The developers discuss the frequent 2.0 PTU patches and their CDN costs, plus jump-point piloting, limited planetary gravity, smuggler hidden compartments, and non-lethal modules like the Warlock's EMP. They also cover NPC crew skill levels, sensor scanning for ship traces, and anti-cheat plans.
TL;DRAnti-cheating measures are planned and on the roadmap, though not much is done at this early stage; a server-client model makes validation easier, and the game isn't a pure competitive shooter.
We definitely are aware and have plans to do stuff to crack down on cheating obviously we're at a very early stage, so at these early days we're not doing as much as we will do long term, because we're just trying to get the basic fundamentals in there.Not sure which CryEngine game you play, if it was an FPS one. Depends on whether it was a peer to peer or a server client model. Server client model's a bit easier to validate and make sure there isn't as much cheating because you own the server which we would, and that's, you can always do sanity checking against what the client is doing. So we definitely plan to have stuff in there to try and stop people from cheating by using bots and everything.There's always ways that people figure out how to do stuff, but that definitely is on our road map to try to make the experience as good for everyone as possible and I would also say it is, Star Citizen isn't a pure competitive FPS game, it has everything, right, that's part of what you can see in 2.0 there is FPS stuff, there's flying the ships around. In the big universe there's going to be exploration , visiting places, talking to people, doing things like hauling cargo, mining, so I don't think it will have the same sort of pressure that you see in a straight up FPS arena shooter or something like Team Fortress or War Face which is a Crysis based free to play shooter. So we'll see, but we definitely are going to try our best to make sure that people don't abuse the system and cheat.
TL;DRNPCs will have RPG-style skill levels and traits, are hired at rookie to veteran levels, and improve through battle, though the detailed background stats may not be exposed to players.
So yes NPCs absolutely will.They will be treated much more like you would have a character in a traditional RPG game: they'll have skill levels; they'll probably have different traits, whether it's strength or loyalty, dexterity or intelligence; and skill with certain things, like skill in being gunner or skill in being a pilot.We'll generate them at different levels: rookie, starting out not so good is obviously much cheaper to hire than the veteran that super bad ass at a bunch of stuff, so you can also get what you pay for in terms of hiring your NPCs. But if you start with someone that isn't as experienced, the more you take them into battles and stuff they'll level up and they'll get better and more experienced just like people do in real life. So we do do these stats for the NPCs because we need to track how they get better and everything; we're just not doing it for the player because we want the player to be you doing it and your skills, so it's you getting better playing the game, not necessarily just leveling up stuff.So that'll be there. You'll get some access to it. I'm not sure we'll expose the individual background stats we track but you'll get an idea of whether they are experienced: veteran or rookie and stuff like that. So there you go.
That's a very good idea I don't think we have that in our initial plan of scanning and functions and stuff.But I think longer term that will probably be something that would be, something we would want the basics in there, and could add because it would be really good for bounty hunting and sleuthing missions where you could show up and get an idea of was this person here or not by the IR, residue, or the radiation signature or something like that.So not yet but I would say longer term yes.
TL;DRYes, non-lethal modules like EMP will be possible on other ships, usually bigger ones, as the game is built around swappable components, though producing all the component variety takes time.
Yes it will be possible to add nonlethal combat modules for the ships. EMP isn't going to be strictly limited to the Warlock we actually have some modules and plans for some of the other ships. Obviously there, normally be the bigger ships that would have them.We're definitely building the game to be quite item and component centric and module centric. So you'll be able to switch and chop and change how your ships equipped more so than you have in the past. One of our drawbacks, cause the underlying system supports this already is just generating all the components with the right variety of functionality.So we have a plan for that it's just there's so many things in terms of just getting the ships out and other things. Even though we have a pretty big team for a game of this size with this many options, there's never enough people, but absolutely we're planning for you to be able to switch out components and customise your ships and one of those things say would be EMP.
