The developers outline 2020 plans: server object container streaming and iCache persistence in 3.8, resource persistence in 3.9, and the Pyro system reached via jump points. They also cover the Aberdeen prison and law system, group and lobby tools, and the Theaters of War mode shown at CitizenCon.
TL;DRServer object container streaming is a foundational step for server meshing, but servers remain isolated pockets for now, and seamless movement between them is still to be done.
The server OCS stuff is a fundamental piece of the puzzle that we needed to solve in order to effect server meshing. What it doesn't do is allow you to transition from server to server. Therefore, each server is still effectively an island where you have a certain number of players and they can basically go anywhere in that solar system, but they can really only directly interact with other players on that server. And we do give some mechanisms, like when you join parties and stuff, you're given the option to jump over to the server of another player. But what you don't see is things like when I request personal transport or I request a combat assist or when I need something that another player could potentially contribute, whether it's via service beacon or whatever else, there's no way for players on other servers to just automatically see that and then basically accept, and then now you two players are basically joined together so that when you go to this location, you're going to wind up automatically transitioning to whatever server he's on. And so it's still a bunch of isolated pockets for now. And that's what still remains to be done in the future, which is allow players to seamlessly move back and forth.
One of the abilities to do that server meshing that we talked about is the functionality of what we have, which server OCS will deliver, is necessary for the meshing. What has to happen is each server, if they're all different viewpoints on the same star system, for instance, we're all linked and we're all playing, having that server be able to go anywhere and just only deal with that aspect is exactly what you need to have first, and then the server meshing is stage two, because then you glue all these servers together that can dynamically have viewpoints around and they will talk to each other.
TL;DRLong-term persistence means items and player-built structures stay in the world, saved to a back-end cloud database, so they remain for others to find, use or destroy, though the system may tidy clutter.
I would say that it's getting us away from the traditional concept of saving in a game where I have to explicitly save something at a particular point, and this is just becoming more realistic to where wherever you leave items, wherever you place items, they stay in perpetuity unless some other player, perhaps...
Or the system we decide to... There's too many cups in a location, and we know that'll be a problem when we stream it back in, so we clean up a few before we stream them.
Well, it depends on what you're talking about. It's like you would expect realistically if you left a cup on a table in a place, it's like, yes, that's going to be gone the next day. And there will be mechanisms for all of these, so if you're actually there to witness it, then at some point there is going to be a janitor, he's going to come in and he's going to grab that cup and put it over in the sink, et cetera, et cetera.
But the difference beyond 3.8, the iCache system that we're talking about is not only saving it essentially in memory or off in the local cache database, but to a back-end cloud database, so that if you came back a month later, it can be retrieved from the database, and then when you come to that area, the state is the same. I think the really cool thing with long-term persistence is that that allows us to almost shape the world with this persistence. As a player, I could make a homestead on a planet, build myself a little outpost or a hut or deploy some defenses or place that there, go back, come back, and my home's still there as long as someone else...
Right, and to be clear, it's not just the you thing. It's like, well, if you build that homestead in the middle of nowhere and someone happens to stumble upon it, then they can interact with it, they can raze it to the ground, they can customize it, they can have them and their friends move in. It's like, you don't really know what the state's going to be when you leave things out in these public places.
That's exactly it, but that's what we do so often, which is we build in the low-level, the fundamental mechanics, and then you get all of this complex functionality that just naturally results.
I think the key is our planets are fully realized. Every single square inch is realized on them. There's a vast amount of real estate and it's great. I mean, we're going to be working hard and we build tools to populate this stuff and put outposts, but if the players themselves can also be doing their stuff and creating outposts or bases, then this whole world becomes alive and breathing.
TL;DRResource persistence on planets and moons is targeted for 3.9, so minerals deplete as players extract them, driving exploration, scanning and conflict over rich locations.
For 3.9. So the cool thing with that is that now there's just always whatever the mineral is there, but with the persistence, absolutely, if there's a really strong vein of stuff there, it will be gone if players are there and they've already...
That's exactly it. And eventually, right now we're still very limited. You basically fly over the surface of a planet and you happen to come upon stuff. Eventually we want to be able to do a more analytical, a more detailed analysis of a planet so that you can find these things, but it's time consuming, it's labor intensive, it requires equipment.
