Yes. I think that would probably be the idea. The idea with the Esperia stuff is they've taken captured, real Vanduul ships and fabricated, as close as possible, the parts for these whatever you want to call them, sort of "red flag", versions that you are going to fly and fight against. And so you should be able to use those parts to interchange. I don't know whether there'll be a difference or a bonus between ... if you repair your captured Scythe with human parts if it's quite the same as getting captured Vanduul parts. We haven't made a decision on that. But you definitely should be able to repair your Scythe with existing Esperia parts that they've manufactured to be duplicates of it.
So the plan for the big capital ships is much like what happens on a big sea faring ship in today's world. There's a Helmsman position and the difference between the bigger ships is you'll have multiple crew stations, multiple seats where people, one person's just the helm, the other person's doing coms, the other person's doing weapons, the other person's doing radar and potentially you have a captain seat and they're giving instructions to the various people manning the seats.I would say it's a bit more ... You're being sort of, I don't know whether it's cockpit style seat control because potentially the interface for you controlling the ship is a little different, but it will be very much like a helmsman station on a navy ship that you would see in today's world and that's how we've set up the Idris and how we're setting up the bengal and I would assume that would be there. There may be a mode that we'll do because we've talked about several different kinds of modes, one you're sort of moving your ship around because the big ships are going to be slow, it's like moving a slow ferry or tank around. There maybe a mode you can switch into where if you got the certain kind of flight control system besides just maneuvering the engine's position and strafe position on your ship, you also can maybe have a holographic display and you can click and say, "I want the ship to go to this area or that area" and then the cap ship version of IFCS tries to get you there and then you can manually take it over and adjust the courses.So that's kind of what we've set up, I mean John Pritchett already has a task for him to sort of do that second second stage. So stage one of the cap ship stuff is the big massive ship handling which we're in progress for, we need it for the Starfarer and then obviously the Idris afterwards and the second stage would be kind of a more go two positional mode that you could do where you could say, "Ah I want to go 100 meters to this spot, 100 meters ahead" and the system tries to maneuver you thereSo you'll have those and you'll be able to switch between both of them, so I hope that answers your question.
That's actually a very good question. Right now we aren't conceiving of same company synergies bonuses. There certainly could be a case where there will be some equipment that say an Aegis ship works has and the only kind of cooler that fits is an Aegis cooler, which is the case in the real world in some cases.So there's that but I would say that in general you would look at the stats of the component and its quality level and that would dictate how it performs and how it would help in your ship. And whether or not there was a bonus because Aegis works better with ... an Aegis component works better with an Aegis ship, I don't know yet, and that's actually something that I will actually bring up because we are in the middle of finalising a lot of our component stats so could potentially be a cool thing.Like maybe there's an extra feature that you get with an Aegis cooler in an Aegis ship. It will still operate as a cooler on another ship but you just wouldn't have the extra, I don't know, fidelity or reading. Which can happen sometimes where you have a cooler, like on a computer, and if it works ... put the Corsair cooler in the Corsair case it's like built for it. You can take the Corsair cooler and put it somewhere else but it maybe isn't quite as good as a fit or works quite as well.