TL;DRYes, destroying supply shipments to hurt a rival org is meant to be possible, as the game is built around logistics like fuel and ammunition, so attacking supply lines becomes emergent gameplay.
Yes absolutely. That is going to be possible to do it, not only in the world like the NPCs' supplies or goods or equipment or resources that are going between resource nodes or stations or planets, but you could definitely do it for orgs as well I would think, player controlled ones, depending on what they were moving around for their own stuff.But were really going to try to have a game that's based around being able to deal with logistics. So you're going to need, we've mentioned it before, but you'll need things like fuel; certain kinds of ammunition are obviously consumable, so ballistics are consumable, there'll be other sorts of consumables that'll happen. So if you're out on the frontier or you're waging a war there'll definitely be the need to rearm, restock, refuel and you'll have to get those arms and weapons: maybe someone can sell them to you; maybe your org has someone coming in with a supply ship to do that. We have a variation of the Crucible that would be a restock and supply version that you could use in the background to backdrop an offensive to bring it in.We definitely want to make that part of gameplay for the bigger organisations team play because we think one of the most interesting things is not just the frontline combat but how people work together as a team to achieve things and obviously the logistics are pretty good with that. And therefore one of the techniques to degrade your opponent is to go for its supply line. So yes that will definitely come out as emergent gameplay in the system we are setting up.
TL;DRThis hasn't really been thought through; the Xi'an probably wouldn't treat you as their own but might be friendlier, and Vanduul would likely identify and attack you unless you spoofed a clan.
To be honest with you we really haven't thought about that, you're not likely in the near future to be in the Xi'an scout and coming up against Xi'an raiders are going to attack you, because the Xi'an are more to the edges of the UEE so we're going to be building out some of the interior parts first. I don't think they would necessarily recognize you as one of their own, they would probably know the Xi'an ship you're flying is the human modified sale one, what the Scout we're doing is. Then if you're on territory you shouldn't be then maybe they would do something about it. They may potentially be a little more friendly or predisposed to you because bought something that uses their technology.In general, the Xi'an don't fire on sight against humans. For instance even though there's a bit of a stand off if you want to think of it a bit like China and America, trade together but maybe there's some idealistic differences and they kind of distrust each other but still work together pretty closely. I think that would be a good analogy for the Xi'an empire. I think if you run across Vanduul flying a captured Scythe or a Glaive, generally they would know from the scan if you're Vanduul or not. Probably go after you in fairly short order although if you had a captured one that was rigged to spoof being part of a Vanduul clan, then perhaps you may be able to slip through or slip by. We haven't really fleshed that out yet.
TL;DRSmuggling with hidden compartments is intended and will let players install items such as false bottoms, but the design isn't finalized and it won't be in 2.0, since simpler gameplay comes first.
Yes. We are absolutely going to have that. We're going to have the ability, we're trying to think of how to do smuggler caches, cause obviously we want to have some creativity up to the player, so it's not like "Here's always the secret compartment in the Constellation" cause obviously then law enforcement will know where to look.We still have to finalise the design on that, but the intention is to allow you to buy, purchase or install certain items that could potentially have false bottoms or all that kind of stuff to hide some cargo and then maybe if someone's playing the role of an officer or something or an NPC they can come in and board you and they check your ship out and give you a pass and you fly on smuggling that contraband and stuff like that. That's absolutely going to be part of the gameplay.It's a long term, obviously not happening in 2.0 cause there's some more basic gameplay like cargo hauling those kinds of things, bounty hunting, mercenary escort missions. They will probably happen first but smuggling's definitely on the list and it's kind of a fun one involves interaction with other NPCs and potentially other players so yes you'll be able to do that.
TL;DRGravity slingshot trajectories like NASA's probably won't be modeled, but gravity will vary with distance from a planet and affect flight, including atmospheric flight, as landing pads already influence the flight model.
