Reverse the Verse: September Subscriber Edition

Honestly, I don't know whether that's the case. I do know that we're using what we call our item port system, so it's the same system that's used on the vehicles, it's on the items, it's on the players. So it's different than what is by default in CryEngine. So we just have a very generic, general system where we can define places you can plug things in and they connect, and connect with heat pipes and stuff. And so all the weapons have a lot more connection points than the traditional weapons have been in Crysis games before. And so we just plug in a scope with an item port. The actual ammo cartridge is actually another item that gets plugged in by an item port. A silencer would be plugged in on the front. You can change the stock out. So it probably wouldn't be difficult for it, because it's pretty data driven in terms of where the ports are. I just don't know if we've got plans to be able to shift them, because they all tune the ADS, which is when you bring up the gun sights. That gets specifically tuned so we make sure it works well in the screen and stuff like that, so if you would slide it around, it potentially could hurt that. But I don't necessarily know the VR thing, because we're getting the basic stuff working, and then we'll tune it in for the VR, specialized afterwards. I know Jason Hutchins has been working a lot on the ADS system lately. He's a certified gun master, and he's pretty specific about how you should hold, how you should fire, gun handling, and all the rest of the stuff.

Yeah, definitely. So you'll be able to, we have plans to have the equivalent of real estate, which would be hangars, potentially a little place you could buy or rent and stuff like that. So there's sort of things that you can acquire. And so there would definitely be the renting and the buying option on those kinds of things. We're trying to go for the real world model in a simplified manner.

So the war effort goes badly and the UEE starts charging property taxes.

No, we may charge property taxes. I mean, we're going to try and simulate. So if you're in a planet that has good law and order, you have higher taxation than if you're in the pirate lands and there's no taxation. So it's sort of up to you to decide how you want to play the game. Do you want to hang out in Somalia and don't pay taxes but potentially get ripped off by a bunch of pirates? Or you want to be in the US and pay high taxes but have the police and everything else?

Player-owned property outside of ships and hangars? Well, obviously we have the Million Mile High Club, I think it is. And longer term, we will definitely have, like I said, some aspects of player-owned property, whether it's a cool penthouse apartment or something like that around the galaxy, because we kind of want to have things that people would play the game, earn money, and they could spend their money on, so that can be on a huge ship or potentially get yourself a bit of real estate on Terra, in the Terra Tower where you've got a great view or something. But that's sort of the longer term plans.

I think we have someone here who commented on the Million Mile High Club.

We do. I was thinking of showing a picture and then I was like, oh, no, we can't do that because it's happening at CitizenCon.

So we'll say that the guys in Austin have been building, and you'll see more soon.

No, it hasn't changed. I actually think on our star map, which we will be sharing with everyone at CitizenCon, that we actually have the sizings. I mean, the idea is basically: think of a jump point as a mountain pass between two different valleys, and some mountain passes are narrower than other ones. And so the concept is that this is why, okay, I've got myself a Hull C and I'm hauling a bunch of cargo just like a big container ship. There's certain ways that the ship can go, but it can't go everywhere. It may be able to take more, but it would maybe potentially have to go a longer way around because it has to go in whatever it will be, the class three jump points. But I could be in a Freelancer, which is a much smaller ship, and I can go through a class two or a class one. And so I don't take as much cargo, but I can do it in two jumps instead of three jumps or something like that. And so that's kind of how we're trying to balance it. So depending on the size of ships, there'll be narrow mountain passes basically that you'll be able to sneak through, but you won't be able to take big ships through. Then there'll be ones that are bigger where the big capital ships or the big cargo ships would go through. And so there'll be pros and cons to flying different sizes of ships. I mean, we're really trying to set the game up in a way that there's different reasons to do different things. So we're really trying to figure out how we can have groups of players also, they have their smaller ships, like a Hornet or something, and then they've got the medium-sized ships and the bigger ships, and how they all work together and almost create a little bit of an ecosystem.