Well I don't think the RSI Zeus will be a starter 'cause it's an old legacy ship. I think it was one of RSIs first star faring ship. I think there's a model that you can get in your hangar for it. There is a fair amount of work we're doing. We've got some concept ships that we've looked at, and obviously we've got a few that we owe.So the corvette is basically the spot that the Idris left and that's going to be an RSI ship, we're calling the RSI Polaris at the moment. And then the pirate interceptor is to allow you to own a sort of quicker more maneuverable just straight dog fighting ship if you're a pirate because, the Cutlass is cool but it's kind of a jack of all trades. It can absolutely fight and it's pretty tough but it also carries people or a little bit of cargo around so it's maybe good for boarding actions and stuff like that. So it's almost a bit more fighter/dropship whereas if you're a pirate you may also need some interceptors and maybe you just don't want to be boarding a Hornet or something, so that's going to be the Drake Buccaneer that we're working on.But, yep there's a lot of cool stuff and the next one we are going to probably focus on is the much smaller mining ship. I know people have been looking for ships that are not just necessarily combat orientated. And also rather different roles and with our procedural planets set up we've been looking at how we can have ships that can go down and maybe fly around, scan and pull in some minerals because we'll make that part of the gameplay when procedural planetoids roll out, which will be in the near future.So some of them will just be rocky planetoids maybe with minerals on, some will be a bigger planet with oceans and all the rest of the stuff on. But one of the things we think we could do in a large procedural area is look for minerals and basically mind for them and so the idea is the MISC Prospector will be a sort of one person version of that. Because the RSI Orion which is the big mining ship is very much built with some of the bigger mining operations in massive asteroid fields. It's a super cool ship but it's a really big ship and isn't so inclined to working down on the planetary surface stuff, looking and mining and strip mining materials. That's really what the MISC Prospector is.And the MISC Prospector's going to be built to pull up and gathering minerals and then maybe take the containers and put them on another ship, like one of the Hull classes, that you can fly off somewhere that needs some minerals. It should be pretty cool. So the design's coming along well and hopefully you guys will be excited. Non-combat ships I know a fair amount of people ask for that. I think it's one of the cool things with Star CItizen. It's not just about dog fighting or fighting other people, there will be many other ways to make money. Maybe there's people that have to protect the mining operation and there's people that are doing the mining operation and there will all be great ways to make money.
So I'm assuming that whether we're talking about the actual instance itself, in terms of now the fact that we have 24 players and whether there's space for the ships or whether we're going to get above 24 players.So the answer is, yes, long-term we're absolutely going to have more than 24 players in any single instance, we will also open up some of the other spokes on Port Olisar, and there are actually 64 sleeping habitations in Port Olisar and basically arranged between 4 groups of 16 and 4 spokes and we're going to do connections between the spokes and add things like some shops and stuff on Port Olisar and by the way, Port Olisar is sort of a template of a sort of way-space-station that you'd kind of stop off, trade or repair your ship and stuff like that in the longer-term Persistent Universe.So we'll be fleshing out that, giving more functionality, giving more life and we'll make it more functional and have more players and in the mean-time we are working on backend stuff to be able to have more players happening in any one instance and also have players seamlessly go between instances – so the idea I've mentioned before on 10 for the Chairman is to sort of have a mesh of servers in the cloud that are dealing with one continuous space, say, the Stanton system where Crusader is based and then the different servers manage a certain group of players and if someone, say, travels from Port Olisar to Port Kareah and we've got more than the limit that one server can happen, say, right now 24 we would kind of have servers looking after the area around Port Kareah and servers looking after the area around Port Olisar and a server looking after the area around Covalex and as you move between these, you'd be handed off to the server that would be authoritative in that area but that server would still tell the other servers what your position is and what your state was.So any one server has a snapshot of all the entities or all the players in the system, but just only simulating the ones they are responsibility for. And that's a technique that we'll be able to increase the player count of the server, the other thing is increasing the efficiency of the code on the server and how it can utilize multiple cores, cause I think I've pointed out before, currently we run 8 dedicated game servers on one actual physical server in the cloud.A physical server has 32 logical cores, so it's about 16 actual physical CPU cores, and each one of our game servers – DGS instances – runs 4 logical cores, so two physical cores, and so if you just decided now we're not going to run 8 instances on this physical server, we're just going to run instance, there are then, you'd be 8*24 so that's a fairly decent number, right? Almost 200 players, and that's without even scaling, better optimizations and performance and stuff.Right, so, we are working on it, it's all stuff that's happening – it's kind of a bit of a trade-off because you can kind of see that what we're releasing