Wingman's Hangar ep052 . January 10, 2014

Well, we changed the Ask a Developer. Some people know Rob Irving, know what question to ask Rob Irving. A lot of people, they're coming out, this is their first space sim, they don't know the team, so now we're dividing it by the different teams, so there's Hangar, Dogfighting, General, and then it's divided by what people do, programming, different disciplines. So now you can easily find a place to get your questions answered, and all the different teams around the world are setting up schedules so that everybody will be in there in the Ask a Dev threads now.

And it just makes it easier to manage.

Not even to manage, it's easier to get your questions answered.

But it also opens up the number of people that can answer, and that's a good thing for everybody.

I'm sure Dave Haddock will still do like 80% of it.

That's a good question. We don't really have a specific stance on this at the moment. My guess is probably we would reset everybody when the game goes properly live. It's sort of hard to say, because I think when we go into beta for the actual game that the backers will have, but maybe not necessarily for the full public yet, we probably wouldn't wipe that late-stage stuff. But certainly some of the early stuff like the dogfighting module, planetside module, all that. You'll definitely be able to earn some money for winning some fights and doing stuff, and that will be money that will allow you to buy some weapons, but it will be for just that sort of dogfighting test area. It won't be money that will carry you through into the persistent universe. So I guess the answer is there's going to be a combination of this. So there will be wipes of some of the stuff but not all of the stuff, and as you get closer to the final release, maybe some of the stuff you've done will carry over.

What exactly exploration entails? It's a lot. That's like how long is a piece of rope. So there's a lot to exploration. It's not just going to be looking for an undiscovered jump point and plotting the jump point and going to a new system on the other side. There's going to be just a lot of sort of mapping that will happen. So even in systems that are known, not all of the space is mapped. So basically there will be certain areas, like on the trade lanes and the general areas people pass, that will have nav points and will be mapped to a certain extent. But a vast amount of it won't be mapped. And so maybe you find an asteroid field that isn't on a map. Maybe the asteroid field has some really good minerals. Or maybe there's a wreck. So we're going to try and add things to discover even in known space. So we're really trying to up the amount of things that you can do if you're an explorer, where it's not just about jump points or finding a new system, although that's pretty cool. But obviously we can't do everything all at once at the beginning, so that's all stuff and content we'll build to. And then the other thing I'll say is that we're doing a lot of work in R&D on procedural stuff. So I know a lot of people think all of Star Citizen is completely scripted or designed or crafted, and yes, it has a huge amount; Terra and Earth will obviously be pretty much everything handcrafted. To build a universe on the scale we need, we need to balance some procedural stuff as well as crafted stuff, which I think is actually the best way to build a big expansive universe. It's the same way that we're approaching the gameplay. We can't script every mission, so we're actually building in such a way that the universe itself dynamically runs itself and the players' interactions generate a lot of the missions and the intrigue and the action.

So I didn't answer what will plotting a jump be like. Well, it should be a lot of fun and very scary and very risky. So a jump point is sort of a rip in the space-time continuum that takes you instantly, well, almost instantly, between two parts many, many, many light years apart from each other. And so the concept with it is to have, I don't know whether it's a space-time fabric sort of big breaker, if you want to think in surfing terms, that you want to surf in, and you've got to hit exactly the right lines or else you're going to go off track and potentially get ripped apart or spat out in some random part of the universe. And obviously this will require a combination of some skill, some specific equipment, but once you've gone through and you've recorded your jump, so to speak, you can then turn around and sell that to the government, or share it with your friends, and obviously you can name a jump point or a system after you, which should be pretty cool. But it should be like trying to ride the hairiest big wave off the North Shore of Hawaii, but with cool space effects.

So that's a great question. That is actually something that we long-term want to do. Not so sure you'll be able to do the fullest of that on our initial release. Longer term is to do it fully, but shorter term we certainly will have some mechanics in there that will allow planets themselves or outposts themselves to evolve during the game based on player action or what's happening in the universe, which I think will be really cool and will fold into my goal of a living, breathing universe. We're already looking at organizations, groups of players, being able to buy and build up some industry on various planets. So a certain aspect of that will be there, but to have completely new planets that you're fully colonizing, doing all the rest of the stuff, that is definitely a goal. We are definitely working towards that. That is in the feature set we want to promise. But it probably won't be on the initial release, just because there's a lot of stuff to do with it. But again, that's along the lines of some of the procedural R&D that we're doing.

The thing to remember in our server setup is that we have one central server that is basically the general tasking server, but the actual servers that would handle the local, say, instance information, when you're flying in space, you're dogfighting against someone, figuring out when you're on a planet what the other people are doing right next to you, they're actually mostly going to be distributed around the world. So that's where the local instance servers spin up. And what happens is the master server is really sort of the matchmaking server, and it's sort of going, 'okay, you and you, I'm putting you together in the same instance server', and it has a whole set of criteria when it does that matchmaking. So a large part of it is the friends list, so it's trying to match you with your friends. And also we'll do things like, if you want to do PvP, put maybe some of your enemies in there, people of similar skill levels. And this is, by the way, just to stress, in the case that you're in an area where there are more people than can fit in any one instance. Because if there's only enough people for one instance, everyone would be in the same instance, with a few exceptions. But if someone's in a safe area and they don't want PvP, and someone just wants PvP, then maybe there would be two instances, one for the PvP, one without the PvP. But generally what happens is there's a whole sort of matchmaking criteria, and it's based on ping, friends list, associates, persons of interest, enemies, skill level. And it uses those criteria to match you up dynamically as you move around. As you fly around space, you go from area to area, it's matching you up and putting you in and out of different instances, and it's doing exactly the same down on the planet. And so what would happen if someone's in America or Australia, depending on what you tell the game, it probably would not opt to put you together if the ping was high, but you certainly can say, 'hey, you know what, I want to hang out with my friends no matter what, even if my ping is bad', and then in that case the friend relationship would trump the ping in terms of the matchmaking criteria. So generally it would default to trying to keep you flying with people with low pings, but if you specifically say 'no, I want to be with this person', it will make an exception for you. So I hope that answers your question, BigDamnHeroes.

We're going into the inside and adding more details, even far more than I was expecting. Going in and just adding more wiring and making it look a little bit rougher inside than it originally is. It's kind of clean right now. We are really pumping up the details.

We're doing a lot more in geometry than most. Usually we do things with normal maps and texturing to make it look a little more detailed than it really is. We're really building that stuff out.

Yeah, when they first told me what was required, I was like, are you sure? Are you sure we can handle that? And they're like, just do it, more polys, more polys. And I've still put more polys in it, and they're coming back saying, more polys, more polys. This is one of the most detailed games I've ever worked on. It blows my mind.