Not only is it hard, but most of these things, excepting things like plant growth that regrow and things like that... when you're talking about metals and minerals and things like that, there is a fixed quantity of those within the ground in a given area. And that's what we're looking to deliver for 3.9, so that there is this much gold in this particular area. And if you happen to extract it, over the course of a day or two or three days, whatever, there will gradually become less and less and less. And then you need to go out and find a new location. And this is where it starts getting interesting...
That's exactly it. And it's easier for me to follow a miner to wherever he's going on the presumption that he's already found some valuable place than it is for me to go scan and do all of this analysis of the planet and find my own location, which might involve, who knows, eventually hours and hours of work to find a really rich one. And so now you'll have people tagging along.
Driven by, oh yeah, this is a great place to buy resources, therefore I can make money. I mean, that gameplay all emerges out of it, and then if it feeds into the background universe simulation that we're running, the thing that you're working on, Tony, I just think, I haven't seen a game like this, and it is literally like a second universe that you can just escape into.
TL;DRStarting in the very complex Stanton system forced the team to solve hard problems early, giving a foundation for further systems like Pyro, shown with a seamless jump transition.
Yeah, we're not going to be in Stanton forever. I think that was such an important thing to do at CitizenCon. It's been such a great evolution, just in scale, if you think about it.
Because in that demo that we do, SOCS is running. That's how it all works. And as we enter the jump point and we're going through the wormhole, Stanton's going away while we're loading in Pyro. And then we come out, Pyro's there, and it's all seamless. There's no loading screens, there's no cutaway or anything. It just all happens from gameplay straight away.
It's still mind-boggling to me. It was good training to start in probably one of the two or three most difficult of all the solar systems planned, in terms of four planets, a dozen moons.
Well, the point I'm making is it's forced us to basically deal with a lot of the most complicated problems sooner in the process, so that going forward now, we've got a solid foundation to deal with any quantity of content, decoupling the frame rate from necessarily how much stuff needs to be loaded by any given server and things.
And also the Planet Tech V4 is allowing them to... Pyro, I think, has six or seven planets, and then a lot of moons. I think we're only going to have a couple of landing zones, but it doesn't have the population density of Stanton, but there's a lot of places you can visit. But we have the tools, and Pyro is sort of a hotter system, so that's where the active status comes in.
TL;DRJump points bring new goods and opportunities into a system and, with varying durations and a discovery element, can upend its economy and become valuable places to control.
The jump points are a way for us to introduce new things into that solar system because, again, Pyro or Stanton shouldn't have everything that it needs. It should be pulling in from other solar systems. So that introduces new things for the economy, and then obviously once in Stanton or Pyro, when we start opening other jump points, then that basically really starts messing with the economy, or it creates new opportunities for the players to run missions or do other aspects of gameplay that they find interesting.
Yeah, I like the economic implications of basically having a diversity. Some of these holes are longer lasting, some of them are shorter duration, there is a discovery element, so there are players that will devote good chunks of time towards scanning, trying to find these things. When they find one, it's like, is this a shorter path, a longer path, mapping it. As you said, the economic impact: what changes when all of a sudden this incredibly long distance, for some period of time, winds up becoming quite accessible? It completely upends the economy. It changes everything for the duration of that thing. And these wind up becoming very valuable. All of a sudden you're going to have to basically exert a lot of outwards pressure to maintain control of that thing.
That's the biggest issue, which I see, which is when you're in that system, you should always feel more pressure. It should be more dangerous. You should be more anxious. You should always be more concerned. When we were talking in the previous discussion about the melee combat and stuff, it's like, just going to get your ship may be an exercise in concern.
There might be somebody sleeping in your bed. Well, and I guess from my standpoint, I wanted it to feel almost like the Wild West, where I see you and I don't know what you're going to do to me. And so am I going to take extra precautions? Am I going to shoot first or are you going to shoot first? What are you going to do? And then that cat and mouse gameplay associated with it.
TL;DRLawless places like Pyro are meant to offer risk-reward through exotic materials and salvage, but Pyro's release isn't promised and is said to come after 3.9, sometime next year.
