Erin Roberts covers Squadron 42 motion-capture planning, its very long branching script, and mining colony work on the Shubin base. Also discussed: pirate insurance tiers, item ports for weapon attachments, in-game time scale, fuel types, dogfighting modules, and gold farming.
TL;DRThey are planning the Squadron 42 motion capture shoot, with large budgets and a script around 1,000 pages that Chris Roberts says is longer than it should be and needs scaling back.
Yeah, we're doing cinematics. We're working out, going through the shoot we have to do for the motion capture we're going to have to do for Squadron 42. So there's a lot of pre-production, getting that organized, and obviously booking stuff and things, and working out the budgets, which are quite large.
Yeah, bigger than we were expecting, so we'll see. Although, admittedly, I think the current projected script page count is about 1,000 pages, which is more than it really should be. Wing Commander 4 was about 400 pages, which is long. A traditional film script would be about 120 pages, 115 pages. Wing Commander 4 was almost four times as much shooting pages as a movie. Squadron 42 should be approximately Wing Commander 4-ish, maybe slightly bigger in size. So I think on the writing side, maybe Dave Haddock and Phil Miller are getting a little enthusiastic. We'll have to bring them back down. We're like, yes, this game is a whole opus magnus, but the whole game is. We don't need just Squadron 42 to be the biggest game you've ever seen in your entire life. But yeah, we're in the process of figuring that out. It requires a lot. I mean, it's literally like scheduling and planning a proper movie shoot. Depending on where it ends up being, but it's multi-millions of dollars to shoot that, potentially as high as 10 just to do a shoot with actors, to do the motion capture, to do it at sort of the Avatar level, which obviously next to a big full-on feature is cheap, because they all cost 100 plus million dollars. But we're trying to scale it so we get the highest quality possible and a lot of really great content, but it doesn't break the bank, or at least we'd have to sell some more ships or something to afford it. But everyone's been so generous already that I think we'll be able to do something that will match any other AAA single player game out there, and then of course we're doing everything we're doing on Star Citizen.
TL;DRThe Wing Commander script ran 600 or 700 pages but counted as about 400 shooting pages, and Squadron 42 aims for roughly five to seven pages per day of motion capture, so page count drives shoot length and budget.
It's partly because there's more options, there's more different areas you can go. The Wing Commander full script was actually longer than 400 pages, but we didn't fill all the pages, because when a scene ended, it would end even if it was at half a page. So when it was formatted into full script format, generally they break it into eighths of a page normally, it worked out to be about 400 shooting pages. I think the actual script itself page count was about 600 or 700 pages. But really, when you do a page count based on what you'll shoot on a daily basis, that's kind of how you break it down. So a high-end feature film, with a lot of action, you would maybe be doing half a page or even less a day. TV, movie of the week, you may be doing five, six, seven pages a day. It all depends on what you do. The more conversational, the less camera movement, setups, action, generally you can do more pages a day because it's really just more dialogue. But anything more than about eight or ten pages a day, that's not a pace that people normally shoot. Even a low budget movie probably does not do more than eight or ten pages a day. So we'll probably be shooting for somewhere like five, six, seven pages a day, and we can kind of do that because we don't have lighting setups, because it's all motion capture. So the lighting is pretty much set and it's really just blocking the actors and moving them, working out the scene with them and then capturing the motion. So we can probably do six, seven pages a day at a pretty decent pace and get good performance. But not more than that. So then that dictates how many days the shoot's going to cost. So if it's 400 pages, it's a lot less days than if it's 1,000 pages, and therefore that pretty much dictates how long you need the stage for, how long you need the actors for, how long you need the crew for, and that determines the budget, basically.
Well, yeah. Starts with the script. Make sure the script's right, basically before you go into any production. So that's what we want to make sure. Get that right and be happy with it, and then we'll do the rest.
TL;DRChris Roberts doubts pirates could insure items or cargo, though hull insurance and perhaps a pirate syndicate might exist; optional item and cargo insurance won't apply in the most dangerous areas, trading safety for greater potential reward.
