this way if you just change... It's just one of those things where, this is the experience I want to achieve, how do we make this happen? I could tell you how I want it to happen, or you could tell me how it's going to happen. Sometimes you're like, it's so simple, it's just a grid. It's like, yes, but... And then, ah.

There's this system that's already in there, there's this system.

Yeah, it's kind of like, oh, I want to do this thing. And it's like, yes, but in world space, that's this thing. And it's like, oh, do we do it that way? It's like, we do it because of a completely unrelated system that you've never heard of, but because we want to stream that information in, it can't be stored in this place, so therefore this. And you're like, okay, well, what if we just change this? It's like, let me think about it. And so the smartest person in the room goes away, solves the problem, and then is like, does it fit?

And then the designer responds, no, go on.

And so then you come back and ask, does that fit the experience that we ultimately want? Okay. And so I think it's one of the reasons designers, when they get better, learn to listen more and stop telling.

I think honestly the same thing goes for programmers. And then, of course, you get it working. Not perfectly, but you get it working well in your own private little environment, and then you go to integrate it into the game, into the game code, with all these other game systems, some game systems that were developed a year ago, two years ago, that haven't been touched...

I'll give you a perfect example that just came up. So we got this cargo grid working. It's great. It's got all these features. You can do all these cool things with it. But there's one ship in the game that has the cargo grid on an elevator, which is the Constellation. You lower the elevator, you can walk through the cargo. You raise it, you can interact with it, you can't walk through it. It's one of these things where you don't think about it until you get into the game. You're like, oh, okay, yeah, that makes complete sense because of the way our zone system works. But it requires some iteration on the tech, because we didn't think that far ahead. It's only one ship in the game at present. There'll probably be more.

We briefly talked about the plan. We're looking at cargo drones and things like that. We were actually looking at bigger ships as well. Is there a way to take the Argo and things like that? Do we want to put tractor beams on smaller ships, tugs and things like that? Treat smaller ships that would feed larger ships, like the Argo. When you arrive at certain ports, they already have either NPC or player characters that can load for you for a small fee, things like that. They are starting to fall into a weight class of more industrial cargo ships, that you would see at the port of Los Angeles or the port of San Francisco. Those kind of carriers would take two days, 48 hours, just to unload, before even leaving the bay, kind of thing. It's a full-time job and all hands on deck to clear that. We could see a similar system where you can only take your Hulls to certain... like Port Olisar may not be set up for it, but a more industrial trading post might be. These are things that we're looking at now. We have our infrastructure, and then we have bigger ships that need to integrate it. Is it worth just putting an umbilical off the side and just automating it, or do we want to encourage players: oh, you've got a big ship, you're going to have to take that somewhere else.

There might be specific space stations that are more suited for something like that.

Yeah, or we start adding loading docks as a concept that's separate from the private docks of just landing pad off and away. That's the next question, whether we designate loading docks. The Hull C is in progress, and I think that's going to be the first test of cargo point two, the next iteration of where we are right now. We've got it in, and most of our internal cargo grids, aside from a few lift problems, are working really well. So it's the outliers now, and the Hull C is the new big outlier that's kind of like, okay, how are we going to integrate that? Because we're also going to see that on the Starfarer: its external tanks are designated as cargo storage space as well. So yeah, that's the next big step for cargo.

Yes. It's part of the design.

Yeah, it's the same footprint. It's an SCU space with a lid, and inside it'll have a hundred-unit space.

There's definitely some serious technical considerations for something like that, but we'll figure it out.

It's got all the item ports in there, and like a rifle takes three item ports.

Yeah, but imagine you have a ship that has thousands of these things.

But to be clear, these won't be commodities. You won't be able to open up your box of chlorine and then just, like, I'll just take one chlorine out. They will be inventory items, bits of loot, other equipment, things like that, because the unit system is what we're also using for the personal inventory. When we talk about how much stuff you can hold in your pockets, in terms of units, all guns, like you said, rifles might be three units, pistols might be one unit, a grenade might be one unit. Knowing the unit size of items that you find around, you can put them in your boxes, and then they will take up the same footprint as every other one SCU item in the grid.

Not the one SCU boxes.

The ones that they're physically capable of picking up, the commodities. Can they pick up that chlorine and just carry it out of your ship?

Yes. The ones that are the one unit, the smaller boxes that you can pick up: if someone gets into your ship, they can pick them up and then take them out, and it's not in your ship anymore. They put them in their ship, it's in their ship. They park their ship somewhere, now it's in their ship.

So by the same token, if somebody disables a Starfarer or something in space and they board, they can grab your cargo and fly out with it.

Piracy.

If someone takes your Nox that's in the back of your ship and puts it in their ship... That's interesting. I don't have an answer for that one just yet.

Put in an insurance claim. That's what you want to do.