you, like 2.2 and 2.3, sometimes performance goes down, sometimes performance goes up, and a lot of the problem is that we sort of add some new features and we don't really see the impact of the load until it's actually out on the PTU or even out Live. Because we don't, within our internal test environment, even with 30-odd testers, it's not enough to stress it in the same manner as thousands of testers doing PTU or hundreds of thousands when it goes fully live.So we're constantly working on that. We're working on optimizing code but we're actually in the middle of a massive backend rewrite – completely changing the way the serialization works to a much more efficient, logical way. Which is the item port- the item 2.0 system we've talked about, which we've recently got going. It is a fundamental part of that, because we're restructuring some of the way that entities are set up – so we're changing it completely from the way it was done in the old CryEngine to be a very component-based setup, much more logical, and we're only really serializing data that we need to serialize rather than big globs of data and it's not nearly as, I guess, fixed as the old system was. Because the old system was really built for small, 16 player or 8 player, multiplayer games – deathmatch, FPS shooter-style whereas we've got something that we need to be up for long times, hours or days of time have the server up and have hundreds of people on it.So our ability to scale has been much bigger, it's something we've been working on for quite a long time, and we're still working on it, we're getting close to having some fruits of it being born in the near future. So this is very much analogous to us using, when we did the zone system and moving to 64-bit math instead of 32-bit math. All those things sort of paid off – what allowed us to be able to do Crusader and the local physical grids and all the cool stuff that you've seen from 2.0 onwards and a lot of this other backend stuff we're working on is going to make the experience much better, much smoother for you and have a higher framerate on the server – one of the reasons why people see desync issues now, and maybe some precision issues is the actual server when it's under load is running at actually quite a low framerate, even compared to clients.You could be on a client running at 40 or 50 frames, yet the server is only running at 10 or 15 frames. Now the server running at 10 or 15 frames is simulating physics only at 10 or 15 frames, which means there are big steps between each frame, whereas on your local machine, you've got much smaller steps, so what can happen is, on the server, you could be here – which is something that happened in the EVA situation – and the next frame of what the server thinks you're doing is, like you're player is half-way in the wall of the ship – he's moving outside. But on your local client, you haven't – because you have all the fidelity whereas on the server, it goes, "oh look, he's half way in the world, so I'll give him a big impulse to try get him out" whereas the server isn't in the same position which basically catapults your EVA person – could potentially kill him from the damage and that was one of the things that was creating, say, the deaths that you would see in an EVA-transition going in and out.And partly that was because the server on the physics step was running at a much slower framerate than the client so we're working on things to make all that better, it's a work-in-progress, it will take a little while to get going but once it does, it will be better and there will be a lot more people in the instances and we'll be moving smoothly. So these are all things that the network team is working on – I wish we had more members of the network team, we have essentially about 4 engineers that work on the game server network side and then we have another 3 that working in the backend services side. But if any of you out there are network engineers and wanna work on a really ambitious game, let us know, because we've had open positions for this for quite a while.We're always looking for good people because the things that we need is networkers, there's a big need for us on the engineering side, AI is a big need and physics – if there's any physics geniuses out there but if you talk to anyone in the game business, those are all the areas that are it's genuinely hard to find people. We're moving along and it's going to be pretty cool when it's all said and done, cause it's basically building a system, I've talked about it before, that the next generation of how you build these online cloud-driven systems, so we can distribute it across many servers and process more than you would in traditional single-server setups.So anyway, probably a long answer for whether or not there will be spaces for more additional pilot players, but there you go.
Yeah I mean, to be honest with you, I think I've seen that since the beginning. So, even back in the early days when we first launched the campaign in October 2012 there was people that like were sort of Origin fans, or there was people that were Anvil fans and people that were RSI fans. And it's kind of cool, 'cause I mean the whole goal was to sort of go with this idea of ship manufacturers being very much like car manufacturers. So you know you're into a BMW, or you're into a Mercedes, you're into a General Motors car or whatever. Whatever it would be. So, kinda like that.We definitely have this subsection called the Shipyard that's in our forums. We're really going to make this push. We've fallen away a little bit in the Ask The Devs section in terms of people being active and responding. So, we're trying to bring that back more to the forefront and focus of developers on spending a bit of time there. I mean the problem is obviously there's a lot of work to be done as you all know. And even though we've got a company of about three-hundred people now, they're all very busy trying to get