Probably not going to model gravity in planets to the level we can do the slingshot stuff that NASA does, when it's trying to figure trajectories or trying to figure how to get back to Earth from the Moon and all that sort of stuff.We are going to model gravity to a certain extent where there's a planet you're landing on a planet; well the effect of gravity as you get close to the planet is greater right? So in the upper atmosphere, the distance out from Earth, nine point eight meters per second it's less than that. So we will do that level of it and gravity will have some effect on flight, on atmospheric flight and all that kind of stuff as well.You can actually even now if you fly in the game and go onto some of the landing pads, the landing pads themselves have artificial gravity in a certain volume around them and in that case the actual flight model compensates for it, so the thrusters and everything produce additional thrust to negate the gravity so it does actually affect the flight model and we were anticipating all these when we get down and do stuff closer to planets and there's atmosphere and all the rest of the stuff then there'll be even more of that.
TL;DRYes, they plan for challenging environments like narrowing, shifting jump point tunnels, where unstable ones may need extreme piloting but offer shortcuts, and for other structures or planetside areas.
I would say yes, definitely. I think we've mentioned before but jump points in some ways are going to be quite similar to this, not necessarily going through a death star but they are tunnels that collapse, undulate and move around and narrow and the more risky, the more unstable ones are worse that way but sometimes the risky, more unstable ones are the best shortcut to get to a location.What our plan is that navigating a jump point potentially if it's not a safe one could require some extreme piloting skills along the lines of what was described here. Then I'm pretty sure we'll have some other areas where whether it's flying inside a big structure in space or even down planetside, we'll put some challenges in there that are pretty cool. Possibilities are endless with the structure in the game we're building, it's one of the reasons it's taking so long but we are engineering it to do some pretty amazing things so I think you'll all appreciate that. May have something cool to show in a few days to sort of underline that.
TL;DRThe main downside of frequent PTU patches is the bandwidth cost, but the testing gave much better stability and iteration, so they plan to keep patches on the PTU for about a week before going live.
Well I think the only downside is that we spend a lot of money on CDN costs. Every time we push 30 gigs to thousands of players we're paying for all that data bandwidth getting pushed down from our CDN provider who is Amazon AWS.So that is kind of the down side but the upside is we get much better turn around and iteration. We were looking at the stats and the last PTU build, before we went to live, compare to the first PTU build was over 100 times more stable than the first one. Which is a pretty massive change in a fairly short period of time. And a lot of that was because we had a large group of players stress testing in a way that we just can do internally. Currently we have 24, 25 QA between the UK and the US which is not a small amount of QA but on a game this big it's really hard to cover all the features and stress test it. But when we are out on the PTU we can have 1000 people concurrently and that can really be pushing what we see, push the engine, have cases created that we wouldn't seen in an internal test case, and allow us to see some of the problems. And we're continuing to add, to improve on stuff, so we're going crash reporting automated stuff built in in some future version of the clients we'll give people so we can see, the call stacks and what was going on on the client side as well what we see on the server side which we already do.I think the 2.0 PTU testing experience was really great. The one that we spend a fair amount of time on the PTU comparatively to what we've done before. It's also the build we're delivering that probably stresses the engine and the game the most we've ever done. Just the sheer scope and scale of it. A lot of features like the Zone System; the Local Physics, Local Grid: they're all very new systems and of course we've flown around on them but we haven't got all the edge cases you get when you've got tens of thousands of people playing it and seeing if it can break or not.So it was pretty impressive to go from where we started to where we are releasing it live and that's really due to the PTU iterative process: getting a new build out; seeing if things worked; or even sometimes we put things in there that may have made the experience a little worse, because we actually had some extra bug-tracking, memory walking to see if there was memory corruption, and stuff like that.So I thought the PTU experience was great so we kind of want to focus on more of that where before we do a patch we are on the PTU for at least a week or so, so we give it time, we get enough people hammering on it, we can fix some issue and then we go live. So that's going to be our newer model going forward starting next year.