Well, in SC Alpha, I don't know whether we call it 1.3 or 1.4, which is the multi-crew which will have the FPS and we'll have the section numerous stuff in it, it has proper fuel consumption. So essentially, we think about it, there's sort of three types of fuel, and you sort of need to conserve or use two types. So we assume that the basic space moving that you're doing normally without boost is, you're collecting enough hydrogen from your scoops as you fly around to maintain enough in your tanks to be moving you at normal speed. So we don't have to worry about running out of fuel if we're just flying around normally. But boost, which is going to have a lot more impact and a lot more use in the upcoming multi-crew, is a resource that you would use. And you would either have to replenish or buy that at stations. There are some ships or scoops or equipment you could get where you could go and refine that. But think of that as, I don't know, nitrous or something that you could have in a car. And it's what allows you to overpower your thrusters. Do the afterburner; it will also allow you to get up to super cruise. So we're adding a whole bunch more flight modes. So we're basically going to have a flight mode called Precision, which is this lower speed landing, maneuvering around other objects. So it'll be much smaller movements, so you can have precision. Then we'll go to SCM, which is Space Combat Maneuvering, which is kind of what we're at right now. Then we'll go to Cruise, which will allow you to go much faster than SCM, but you will not be able to turn quite as fast, because obviously going faster, some of the G-forces. There will be some kind of inertial damping on it, but not enough to allow you to do all this stuff. So it's kind of up to you. Almost think of it as gears you can shift up through. And then obviously beyond cruise is when you get to quantum drive. And quantum drive is the second type of fuel, it uses quantum fuel. And jump drives and quantum drives are basically the same thing, because the fiction with the first discovery of the jump was that there was a reactor that you can make quantum drive, and so basically a jump drive is just kind of a bigger quantum drive with a containment field, and it just uses a huge amount of quantum fuel to jump. But you'll need to have quantum fuel to go to quantum space, and obviously the further you go, the more it consumes, and it'll also be based on mass. And then on top of that, the jumps would consume a few more. And quantum's something that you could also harvest or mine, but it's a much rarer resource, and it's also something you can buy. So there'll definitely be a role for people with Starfarers or something, where they come along and they'll be able to sell fuel to people out in space and stuff. So that's another thing that we're trying to have, roles where people would rearm people or people would refuel people. And like I said, when all this works together, I just see a lot of potential for people to interact and cooperate, and it'll be pretty cool.

Yeah, we'd like to do that. So we've kind of been debating that. I mean, the zone technology that we have will allow you to do that, because the zone itself, you can just move the zone around and then everything inside it moves, so you could have a planet and you could have things in orbit around it, and then you could have that zone all moving around, say, a star like this. And then you could have the space station orbiting around the planet and everything around it, and it would be in a zone. So really the trick is just how you handle the relative issues of when you're not in that zone or outside that zone. So in a simplified form, you can say, well, I'm in the influence of this planet. So as I get inside that zone, I will just move with that zone. And as soon as I leave that zone, then I'm not moving with it. But we still haven't fully made a decision on whether we want to go the full hog or not. That will be kind of a gameplay thing. I mean, you don't want to have a massive planet from doors you would smash you in the face. But what would probably happen in what I described is, as it rotated around, you would enter its zone and then you would be caught up in its zone and you would move along with its zone, so all of a sudden you'd be staying there. But we probably wouldn't simulate the proper gravity effects and orbit effects that really happen. It would be very simplified, and already discussed. But first stage probably may not have orbits, but the system will allow it, and that's definitely something we've discussed and we would like to do long term.

