The developers cover owning offices and factories, vulnerability of capital ships like the Bengal carrier, hiring NPC wingmen, retiring characters, base hangars, space sound options, motion-seat and Rift support, alien trade and faction reputation, and the new custom-built RSI website.
Companies and corporations. Yes, it will be possible to establish an office on another planet. So we're still working out the whole aspect of factories, but we are going to allow people at some point to be able to own them, manufacture goods, buy goods, hire people, and sell them. And obviously have a storefront. So yes, we will be able to do that.
TL;DRCapturable big ships and asteroid bases will be vulnerable when owners are offline; owners can park in safe space, use NPCs, auto turrets or clan guards, since contested territory is the point.
So yes, they are going to be vulnerable if it's the big ship. So the concept is that there are certain areas in the persistent universe that are always at risk. Typically, say, an asteroid base that, say, as a pirate, you may want to hang out on because it's a great place to stage raids. Maybe a star base, but also the bigger capital ships can never go down on the planet. When you're on the planet, you're sort of safe. When you're out in space, you're not safe. So if you want to keep your Bengal carrier safe from other people, you've got a couple of options. One, probably take it to an area of space that's fairly safe, like deep in UEE space, or make sure that you've got some NPCs to protect it. You'll also be able to have auto turrets. Or make sure that you've got people in your squadron or clan that are guarding it around the clock. But yeah, the whole point is that we definitely need to have territory that people fight over. And since it's a persistent world, we can't just put it away and only bring it out occasionally. So that's sort of the upside and the downside of having something as cool as a Bengal carrier.
So definitely you will be able to hire NPC wingmen to fly missions for you. So you'll be able to actually hire some NPC crewmen on your bigger ships, and you'll be able to hire NPCs to fly on your wing. I mean, the system's gonna work in such a way that you'll say, I need someone to... You can probably specify whether you prefer an NPC or a player, but the system, the same mission system, acquisition system, is the same. We're thinking of it like a Craigslist job board, so to speak.
So, yeah, I mean, I think if you actually want to retire and pass your goods on to your successor, then why not? I mean, there's no difference, particularly on our side from the code, to support you saying 'I want to retire' button, because we still have to support it for when you ultimately get killed down the road. So yeah, we can definitely do that. It's not a problem at all.
Potentially. I don't know whether we're going to have all your old characters that are retired walking around your hangar. It's a nice idea, but we'll see.
TL;DREach player gets one base hangar on one planet for their ships, may lease extra hangars elsewhere, and must return to base to fetch ships; ship rentals are undecided.
So basically everybody's going to have their base hangar, and that's where they will keep, if they have multiple ships, they can keep their ships, and that is going to be set to one planet. Now, that won't stop you in the game from actually leasing or renting another hangar on another planet where you can also store stuff, but the hangar that you get with your initial ship, you have that once. It's not like it propagates and it's every single planet you can drop a ship off. So if you've got four ships in your base hangar and you're on the other side of the galaxy, well, if you want to go get one of the ships you're not flying, you'd have to go back to your base. But like I said, there's nothing going to stop you in the game later on essentially leasing a hangar on another planet and storing some stuff there. But everyone has sort of one home base that they'll pick and they'll say, okay, this is where I'm going to be. And they'll leave their ships there. And if they want to move their base somewhere else, they will have to lease some hangar space somewhere else and then move their ships there.
But maybe you could lease another ship there. If you want to fly a Constellation, you have a mission that shows up and you don't have a Constellation there, could you lease one from an NPC or perhaps another player?
I don't know. We haven't even got into ship rentals. Typically you're going to have to buy your ship to be flying it, but we'll have to see. That's all stuff that we'll be working on as we go forward.
TL;DRDefault sound is expected to be Star Wars/Star Trek style effects; a realistic silent-space option might be easy given the audio setup and will be investigated, but isn't promised.