That's the carrot, which is, so why would you go to this incredibly dangerous, lawless place? Well, there must be something. That's exactly it. It's the risk-reward, which is, that's where you can really make the big bucks. That's where you can make the killer return. There are some exotic materials, and in greater quantity there than in other places, but you're going to have to be willing to get bruised in order to retrieve them.
And I think Pyro, we're not going to promise exactly what the release is, but it's going to be at some point next year. It won't be 3.9, maybe after that, at some point. But it's a bit early to promise because we still have to make sure a few things are going. But, for instance, you're in a system like Pyro where there probably won't be a lot of stations that you can go and get fuel. You may want to be able to collect fuel yourself with your ship, or someone can make a good living by selling it to people in Pyro.
One of the next occupations up will be salvage. And I would expect in any kind of lawless place, a lot of conflict, you'd have a lot of debris, a lot of derelict ships, a lot of stuff to salvage, a lot of value for people that basically want to strip, whether it's the hull of a ship or the internal components and things of that sort.
TL;DRPrisons, planned for 3.9, will make illegal actions carry heavier consequences than simply respawning, with possible escape or reduced sentences, as the law system keeps being iterated on.
So we're going to keep iterating on the law system for another several quarters. The prisons are basically the next major step forward. We've added an automated prison to Aberdeen. And what it really does fundamentally is it increases the consequences for you doing all of these illegal actions. It will make every player that's engaging another player, whether it's for the fun of it or to basically take their resources, steal their ship, whatever... now there's this whole prison thing. You don't get your ship. You're going to be stuck in there for a longer period of time. You have the potential to escape. You have the potential to reduce your sentence. But in general, the penalty is much more substantial than us simply allowing you to restart.
My big objective with the game is to not have people basically respawn. You want to keep your ship as long as possible. You want to stay alive as long as possible. I want to crash land on the planet, and it's better for me to have my friend rescue me or get rescued than for me to basically commit suicide and wake up.
TL;DRGrouping, lobby and friends systems are known to be painful and are a focus, with new Building Blocks UI tech hopefully making such interface work much faster.
Well, that ties into our front ends, basically even our launcher and Spectrum associated with it. There's how you group with people, there's a lobby associated with it, there's the front-end option menu. All that stuff we know needs to work, and that has been a focus of ours in talking about how we can update the lobby and update grouping with people, just because we know it is a pain right now.
Because basically, we talked about it before, we basically have three different areas of friends at this moment that have different management techniques. You've got Spectrum. Well, it's also, I have to reach out to you, and then you have to reach out to me. It's really from our website all the way down into the game and you're playing with your buddy.
You mentioned one thing earlier on the server object container streaming, to where if the tools basically make it too difficult to achieve a desired result, then people have a tendency to do less of that. And that's very much been the case, which is a lot of what we're talking about here requires significant amounts of user interface work. And we've done this over on my side: the service beacon still doesn't have features that we wanted in from version one, because every bit of that UI work is so expensive and you're always weighing it against what else you could get with that amount of time. And so with the new Building Blocks stuff that we've had coming online recently, that aspect of it should become dramatically faster.
Yeah, I mean, that's the tech thing. We've been investing in the UI tech, which we've done some ATV episodes on. It's still got some stuff to happen, but it's becoming easier. That, hopefully, is something that will pay off in us being able to expand things like the group system and our front end and during the game, and just getting into your mobiGlas and the Galactapedia or all that sort of stuff.
It's about empowering the teams, too, because before we used to have very much a bottleneck with the UI team, but now every single team is getting used to using the Building Blocks, and then it's just making sure that we have the oversight so we have the cohesive nature of the UI experience and the UX experience. But groups and lobbying and all of that is definitely on all of our radars and is very important to us, just because when we play the game, we have to go through the same headaches.
TL;DRMatchmaking, leaderboards and groups need a holistic approach, and Theaters of War, shown as a 40-player lore-based combat scenario called Crossroads of Crime, was brought to CitizenCon to gauge player reaction.
