Developers answer fan questions on ship wear and jury-rigged repairs, stealth as reduced heat and EM signature, ship theft and blockade handling via instancing, and exploration content. Most of the episode explains the matchmaking backend: instance manager, game servers, regional data centers, headless load testing.
So, I guess the sort of quirky personality-based repair thing that they're asking about, not really a thing. But there is wear and tear. Things do break down. You will be able to do some jury-rigged repairs in space and everything. So things can break down in interesting ways, but it won't necessarily be a personality trait of your ship.
TL;DRNot definitively; CIG must keep tight control of its universe, and may later let players pitch ideas to a review board, noting the Next Great Starship contest as a first step.
That's a tricky one. So obviously if you're running a local server you can do whatever you want. But we do have to keep kind of tight controls on what goes in our universe. Like any other persistent universe game, you have to make sure you're keeping your fiction intact. So we've talked a little bit about this and this may be a thing later on down the road where we let people come up with ideas and present them to a review board of some sort at CIG and then potentially bring them into the game. But there's a lot of work required to bring a ship idea into the game as an actual functioning piece of equipment.
TL;DRStealth means reducing heat and EM signature with less powerful, more efficient equipment, not cloaking, so you are harder to detect but lose output; powering down is another option with a reboot penalty.
So a lot of times when people ask about stealth, they're talking like Predator-style or Klingon cloaking device type, which is not our approach to it at all. Stealth is really an effort to reduce your signature for your ship, so the amount of heat you're generating, EM in general, and you can't really change your profile, so that's hard to do. So the trade-off is you get equipment that is less powerful, consumes less power, is more efficient, so you're not generating as much heat or as much EM signature, and then the end result is that you're harder to detect. You will lose some of the output of that stuff. So you have less power, you have less oomfy guns.
Right, exactly. And you could also turn off your ship and wait for somebody. But then the penalty to that is, well, you have to turn it back on and let it boot up again when you're going to attack. So the trade-offs are just what do you want to be better at.
So, of course, the basic consideration anytime you say, hey, let's throw in some alien races, is how long you're going to have to build them. And the animation team gets all kinds of crazy when you say, hey, here's an eight-legged animal, go animate it for us. But down the road, I can definitely see that happening. It's one of those things that takes time, so it doesn't take priority over what we really need for the base game right now. But it could definitely happen somewhere.
Again, as we build this thing, it's never completely finished. We'll be continually adding on it forever and we'll be listening to what people want at that point.
That would be a really, really big explosion to catch somebody else in it, unless they're sitting on top of you when you blow up. So, I mean, there could be explosive cargos, and if you got hit in the cargo, that would mean you'd probably blow up. I'm not sure that would do any damage to your opponents. Like I said, unless they're right...
TL;DRExplorers should have plenty to find thanks to huge star systems with much empty space, re-navigable jump points, derelicts, procedural content and cargo crates, though the answer isn't a full list.
I actually am one of them. I want to explore too. I think that our poll results have been very consistent on that. A lot of our fans are explorer types. I think that we keep that in mind all the time when we're generating content. So there's so many different answers to this, but for one, the star systems that we're building for the game are huge. And the points of interest, the really central activity areas, are just a small portion of that. So there's a lot of empty space in every area. And if you want to go map that and find interesting things at the edges, that's a long trip. So that's one thing. For the people who really just like to know, have seen everything everywhere, that would take a long time. Another thing is navigating jump points. You can find new jump points, but you can also go back through and re-navigate an existing jump point if you want to shave some time off of the passage time. There are also going to be derelicts. We're going to have a lot of procedural content that can appear...
Just run over it and you've got stuff. The cargo system involves actually being able to load stuff into a box and then put the box into your ship. So, yeah, you can open up your containers and look at the cargo inside. I guess if you want to throw it all over your ship, you could. It seems messy.
So yes, if you manage to disable someone's ship and remove the occupant and fly off with it, yeah, you can fly with that ship all you want. However, that ship is stolen, so people are going to be looking for you. It's not like you can just, yeah, everything's great, go visit Terra, and then they realize that your ship is reported stolen and they spend a lot of time trying to make it into small pieces. So yes, there could be temporary inflation of ships, but at the end of the day, stolen ships are going to be hunted, so it's not scot-free.
Well, for one thing, that's not necessarily bad for gameplay to have some areas where that can happen. I realize that for large groups, that's an important part of gameplay, seeing if you can take control over an area to some extent. But a lot of it will be handled by our instancing system in the sense that in places where you're blockading, people may slip by. You just don't notice them. Space is really big. It's hard to see everything that's going on. So that's the main way that that'll happen. There will probably be other techniques we use, but part of it will depend on us playing it and seeing how it works.
Somebody else thought of it. So that was a pretty quick no from Mr. Roberts. But at the same time, it's a thing in our game that is still going to exist in the game as something you can do. That's the arena, which I don't remember which stretch goal that was. So it's going to be there, and there may be an arcade version of it in the game somewhere as well.
Yeah, matchmaking services are ready to go. So we've got it in the QA environment right now and we're currently pushing into production and just trying to figure out how many machines we're going to start out with.
Part of it's from game design and how the game feels. Part of it's performance-wise, since we are still fairly early in the project, so we haven't done all the optimization we're going to to maximize how many we can fit on one game server. Then there's going to also be how many we can fit on one machine, how many game matches we can fit on one machine at a time.
Your client connects to our universe services, just like it actually does a little of this already with the hangar. And when you enter your ship and go select what you want your match to be, then it will connect you to a game server that the matchmaking service chooses that's available, when it talks to an instance manager that tracks all the game server instances running. And then your client then redirects its CryNetwork, its gameplay connection, to that game server. And then the match starts up.
Not in the first release, but definitely planned. We want to have the machines in basically data centers in all our main different regions, so you will get connected to ones that are closer to you with lower ping times.
Even before we get to there, as we test internally and we increase the number of players, we also use a load testing system that we've developed that runs the game client but in a headless mode without any graphics. So we can put all these artificial players in to help us make sure that when we do release, it doesn't crash and burn. Then we start ramping up the number of people we're going to have in. And we'll keep an eye on it as it goes up to make sure everything's okay, and as we find problems we'll fix them and then continue ramping up.
Absolutely. Manuel's been a great help. We had the backend architecture in place, and Manuel was able to really take the matchmaking services and just plug in his matchmaking logic into our framework, and it just worked.
TL;DRGame servers register with the instance manager, and when a player picks a level and mode in the matchmaking UI, the matchmaker scans running servers and places them in a suitable game.
Well, basically, we start up X number of game servers and they register themselves with the instance manager. And so the matchmaker will talk to the instance manager and say, hey, how many game servers are free for games to be played on? Or what are the different player counts and what are the different levels that are currently running on each of the game servers. So when you log in on your own computer and you go to the matchmaking UI, you pick which level you want to play and what game mode, whether it's Capture the Core or Battle Royale, you put in your selection, you hit go, and your message goes up to the matchmaker service, and it's going to scan all the game servers that are currently up and running, and find a game for it to place you into.