So I doubt that you'll be able to get insurance on items or your cargo as a pirate, right? So you could probably get hull insurance, and I think there'll certainly be some level of pirate insurance syndicate that you can go to that would cover the more morally challenged members of our community. But in general, I think we've talked about there's three levels of insurance. There's just hull insurance. So one of the concepts with the standard hull insurance or the lifetime insurance that we originally had, and really they're the same thing because it's the same coverage of your ship and you get your ship replaced. The only difference is you don't have to renew your lifetime. Every ship you buy comes with insurance. It's just that after a few months of play or whatever, you just have to pay some more UEC to keep the insurance policy up, just like you would on your car, right? You would keep the insurance going on your car. But we have three levels of insurance. So you have the basic hull insurance, and then you have the customization item insurance, which basically would cover all the extra stuff that you've got on your weapons and all that. And then there potentially is cargo insurance, which would insure the cargo you take. The item and the cargo insurances are optional insurances and they'll cost you extra money, and if you lose your stuff then you're covered, but the optional ones are more constrained than the basic hull one, because basically it's not fun to go out there with your ship that you're all excited by and then it gets blown up right away and then I've got nothing to play with. You want to make sure that someone always has their ship, but you want to have some risk if you're going out with your highly customized ship or cargo into a dangerous area and you could get destroyed, attacked, whatever. And so in that particular case, the insurance policies you could get for those classifications of items or cargo don't apply everywhere. So I think we've talked in the past that in the most dangerous areas of space, like the outlaw fringes where you'll be dealing with the most dangerous pirates or whatever, in that case, you just probably won't be able to get cargo insurance. It'll be like, okay, you're rated for blue systems or below, or you're rated for orange systems or whatever. That's kind of the way the cargo and the item stuff will work. So I think it's unlikely if you're a pirate that you can get an insurance policy to cover all the knickknacks you have on your ship. So you're dealing in a slightly more risky world. But then again, we're trying to make it so when you're in that risk situation, there's a lot more potential upside and reward for players, so that you are risking something, but you can obtain and get things quicker in that method, or more valuable things than you would if you're staying in the safe area of space.
TL;DRPlayers will be able to own economic nodes such as factories and trade items between regions, but at the start they won't choose what to manufacture; choosing products might come later.
Well, we've already talked that players will definitely be able to control and own some economic nodes, and those economic nodes do produce items during the game. We're also going to allow players to trade. So one of the things that we're trying to do with the Banu trader is there's a whole receiving room in it, and you can maybe collect items in different parts of the galaxy and then maybe fly around and sell them in other parts. Because one of the goals is to make sure that you can't buy certain items all over the place. So a lot of really good and valuable items are very specific to areas of space, and so perhaps there's a business to be had of going to an area, getting a bunch of items and then flying somewhere else and selling them, right? And selling them to other players or selling them to NPCs. That will all be part of the gameplay. I think the question's about necessarily coming up with items to sell. And I don't think so much that you'll decide, okay, well I'm just making widget A. It's like you'll get the opportunity to purchase a factory that makes a certain kind of thing. And then you run that factory and perhaps expand its ability by buying more equipment or bringing more of a workforce in, and trying to grow its business. Certainly at the start you're not going to basically decide what you're going to manufacture and go from there. Maybe later on we would do something like that, but at the beginning we're not intending to. But I could see later on that you could have the possibility of choosing certain basic things you want to manufacture, whether it would be basic foodstuffs or something like weapons or whatever. From the outset, I think we would let you buy a node that, okay, you control this food node or you control this equipment manufacturer node.
Well, yes. So we're going to have the same system that allows us to attach items to the ships. We call it the item port system, where basically you can attach any items, plug into other items or stuff like a vehicle or a player. A player can have an item port. So putting a suit on, you wear that on an item port, or a helmet, you wear that on an item port. We have the same for weapons. So if you have a weapon, you could plug in a silencer or a scope. So essentially, that system's extended everywhere.
TL;DRThe Shubin mining base is being white-boxed, to finish in a few weeks, before art blockout and gameplay; the plan is to build everything in final form early and swap in finished assets later.
So the big thing about the mining colony has always been that we're obviously building it in Squadron 42, but also we know we have to make it for the Persistent Universe as well. So the idea behind that was actually that you will be able to use these items in the Persistent Universe when it comes out. In terms of an update, right now we are on the Shubin mining base, which is a big mining base, which is like six kilometers long. It can park staff areas and it can do whatever. If you've ever seen an Idris next to it, the Idris looks positively small. Even the big new one. But anyway, we are in the middle of actually white boxing that all out. So what happens is we've got the 3D concept of it, and now the design goes through and actually builds out the whole interior, because it's not just going to be something you can look at, it's something you can be able to land on, you can be able to go in, you can be able to use and operate in at times, and also it's a big part of the beginning of Squadron 42. So we're in the middle now of just creating all the different areas of it, the landing areas and so forth, and so that's kind of what we're focusing on. Once we have the white boxing done, which will be finished in the next few weeks, then we go to the art blockout phase, and then we actually create the whole look and feel of the interiors, which is blocked out in terms of the way it will look, but it won't be in mass detail or texture, but the corridors will look the way they do and so forth. And when we have that, then we actually start putting gameplay in it. Because although the final build-out of the whole thing will take months and months and months, what we try and do in all the Squadron 42 stuff, the way we're operating, is we're going to build everything in concept, block form, where basically everything is going to be in the form it will be in the final game, and then we basically put in all the gameplay and the missions and get it all working within that. And then as the content gets finished, from the outsourcers, whether it's CG parts or internal guys, we then just keep on building that stuff out and just replace the base models with the final models and so forth. It allows us to get on with actually getting the missions done at the same time.