both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen pushed forward as fast as possible. So sometimes getting on the forums and asking questions is something when they're having to have a bug they have to fix fairly far from their mind, but from our standpoint the community is kind of what made the game, what's enabled us to get where we are, and I think that debate's really good for not just the community but for us as well. To sort of see people's ideas and thoughts and maybe take them on if we agree with them. So, we are going to be stepping up a bit more like that.I do, longer term we're going to ... we kinda want to establish the ships we've got and we really as the universe goes on it should be like the way that Ford is, and Fiat is, and BMW is and Mercedes is. The different manufacturers will sort of vy for each other for certain markets, and they'll do updates of ships. So, like longer term we won't redo the ship anymore. What we'll do is we'll have a new model of the ship just like oh here get the new 2016 Ford Escort or something, which will have different features, maybe a little different body style, but it'll be in the same car category. So longer term that's something we're planning to do once we've got our base foundation of ships in we're going to start to have fun with that to make it much more like you see in the real world. And again that will be fun.I think those are all the sort of elements where we take aspects of the real world and weave them into the fiction and the fabric of the universe of Star Citizen. It sort of feels sort of real because you sort of see analogies to stuff you know everyday in life and having rival ship manufacturers in the way there are rival car manufacturers in the real world is an element of that. So, there you go.I think Aegis right now is very strong, 'cause they've been doing quite well. The U.K. team is what you would call the Aegis team, although they are now branching out and doing RSI stuff on the Bengal carrier and a few other things. We've got the Drake team over here in the L.A. studio and in the Austin studio is I think they're going to be devs doing some pretty cool stuff. And I so we'll see what happens. We've got to get back to doing some pretty cool Origin stuff and the MISC stuff has been going well. So, who knows. Lots of stuff to be done, lots of manufacturers to compete and lots of cool ships to be made.
Alright, so I get it on the not so accurate side, with the not so accurate spread weapon there. I think that's a pretty good idea. I know that, to my knowledge, we don't have a shotgun style weapon for a ship on the schedule in the immediate future. I would say that would be an interesting type of ballistic weapon that you could have for short range stuff. Therefore people trying to EVA you it's sort of like an antipersonnel weapon you could deploy, and kind of a wide hitting component damage on a ship up close would be pretty interesting. It's a good idea, so I think we can put that into the hopper.I will say that as we start to finish up all the components, the implementation, and we move towards the persistent universe where things like ammunition whether it's your ballistic weapon ammunition, or missiles, there will be fuel, all things that will be consumables basically, when you're flying around you're going to have to earn money by getting missions. So if you fire all the rounds from your gatling gun, or you fire your missiles, you're going have to spend some UEC, or Alpha UEC in the pre-final SC-Alpha version of the game, to replenish them.What's really going to happen is we're going... the idea would be that the ballistics and the missiles are actually quite effective, probably more effective than an energy weapon. Of course energy weapons don't have the same ammunition... they don't have a finite amount of ammunition, or a finite amount of shots, you can keep on firing them as long as your power plant is active, and you have enough power, and you're not overheating. What should be the case is that the ballistic weapons, and the missiles, are in fact more effective in the future when we will make this adjustment, once they become sort of perishable as you have finite amounts of ammunition.The gameplay should be you sort of juggle between either your energy weapons, or your ballistic weapons, or your missiles, and you use them depending on situations. So if you want to really do some damage quickly, and not get held up by shields for instance, which is one thing you do get with ballistic weapons is that they sort of penetrate through shields. Then you would use ballistics, the downside of using a ballistic is obviously that you have a finite amount of ammunition and you'll have to go and replenish it when you get into the next space station, or land at the next landing area. We want that kind of juggle between them, it'll be kind of cool.Having some cool different ballistic weapons would also be interesting, like a sort of spread shotgun weapon. I think there will be more weapon management by players in the persistent universe going forward. Especially once we have persistence in, consumables in, things like wear and tear, and all the rest of the stuff that we're going to be starting to roll out over the rest of this year that will allow you to manage your components and equipment better and have different strategies depending on the situation you're in. I think that's going to make for a much more interesting long-term game.What you see right now in Arena Commander, or potentially what you see now in SC-Alpha, in terms of weapon management isn't really what it's going to be once more of the features and persistence is in. Of course, the first stage of persistence will be the next release, and over the subsequent releases we'll flesh it out more and more. I think the gameplay will become quite different, and there will be more variations, and it'll be a bit more interesting. So there you go, you have something to look forward to.