Somewhat. There was an awful bug yesterday. I don't even know the likelihood that you'd run into this, but you could get into a scenario where, if you had multiple ships being claimed at once and you expedited some of them but not some others, you log off and you log back in, the next time you access the terminal, it just crashes, and you could never access the terminal again. So you could never spawn a ship again. So there's probably one Evocati player out there who's just like...

You can log out and log in, you still can't use it?

Yeah. Persistent. Working as intended. The fix should be going in shortly.

And I think that's one of the exciting things about the insurance: we're putting in all these numbers, but we don't know how often people are going to crash. We know how often we crash, which is often. But once better players than us get it, then we can see where we sit on the curve of other players and how often they make claims. How much money do they have when they make those claims? Are they earning enough through selling cargo and things like that? If everyone thinks this is extortionate, don't worry. Prices will go down. Prices will be adjusted: the more people who get to play it, the more we can adjust prices so it's at a sensible level.

And that actually reminds me, going back to talking about how we can affect the user stories and stuff: the design for the most recent iteration of the insurance system, since it has changed a few times. I had that question for you on the equation of how do we want the cost of expediting to increase over the number of claims. So that's a feature we have right now, where the more often you claim, if you want to speed up the processing time to get your ship back, that price goes up. And that was something that wasn't in the design. It was like, well, what's the formula for this price going up?

I just wrote "insert formula." It goes up.

But then when that comes to me, it's like, okay, well, there needs to be code in that "insert thing here." So what's the code? And so I would come back: well, how about we use this logarithmic curve, and pretend to be a designer for a minute. What do you think about this? And then we go back and forth. And then Pete steps in and is like, well, actually, how about this even more complicated curve?

Yes. So currently the design for this is, oh, you crash your ship, you go make a claim on it, you have to wait, we'll say, five minutes. But maybe some players are like, well, no, I need to go get in this space battle, I'm not waiting five minutes. So there's an expedite button. So you could pay, we'll say, a reasonable fee. As Will said, this is going to change. I think it's like 100 UEC or something like that. It varies per ship, so your Idris is going to be way more than your Hornet. But you could pay a fee, we'll say it's 100 right now, or 200, and then they'll say, okay, you were going to wait five minutes, but now you only have to wait one. Again, test numbers here. So it'll shorten it to some amount. You could just wait it out and not pay. You've already got the insurance on it. But if you do want to pay to make it quicker, you can do that.

Yep. So there's three variables. In this iteration, this is another thing I had to talk to Will about after getting the design. Like, okay, so you've specified we need the number of claims to matter. Ships have a certain amount of time they need to wait and a certain shortened amount of time. Okay, what variables do you need to edit? And so right now, those variables are: how long does the ship take to process after you claim it? Some of them I've seen currently are sitting at maybe 30 minutes. How much does it cost to expedite this? So if I want to get it quicker, maybe the base cost is like 100, we'll say. And the third one is, what time does it get shortened to? So some values I've seen for these in our current build are like, okay, maybe the processing time is 30 minutes, and it costs 200 to expedite it to five minutes. And that's what all the designers can go in and fill out: this big spreadsheet of values for all the ships.

We want it to become like the bigger SCU crates, and then you're going to need something that can pick them up and move them.

Well, that speaks to the player experience. Some players don't want to load thousands of containers. You do it once and you're like, you know what? That was enough for me. I'm soloing. I don't have a big crew. I just want to press a button and then I'll go make a sandwich. I'll press a button, and I'm going to take some missions at the same time and buy some gear. Whilst your ship is being loaded, if that's the first thing you do, you can go off and do other things. By the time you get to your ship, it's already loaded. It's whether or not the player wants that experience. We offer the ability to manually load it if you want to, or automatically load it if you don't care, potentially for paying a little bit more. Striking the right balance, really, between providing what the players want but not making it too easy.

You can sell it. It's still part of your ship, and so whenever you land it at a station, it still shows up as part of your manifest, but they're loose, so that means, again, they're not locked down tight. Someone can walk in and steal them. So yes, it's still cargo. That said, there was a bit of a change since that video went in, again with the previous cargo change I mentioned, where when you're now buying cargo, it's always going to occupy one SCU slot at least. So if you, say, buy eight units of agricultural supplies, that's going to occupy one cell, one SCU box in your grid, and so you can keep buying and fill it up as much as you want until you hit a second or a third. But you can't, say, diversify and buy one unit of every single different thing, because very quickly you're going to exceed the physical capacity for your grid to hold it. So it makes you kind of have to invest in a particular commodity if you start buying into it.

Because the boxes don't mix. So you can't have one unit of this...

You can't have, like, half and half.

It spews out.

Yeah, there's a little bit of gamification going on there right now. Because we don't have a way yet in 3.0 to move the large boxes, what will actually happen when you destroy a ship, if it has large SCU boxes in it, they'll actually generate smaller boxes that you can move by hand, just so if you're pirating, you have a way to grab that loot and put it into your ship and sell it later. But that's just a placeholder behavior until, I think, we have a better way to manipulate the larger boxes.