At the end of the day, you just replace that file with the finished file. It's all in the form it should be. That's the hope. Obviously, there'll probably be one or two little changes. We'll have to go make some tweaks. But that's what allows us to work with the fact we've got a huge amount of content to put in, but at the same time, get on with making the game.
TL;DRPrivate servers won't get Persistent Universe updates in sync or on a cherry-pick basis; new content may later come as asset packs they can take or ignore, at a different pace.
So the Persistent Universe is a slightly different beast than what you'll be able to do on your private servers, just because the Persistent Universe is actually many, many, many servers all linked together. It's just what you need to do to handle the large amount of players we already have, let alone the amount of players that we intend to have, and so to a certain level the ability for us to keep the private servers in sync with what we're doing on the persistent world is not like we just hit a button and it's on everywhere. So probably the way I would think of it is that with all new stuff, we roll out a new ship or whatever, we make it available in the Persistent Universe. Later on it potentially can be available for offline; people would get an asset pack or something they could probably pick and choose from. But it's not necessarily going to be at the same frequency or level that it's going to happen in the Persistent Universe. Because the Persistent Universe is the live universe, and that's where you hook into and you plug into, and we're built to push out data on that frequently. And as soon as you've got people modding their own server, first of all, they're on a much smaller server. That's something that an individual can run and have a bunch of their friends in their group or clan or whatever run on, more like a Freelancer server than what we have in the universe, because we have universe servers, system servers, instance servers, and it's literally hundreds of servers. It's very unlikely that any individual is going to have that at home. In that case, it's different, because how you manage the data, how you deliver it is a whole different thing. We can take some of the assets and say, hey, you can put these assets into the universe yourself, but we can't really push it out to everyone because, first of all, we don't even know what people have done on their server. Essentially, when you have a private server, you start at the base level, and then you build it from there. We'll occasionally put out updates of things that we've changed, and they can take that if they want, or they can do their own thing. That's kind of the way it will be.
TL;DRSquadron 42 will open with a huge capital-ship battle and a torpedo bomber is being built; tanks currently have no plans, though ground vehicles like exploration buggies and mining-base vehicles are possible.
Yeah, I mean, on Squadron 42, we definitely have plans on the ship side. Obviously, we've got capital ships, and I think our intro is going to be pretty impressive, I hope. I mean, we're basically planning on having an absolutely huge battle at the beginning, which will really get you into the game. But yeah, we definitely are in the middle of actually building out the Retaliator right now, which is basically that. It's a huge torpedo, Vulcan type, long range torpedo bomber. So yeah, absolutely. We've got some big plans for that as well, obviously on the Squadron 42 side. And also we're creating the cap ships in Squadron 42 for the Persistent Universe as well. So we're making sure while we're making these cap ships, although the multiplayer aspect will be limited on Squadron 42, we're putting all the ship systems in so people can play on the ships together. And obviously we'll be getting that into the dogfight module later on as well.
Yeah, so we'll do that. And then as far as tanks, we currently don't have any plans, although long term that's something that's quite doable, because we have the ability to do ground vehicles as well as space vehicles, as everyone can see with the buggy that you have in your hangar. And there may be some cases where on the exploration side you can have an exploration buggy, and you can have limited areas you land and you can go round and do a little Prometheus kind of thing, and hopefully not be quite as stupid as the scientists in Prometheus. What's this tentacle thing? It looks really great.
I think then also, on places like the Shubin mining base, which is huge, we probably intend to have some vehicles that you'll drive around in there and so forth.
TL;DRThey don't think a Persistent Universe day will equal a real day, perhaps one to two hours instead, with consistent time for all players and fast travel taking real minutes based on travel speed; numbers are still being worked out.
Okay, so that's a really good question. That's something that we've been discussing. We don't think that one day in the Persistent Universe will equal one day in real life. I mean, right now we've been kind of playing around, we've been discussing what we would scale time by, and I think we're thinking that maybe we would make each day perhaps be two hours of real time or so, or an hour, so you could see a day-night cycle in a couple hours of play. And in the Persistent Universe, we were thinking that maybe we would have the granularity of every day as a tick. And in terms of the fast travel stuff, that's kind of one of the reasons that derives the timing we're doing: when you fast travel between stuff, you actually will be in warp space for a time, it won't be instant, right? So if you're traveling a longer distance, you will actually be in this state for five minutes or seven minutes or whatever. And you can walk around your ship or do stuff. I mean, just think of Star Wars when they were warping to Alderaan and they were playing chess. So that will be there, and that length will be how long you're traveling in your system based on your maximum warp speed, 0.2 of the speed of light. So that's kind of how we time balance it. So it's not like I hit autopilot and my time will dilate compared to your time. We basically are trying to factor that as if you accelerate up to 0.2 of the speed of light, how long would it take you? And then we do it from there. And we're still bearing with that. We've got to figure out the exact right numbers to make it work. But yeah, we know we have to have the time consistent between all the players, because otherwise it's problematic.