No, it's kind of how I described. I actually think that, I still see all this debate and people go, "It's a forced PvP, I hate it," or "You better be in PvP," or whatever. So I just think people should, before theorycrafting what that's going to end up being, try to experience it, because the actual way the game is going to work is, because we're simulating it with so many NPCs, it doesn't matter if there's no one at all running around, there will be lots of NPCs going about their jobs, and some potentially could be a pirate, could attack you, or just be traders or whatever. So there will be a whole world and life that's just like the old school Privateer or Freelancer that will be going on. And in the more regulated or policed areas, PvP is... So I actually think that if you want to have that old Privateer experience, you will have it. If you want to find other players to fight, you will have that. We'll have all this stuff. And I don't think you're going to really get forced into it either way. And in general, even if we have millions of players playing the game, as you move around, you are probably more likely to encounter more AI than you are players, because we need the world to feel alive, which is one of the big differences with the Star Citizen setup, is building this alive world. And to do it properly we can't rely on the player base, because at a certain time of night there may not be that many players and at another time there could be a lot of them. So that's why we have this rule that the player base is going to be no more than 10% of the overall population of the universe. And so at that point, by the very definition, if that's the case, 9 out of 10 of the people, ships that you will meet will be AI, will not be players. So it's kind of up to you to decide what style. And there definitely will be PvP. I mean, where I see a lot more of the PvP coming into play, I definitely see the organizations are going to get together and they'll be like, "I want to fight over this piece of asteroid base." We'll definitely have areas where we'll allow players to come together to try and dominate an area. I think there'll be PvP conflict based around that, and then there'll be plenty of just going about your life, doing the business, earning some money, that you can probably completely avoid PvP if you want to.

Actually, a few times. I think I'm going to do a Gamers Nexus interview about it here in a day or two. But yeah, DirectX 12 is something that we're working on. For us, it's going to take a bit longer than maybe some other people who are saying they're supporting DirectX 12, because we're actually refactoring some of the base engine features to better utilize DirectX 12. I mean, the whole point of DirectX 12 is it's much more multi-thread friendly, and so a lot more stuff can happen in parallel. But to do that, you've got to refactor how you manage your resources on the rendering side, and a whole bunch of other things to really use DirectX 12. Otherwise, you're just using a new API, but kind of doing what you did for DX11 and 10 and 9 and stuff. So we're in the process of actually doing some of this refactoring. We've already done some of it. We will continue to do it. And so next year, we'll have our DirectX 12 implementation out. But it will be a proper one that you'll actually see a big upside from.

Definitely want them to happen. It's still early days yet. The biggest things that we're working on is the server stuff. Some of the changes we made recently allow us to be way more flexible in transitioning between servers. A lot of multiplayer games specifically get bound to one server when they initialize a level, and everyone gets their own little objects and IDs. And we changed our system around to be what we call a global entity ID. And so instead of, typically the entity IDs in CryEngine and other engines have been 32-bit, but we switched to a 64-bit representation, which means that we have an exponential amount more of IDs. And we did it specifically so that we can give, say, your ship that you own in the game a unique ID that will never... What happens right now is when you load up the game, there's an entity ID on the game load, and the entity ID on the server is not necessarily the same entity ID that's down on the client. And so when the loading happens, there's a fix-up that says, okay, well, this entity ID on the client really is this entity on the server. And it's not consistent. So as you go between servers, that will always change, which is why you have to sort of... It took us quite a while, because the entity IDs are all throughout CryEngine, but we moved it over to this new system. So what that means is that my ship that's persistent or my item that's persistent will always have the same number no matter what, irrelevant of whether I'm in the game or not in the game, irrelevant of what server I am or what client I am. So what that means is when you have a client and he basically goes from server to server, on every one of those servers, if your ship was number 52, your ship is 52 on every single one of those servers. And it's 52 on everyone's clients, which means that we can very easily now hand over. We can just say, okay, now this server's in charge of you, this server's in charge of you. And we don't have to unbind and rebind, which is kind of that level loading stuff that you see right now when you go to Arena Commander and stuff like that. So that's actually a very big change. Not many online games do it that way. But it allows the flexibility for us to have you at this point, you can now be connected to multiple servers, because they all speak the same language; 52 is still 52 for everyone. But anyway, so that's some stuff that will allow us to have higher player counts. So hopefully that wasn't too technical for people, because we could have multiple servers talk to one client, for instance. So you could have one server taking care of people inside a big capital ship, and one server taking care of all the ships in the space area, and then another server talking to another inside of a capital ship and stuff.