My top priority, ignoring Hull C and those ships, is being able to lift the boxes that are too big for you. I've seen a few people talk about the cargo jack in the chat. That's not going away. The true form of what it's going to take, whether or not it'll be a physical thing you lock on... more likely we're looking at the moment at a tractor beam attachment to the multi-tool, so that you can cut with it, you can weld with it, you can lift a box with it. It's the engineer's tool of choice, kind of thing. And that would be the case that you could lift it, because that way you can then lift it and put it on a box, kind of like the gravity gun kind of gameplay that people are used to.

That depends on the type of insurance you have on your ship. Right now, the lowest insurance that we have is, I believe, two-month insurance. We have three-month insurance, we have six-month insurance, we have all the way up to five-year insurance, we have lifetime insurance. So it depends on the policy that's on your ship. For 3.0, I don't think the policy terms are in. No, it's all lifetime insurance.

Yeah, for 3.0, everybody's just... everyone's got it, and then we will iterate on that.

So there's no risk of losing anything in 3.0. We're still building these systems and testing them out. And it's always free.

So you can always wait for your ship. We don't want to be gouging people.

The other thing I think that sometimes gets lost in the conversation about insurance is the other side of it, which is it gives you some kind of real downside for being overly aggressive. If you make a mistake or you're messing with people that you shouldn't, there's a penalty there. It's not a severe penalty, but it's not like you can just instantly respawn and, whatever, I'll just troll and shoot people because I have no penalty for doing that. Now, if you go and you pick a fight with five other people and you lose your ship, you've got to wait a while. Maybe don't do that.

If you've got a ridiculously expensive Idris, you should act like it.

It has some value.

Plus, it also adds value to the people who took that Idris down. If a whole bunch of raiders decided to pounce on an Idris and take it down, they want to feel like, yes, it's gone. Not, well, in five minutes, that's back. You rid a system of a capital ship for a little bit. Now you can run riot. It's like, oh, they built another, they came back, but at least you felt its absence. There's a power vacuum.

So every now and then I read stuff on this, and it's partly my fault. I did an ATV. So yeah, there's technically legal and physical ownership. And this has to do with the way that the game tracks and works with the persistent data, and also slightly affecting criminality. If you legally own it, that means you bought it or the game gave it to you for some explicit reason. If I bought something at a commodity kiosk, I legally own that, or if I bought some ship in the game, I legally own it. However, if I have, say, a Nox that's in the back of my ship, I legally own it, but then Will comes in, sneaks in, picks up the Nox, puts it in his Starfarer or whatever. Well, now he physically owns it, even though I legally own it. What that means is there are certain gameplay behaviors that will be blocked depending on that. Say I go to the ASOP terminal and I want to spawn a ship. Do I physically own this Nox? No, I can't spawn it. But maybe he wants to claim insurance on this Nox. He can't, because he doesn't legally own it. So it's just a way of understanding the ownership to inform other gameplay systems.

It'll still be there. Needs more QA, but... That's when you claim insurance, because that person has stolen your ship.

It will show as not available, because it's not physically in your possession and it's not at your location. So you can't spawn it. You can still claim insurance on it. You can always claim insurance on it. He has access to that ship, and next time he spawns a ship, he'll have that ship. He can't claim insurance on it. And if he parks it out somewhere else and then logs off, because he doesn't legally own it, next time he logs in, he won't have it anymore. And he won't be able to spawn it ever at an ASOP terminal, because he doesn't legally own it.

So Will can't spawn it. If it's blown up, that's it for it. It's gone. So when Will's got it in the back of his Freelancer and the insurance claim is made, in theory, there's two Noxes. But only one is going to live on in perpetuity. The other one's days are numbered.

It's a black market Nox. You've got to keep that in someone else's ship, because ATC is going to notice it and be like, mm-mm.

So if he kept it in the ship, in theory, he could hold on to the second one for a while. We're not worried about it being a duplicate ship in the universe, because he's just keeping it in the back of the ship. If he takes it out there and plays with it, he's now at risk.

He's at risk, but as far as the system goes, they're two different ships, and it can handle it just fine.

I need to look at my ship database. I don't know how many SCU it's supposed to hold. I feel like I've let the whole team down now.

There's no easy way to get cargo into and out of the 300 right now, which is one of the reasons it's getting a redesign.

It auto-loads, so if it's got the capacity, you should be able to hold that much SCU.

It's whatever the designer said, too.

I think they're talking more about the physical cargo.

Oh, I see. If there's no way to get to it, unfortunately, there's no way to load. Same with the Aurora. If you can't get to it, then unfortunately, that's not available. You could only buy commodities at a kiosk. One thing I was really adamant on is that if you've bought a ship with cargo capacity, for 3.0 you should be able to buy and sell cargo. Physically picking up and placing stuff is a neat addition that we have, but I wanted to make sure that if you've bought a ship that can hold cargo, you get to play the cargo side of the game.