Yeah, there's a volume switch on your computer. No, sorry, I don't mean to. So actually, I don't know. It's an interesting question. We sort of treat the sound... We have interior sounds and exterior sounds that's already set in the engine right now. So, thinking about it, potentially, I'm not going to promise it, but that would actually be something that could be an option that someone does. I mean, I think the default is going to be like Star Wars or Star Trek, where you have all the cool pew pew sound effects. But it may not be that difficult actually to have a realistic space sound button on it. I won't promise it yet. But I think our audio, the way it's set up, it would be actually fairly simple to do. So we'll definitely investigate that. But like I said, I think the fantasy of Star Citizen is much more in the Star Wars, Star Trek mode. And so that's the vibe and the feel we're going for. Because after all, our space combat is at speeds that are not realistic for what space combat would probably be in the future. But it's a hell of a lot more fun. Because who wants to target your enemy on a computer and see whether you've blown them up a thousand miles away? You'd much rather shoot them down dogfight style. So that's kind of what we're doing. But we'll investigate that.
TL;DRSending six-degree-of-freedom data to motion platforms can't be promised, but it's of interest in research and development, and CryEngine already has some motion-simulator support.
So that, I mean, again, that's something that I can't promise right now, but it's definitely something we're interested in. I mean, my goal would be to build the dream Star Citizen setup, which would include a six degree axis of motion seat. Have the Rift on your head, sitting there with a joystick. And I was always thinking, if we get that built towards the end and we're going around to places like Gamescom or PAX, we can have that cool setup that everyone can come in and show your Star Citizen card for entrance and get to play it in the cool virtual reality setup. So that's definitely on our R&D level and research. The good thing is that CryEngine itself has a lot of support for all this kind of stuff already built into it, because, it's not necessarily that well known, but there's a huge amount of CryEngine work that happens on military stuff, especially military stuff in Europe. So all that stuff is supported for military stuff. So they actually already have some six degree of motion stuff in the engine already that they've supported for, I guess, real sims. So we definitely are going to be looking at that, mainly just because it's great, it's cool.
TL;DRA complex faction reputation system will let improving relations enable trading with some alien races, though trading much with the hostile Vanduul can't be promised.
So, yeah, so we're going to have a very complicated relationship and reputation system between various factions, which include all the different alien races, as well as the different branches of the UEE government, things like the Merchants Guild, Mercenaries Guild, etc. On races that are more hostile to humanity, if you start to do things and trade with them and get your relationship to them in the neutral or positive zone, then you'll maybe be able to do some trading with them that you wouldn't do just by default. I'm not necessarily sure that I can promise you'll be able to do too much with the Vanduul, because generally they're very hostile with humanity. But definitely with the Xi'an; the Banu tend to be neutral or positive anyway. [...] relationships and interactions with various factions by how you ongoing interact with them, and that will enable you to be able to do deals with them and not do deals with them. So there you go.
No, it's WordPress, it's not designed for what we need it to do. So what we're doing is we're reworking the whole system, custom built from scratch. And it'll allow us flex to accommodate our very comprehensive requirements.
TL;DRShows the new website's visual style, still being defined, with the user experience to be planned later, and the site intended as a seamless portal into the game.
So right now, this is just what we've been doing over the past couple weeks: nailing down the visual style of what the new site is going to look like. And ultimately what we want it to do is intertwine seamlessly with the game in visual style and functionality. So we're still fleshing out how the user experience is going to be. So that's what I'm going to be doing about a week from now, when I go up to Montreal to meet with our development team. I'm going to be fleshing out the user experience architecture. So right now we're just defining the visual style.
And then that's going to eventually be the portal into the game. So the idea is it's going to be a seamless transition as you get to the website, right into the game through the website. And that's why you're also doing the UI on the game as well, right?
TL;DRThe website is being rebuilt in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, aiming for a beta around the end of May, with searchable, tagged Comm-Links and other community features.
So some of the new features on the site, I mean, it's going to be totally reworked on the front end. So in terms of the technology, we're going to be doing all HTML, CSS. There will be some Flash, but only for embedding Vimeo and YouTube and everything else.
Yeah, and on the new site, we're going to implement a lot of new community features. We'll have a thing where you can search posts very easily. We'll maybe have a Google-style thing where it automatically updates the post as you're typing it in.
Yeah, and we'll be able to tag the post too, like if you want to search Wingman's Hangar. So if you want to find out news about the hangar module coming up, we'll tag the post as 'hangar module', and you'll be able to type that in and instantaneously bring up all the search results.
Plus you'll be able to find things like Death of a Spaceman and the important things we've done before. Because we have a lot of new fans coming on board that have never seen these important things, and then they ask the same questions, and we'd like to have a repository where they can easily find it.