I don't know whether it'll apply to the interior of the ship. We'll certainly have the ability to change out materials, so you'll be able to say, oh, I want this wall red or blue or whatever.

For the interior?

Yeah, I mean, it sort of depends on how it gets defined. I mean, we actually have a new character shader system that we use, that actually what we do for the character shader is we don't actually texture it traditionally. We specify which material is in which area and stuff like that. And then we have a library of materials that gets referenced by that indexing. And it allows us to have a lot higher resolution than you would normally do on a traditional character bake. So that's something that we're just wrapping up right now. And a little bit of that tech is going to be in the ships, but the ships, we've used some of the paint system, you've seen it I think on some of the Auroras and the Mustangs, where you can outline a kind of stencil of shapes that you put on it, and then you can choose, okay, that will be this color, or this will be red or blue or whatever. So ultimately that does require setting up the ships correctly with second UV sets and all the rest of the stuff. So not all of them are done this way. All the new ships are done this way, because that's also how the new damage system works, is it needs these second level UV sets and stuff that define, besides the top level texture, where the damage texture is or where the paint stuff would be. And so the newer ones are all set up to be able to take those. But we basically have to retrofit some of the old ones to work with the paint system and work with the damage system. So that's sort of an ongoing process. Obviously, we've got a lot of stuff to get done. So we've kind of made the choice to try and finish up the ships that we said we're going to make, get those done. Because we've been doing a lot of going back and redoing the Constellation. Version three of the Constellation, I think we've done at least three versions of the Hornet or whatever. So we kind of made the choice that we will only go back to fix up some of the older stuff now and then, but really focus on trying to get the newer stuff out. So the painting tech's there, but probably the point that we'll let everybody do some more painting, that's further down the road, because we've got to make sure all the ships are switched over using all the different UV sets, and then we probably need to give them a set of tools to allow them to do that. But that is a longer term goal for us. We want to do that. We talked about allowing people to have some mission building tools at some point. So that is on our plan, and actually we would like to try and do that as we go along, because it's hard for us to... We've got a lot of people working on this game and we still can't generate stuff quick enough or fast enough, and everyone out there does some pretty cool stuff. So we actually would like to try and sneak a few tools out there, because I think there's a lot of talent in the community, and it also helps us if that talent also creates some content that keeps people engaged while we're trying to finish the game.

I'll tell you. It's a big focus. It's a big focus for me and it's a big focus for Tony. And so, to be honest with you, I know people think it's all been taken over by the FPS, because I guess that's what's going to be next, so people see the communications for it. But most of the design work that's happening at the high level, and most of the designers, are working on those kind of things and not working on FPS or even some of the combat mechanics. Yes, we're working on balancing for the various ships and working on stuff for the FPS, but we're working on a lot of stuff for what you're going to do in exploring, what you're going to do on the science stuff, what you're going to do with the medical stuff, repair, refueling, harvesting, mining. So we have plans. We've shared some of those. We've got some tech that we need to deploy for some of them, like mining asteroids. We're going to do voxel asteroids. And so you'll be able to mine away and do all that kind of stuff. So we have that. We have a ship called the Endeavor that is pretty damn cool, and we will be sharing that with you very soon. I've been working with Tony quite a lot on the various roles, but you'll be able to do everything, depending on the configuration, from farming to being a hospital ship to being a space observatory and a discovery thing. And so there's a lot, there's a big focus in the game. I want to have, yes, there's going to be combat and it'll be really cool stuff, but I also want lots of stuff that isn't combat focused. I think that's kind of one of the things that makes it feel like a real world. It also makes it feel inclusive. So you'll be able to go and do a lot of non-combat stuff, and you could potentially avoid combat. In certain roles, you may be able to entirely avoid combat, and then some will just be an occasional hazard of the job or whatever, and then some people can seek it out. So I wouldn't worry so much about just seeing things about FPS. It just happens to be, because we need to get that, because it's a fundamental step. It's not like, oh, we decided we just want to tack on FPS. We were on CryEngine. It's always a first-person engine. Even from the very beginning, when I showed my tech prototype in 2012, that was running in a first-person engine. It was the character sitting there, and you were looking at his eyes, and he was moving the joystick, and he had actually climbed into the ship and was flying it. And so the locomotion, moving around in the 3D space environment, it just so happens the FPS thing is that you can have a weapon and shoot people, but the moving around, the interacting with the environment, doing all the rest of the stuff, that all comes out of the first-person engine. So we need to get those fundamentals working properly, which is what the focus is, which is why you kind of see that right now. But longer term the idea is to make Star Citizen be like the real world. It's sort of up to you. Yeah, you can go into the military and go off and fight in wars, but you don't have to. You can go into a much more peaceful occupation and still do well and have fun and have plenty of things to do.