Well we haven't fully decided on that. We don't have a Banu or Xi'an flying around right now. But I would think a distress beacon generally will put a distress out, if you're listening for it, potentially you are someone that wants to earn some money by rescuing people stranded in space or you just want to be a good samaritan, you can pick it up and you'll get an indication of where they are and you can fly to it. It also potentially could be used by less than scrupulous people that may want to, I don't know, do something nefarious if you're especially in unprotected areas. Or potentially someone like the Vanduul, if they're around, or maybe they're listening for beacons and they would come over to see where the beacon is if they are being especially dastardly, which occasionally the Vanduul can be.But it's still something that we're going to flesh out. It's one of the features that we're going to be putting in proper distress beacons system for the future, not the next revision, the next 2.4 which is the next one we'll have out, but not very long after that we will actually have the distress beacon which is a fun ... it's not just going to be about the beacon it will be about you'll be able to give your position to friends or other people that you're flying with so you can coordinate meeting each other or if you are stranded in space someone coming to rescue you. So that's actually part of the system that we have scheduled to be fleshing out to allow you to meet up or find people in the middle of space, which is obviously very big.So there you go. So potentially may make it that if you are in a Banu area, Xi'an area and you've got a distress beacon out, if there is a Banu or Xi'an ship they may come and rescue you if it makes sense for them.
I would say right now, obviously the Khartu-Al, the flight mode is either you're vertical when you're flying, then you switch to the more horizontal landing mode. The Reliant itself has a sort of vertical and horizontal mode and I would say potentially those could not necessarily be limited to landing and flying. Not sure about our very first flight implementation of how we're going to do that. Because default is horizontal for landing and vertical for mostly flying.But the idea would be, there would be reasons to for instance be horizontal. Say if you went down and were flying close to a planet and you wanted more of an atmospheric model, you'd probably want to be horizontal. And we're definitely going to allow you a lot more interaction with your ship and control of the flight modes and ICFS as time goes on. We're kind of in the middle of what we call this big item refactor we've talked about, that has a whole use ability factor in terms of being able to switch on your HUD, turn off power, or switch off various systems you would have and look around and interact in the cockpit.So when most of that functionality is on it will allow us to to allow you to have more control some of the features of, whether it's your flight system, or other features of your ships. So that would probably be, you potentially could have two stages of something like the Reliant where one it's just vertical for flying and then horizontal when it lands. Then later on when all that deploys, and we've still got to upgrade all the interactions and cockpits, you'll be able to maybe have more precise control of: "Oh I'm in landing mode, i'm not in landing mode. Oh I'm in vertical mode or i'm in vertical flight mode or horizontal flight mode." But ultimately that is where we would be at. And the Reliant is actually is built to be able to fly in both modes. The Khartu-Al less so much, that's more about flies normally in the vertical mode and then deploys this way to land. So anyway hope that answers the questions for you.
That's a good question. We have built localization into the game, so there is localization hooks for everything like whether it's use prompts, or people talking, so it's all there. Then this is really just going to come down to a time-scale aspect. So, once we have everything locked on the English version, then of course we'll start to do the translation.Some of them we'll do full dialogue or voice translation, some we'll just do subtitles. Then the question whether it will be sort of day-in-day all with the localized versions, or we'll do the English first, and the localized ones will come out later. It will just really depend on how long that process will take and how we feel the base game is and if people are really eager, maybe we'll give the version that's just English out to the backers so they can get it a little earlier, and then the one with the fully localized version is like the commercial release version that's a little later.But we haven't scheduled that fully yet or figured it out. We have the plan for it and we have the hooks for it, and it's really just about like the amount of time it takes to finish doing the language translation, especially the sort of dialogue. Which is kind of like dubbing if you were doing a film, and getting that back into the game, and pushing it out. And since we do it digitally, we don't really have the same criteria that maybe you would do if you had a box release.Like, in the old days when I used to do a Wing Commander, and probably true on the console games, you had to do all the localization then because you were putting it in a box, and it was going out the door. For us, we're digital, so potentially depending on schedules and timings. We may feel like, "Well, the English version is amazing but it's going to be another four weeks before the German version is ready". Maybe everyone wants to play something now instead of wait another four weeks so we can release the English version early or we may decide, "Well, we'd like those extra four weeks to do some extra polish and bug testing while we're dropping in the German and the French version", for instance. So, not fully decided yet, but those are the kind of factors that come into play.