TL;DRFuel mainly powers maneuvering jets and afterburners, not the power plant; they are thinking about multiple fuel types, hydrogen as a default always collectible, and drop tanks, aiming for some resource-management gameplay.
Okay, so there is fuel. Fuel mostly drives the maneuvering jets and the afterburners. It doesn't drive your power plant, because your power plant is usually something like a fusion reactor or antimatter drive. And those ones don't require fuel, but you do need fuel to essentially propel mass out to help you to move around. And we're thinking about having more than one fuel type. Hydrogen's probably the simple, the default one. You'll probably be able to collect some level of it no matter what, just so you can't fully run out of fuel, but you'll be heavily disadvantaged if you don't have a nice, good compressed set of fuel. You'll be able to have drop tanks, and we're going to have different kinds; some liquids are just generally denser, so you could store them versus something like hydrogen or whatever. So those would potentially be better for more efficient maneuvering or afterburner, but they would also be rarer, right? So you wouldn't necessarily always find them, so maybe there's just some areas that you could find this, or you would potentially buy it from a vendor on a space station or planetside. So hopefully there'll be a bit of a little metagame on resource management on your fuel, which I think also will add an extra interesting wrinkle to space flight, space exploration, space combat.
TL;DRThe dogfighting module will include several game modes, including Capture the Core, AI-controlled Vanduul swarm fights of rising difficulty, and a free-flight mode where players can leave their ship and watch asteroids float by.
Yeah, we are. I mean, just putting them together was kind of cool and fun, and just actually seeing what CryEngine can do and stuff like that. There's a few people obviously a lot of the levels were put together with, but some of the lighting stuff, there was a lighting pass done by Rowan and I think some of the guys in LA as well.
Forrest and stuff like that. So it wasn't just all us. But yeah, obviously a lot of the work was. But yeah, in terms of that, we also put in the different game modes, which is kind of cool. Because when it goes out there, we just didn't want it just to be a death match. So we're putting in a number of different game modes to make it fun. My favorite one actually we're putting in is Capture the Core, which is basically Capture the Flag. And we've got some really cool effects and things you'll do there. And so you have to work as a team to do that, as well as the other modes. And then specifically also, because I know a lot of people out there just don't like death matching, the other good thing is we've got the AI working there as well now. So people will be able to go in and fight the Vanduul Swarm. Horde mode's some other game. So we're basically going to go fight the swarm and you'll be able to test out your skills against some pretty good pilots. At the beginning, they might be easy, but then it gets harder and harder as you go along. See if anyone can actually get through it all.
Yeah, I mean, my favorite so far for that is actually what I think people saw a bit of in the video that was put up over the weekend. You land on that platform, this is one of the modes you can do, and you can just get out of your ship, and then you can just run to the edge, and it's great. It's just like you're sitting there, just floating around. Gravity style. It's just sit there and watch as asteroids float by.
TL;DRChris Roberts says it is too early to decide on real-money trading; he dislikes gold farming and will try to make it unprofitable, while wanting players to earn in-game through crafting, tuning weapons and trading.
It's too early to tell. I don't mind the innocent stuff. What I don't like is the Chinese gold farmer stuff, where you've got a whole bunch of people that have really nothing to do with the game. You get super cheap labor and everyone just uses bots or mines stuff and then sells it in the game. We're going to try and have some stuff that will not make that advantageous. So just easily transferring money to people and all that sort of stuff will not be as easy in our system as it maybe is in some other ones. What I would like is that players go out there, and I want to have someone that has a career in literally tuning weapons. So they overclock a weapon and they make this weapon, this is the plus 20 or plus 30% damage. It's like selling someone an overclocked graphics card or an overclocked computer. And they can make a living in the game, at least by making a bunch of UEC from it, where people pay them. They just know, okay, Eric's the best laser overclocker in the universe, and they go and find you and they'll pay you double what a normal laser gun will cost, because you'll be able to maximize the power from it. And so that would be cool. Whether or not you would translate that back into real life money, I don't know. There's issues and complications and there's some level of legality here in the US anyway that comes with that. So that would be way too early for us to say yes or no on it. But I certainly do want people in the game to be able to earn money doing more than just dogfighting or doing a trade run from point A to B. So essentially being able to do things like craft. Like I mentioned before, we had the Banu trader with the receiving room. I think it would be cool for a player that makes it their business to go to the corners of the galaxy and get really interesting items and fly around and sell them to other players, almost like a traveling bazaar or whatever.