Generally, it's the Constellation. I think Christmas is doing a pretty amazing job switching around. I like that idea of not the massive ship, but the kind of Millennium Falcon style ship where me and a few of my friends can fly around. Although I have to say the Idris is turning out to be pretty amazing, and I think people are going to see a little peek of parts of it next month on the inside. It's far bigger than we originally imagined when we first talked about the Idris back then, in 2012. I mean, it's over twice the size. And it's a massive capital ship inside. And so I think the few people that have it out there, when they get to have it in the game, A, got a deal, and B, are going to have to have some friends hang out with them or get a whole bunch of AI NPCs. And until we get the AI NPCs that help you fly around, they'll be feeling like Citizen Kane wandering around the massive mansion, because it's a really big ship. For the Squadron 42 stuff, we have to put 90 to 100 AI NPCs moving around it to make it feel like it's crewed and populated. But it's looking amazing.

I will say we are in the very final stages of getting the Endeavor ready to go. We will provide all the information about the Endeavor, its different roles, its different pods. Don't have a date, but it will be within the next week. So it's kind of a date. We're basically just waiting for a last set of art to come in, and then we're going to commit to launching this thing. We're going to get pricing up on the forums, at least for the base ship, later today. The à la carte pods will be a little bit later. Basically, we said, hey, do five pods, and Jim Martin came back and said, I did five pods, and then I looked at your long-term plans for this thing, and I did all those, too. Yeah, he's over-delivering. Jim Martin. He's the Defiant, the Cutlass, the Scythe, the Freelancer. He's a fantastic artist. So, Endeavor is coming soon. And we tried to let you know a week before; we just were not sure until today that it would be happening. Sorry about that. We will plan the sale length accordingly.

We're doing all the Squadron 42 stuff for CitizenCon. Does everybody know that?

We've shared it in previous RTVs, but not everybody watches every show.

Yeah, we've got Squadron 42 coffee cups. We've got a patch set. That's already in production. What else do we have?

The special subscriber patch.

Yes, the special subscriber patch. So there's always going to be a 10% discount for subscribers in the store, for physical merchandise. And then some people have been asking about Jump Point 2 as a physical copy. We do need 2,000 people to say yes to that. So we're looking at doing a poll for that in the new year. In the new year, we're also going to do personalized dog tags, Squadron 42 dog tags. People have been asking, again, about the Citizen Cards. They're really, really hard to do. So we do love doing them for everybody. It's just a lot of work to do.

It was about an 18-month nightmare starting out.

So right now I'm pretty busy doing the Constellation collector's boxes. Then after that I'll do the Hornet, and unfortunately the Freelancer will go last, only because there's an engineering modder's manual in the Freelancer, and so things like modding will be one of the last things to drop in.