Absolutely. I mean, it's a real nice segue to go from the group stuff, because the group and friend system and everything all ties into things like leaderboards and matchmaking and all those. And it all has to be dealt with, not as one, but in a holistic way, so that we see top down a very, very good vision of that. We showed Theaters of War, and again, it's a 40-man map because we had a lot of vehicles on it, and we wanted to bring it to CitizenCon and see what the players liked. And one last piece of it was there's a huge breadth of lore that we have in Star Citizen, and you hear all these stories in Loremaker's Guide to the Galaxy, and because we have this simulation aspect of Star Citizen, I always thought it was really interesting to be able to do like a Gettysburg reenactment or something that you were actually experiencing in the flesh in a simulation kind of environment, but within the Star Citizen universe. So we can tell some stories I think that are really interesting; we have a huge breadth of lore. And again, the one that we showed at CitizenCon was called the Crossroads of Crime. So it told the story of the Nexus system and how the Nexus system was strip mined. None of the resources existed anymore. They had a company come in, the Hathor Group in this particular case. They bought up the entire thing, strip mined the whole thing out. And then as they pulled out, there was zero police force. There was no security. So it became a haven for all the criminals. And at some point, anybody that was up to no good was going to be crossing through this system. In this particular scenario, the UEE Advocacy is trying to come in, and the first planet that they tried to take back was Nexus 3. So this is them going into Nexus 3, and they meet up against one of the more notorious outlaw gangs, called the Supreme. You can imagine how these guys will react when somebody's trying to take it back. Not only are they going to be hyper aggressive, but they're not going to let them take anything back. So they try to take out the entire planet as they're getting pushed back, with mining lasers, and just destroy what's left there if you're going to come take it. So this is a 30-minute, adrenaline-packed, guaranteed combat scenario that's just in your face.
TL;DRTheaters of War is unique because its scenarios shift through distinct phases from ground to space without loading, scaling from first-person detail up to a solar system.
Our technology is what makes us able to do things that are unique. So the reason it's called Theaters of War, and one of the big parts about it, is that we transition. There are phases within this level, and the combat changes dramatically and we balance it very, very differently. So a great example in Crossroads of Crime is phase one is a compound. You have to take out anti-air. So you're the Advocacy coming in. You have to take out these anti-air turrets because you can't bring any of your ships in when those anti-air are active by the Supreme. Once you've taken that out, our next phase is about a four-kilometer run where the defenders have brought their ships in. The Advocacy is starting to bring some of their ships in. But there's a moving combat and it's very dynamic. So this is what most games can't do. They can't go to the scale that we've gone because we have this tech. Then once you've taken out that control tower that's actually controlling a space station and a mining laser, you go Battle of Endor straight up, and there's no loading, there's no little fakey cutscene or anything like that.
Which is basically the thing that Star Citizen has: that level of both the detail, the fidelity of that first-person FPS, but scaling all the way up to space.
To be fair, this is still a really small example, because you could take this... again, Star Citizen is not a typical game. It's not just levels. These sort of scenarios can happen over the span of a solar system, over the span of multiple solar systems. I mean, if you want to put the enemy base on the other side of the solar system, go ahead. It'll just be a very long QT.
TL;DRBefore release, Theaters of War will get visual polish and effects, like a dramatic space station destruction, plus a move from Tech 3 to final Tech 4, while fun stays the priority.
Yeah, and we built this very much in a way that fun came first. That was really, really important, that we would find the fun. So we spent a good amount of time on that. So now let's make it look awesome and let's make the experience really fun. So a great example: at CitizenCon, when you take out that space station, I want something incredible to happen. I want to disintegrate the thing. When you're taking it out, you have to destroy some engines on it, it starts falling to the planet and things like this. So I want to add a bit of the Track View and the effects that we need to add to it. Kind of the exciting visual polish.
And to be fair, it's kind of the fun stuff. And I think because of the timing, we didn't want to risk it, so it uses Tech 3, which I used to think looked great, but now I'm looking at Tech 4, I'm like, eh. So we're going to move it to final Tech 4, right?
Absolutely. And then, again, we're going to try little things within the map. We're going to keep iterating on it. It's just a bit of polish now that's got to go on it. Some art and polish, update to V4. And that'll be it.