Star Citizen Live: All About Alpha 3.14

So the short and disappointing answer is no, but let's break down maybe why. Originally, Carsten and the team were prototyping on a moon or a smaller planet as a starting off point, but it became clear that we just needed to focus on Crusader itself, focus the tech development on that and just specifically look at that just for this release. So it was for a particular reason to just focus on one, just because when you're above the clouds or going in the clouds, you can just focus on that. Also, the scale, right? The scale is a unique thing. Also, part of the conversation as well, as soon as you're putting clouds on a planet or a moon, there's a lot of additional factors that you're going to need to consider, right? Like the occlusion that you'd get from the sun. So there's just a lot of extra stuff that we need to kind of consider. So unfortunately, not for 3.14, but it's something we're looking at for the future.

Short answer, no. So obviously the Taurus has been floating around for a long time. There's been many conspiracy theories about what we've been doing with it. And as I've mentioned before in previous Star Citizen Lives, it was never going to be a whole rework of the ship and the lineup. It simply just spread over that amount of time because it's been a project that we've had on the back burner that we can just put someone on, and when we need to shift priorities, it's the easiest thing that we can pause, move those people onto something else, and then come back to. So it was only ever going to be adding the Taurus to the existing lineup. But that doesn't mean the Constellations are all going to stay as they are. That's not the final version of the Constellation. So when we get to the gold standard pass for the Constellation, then they will all have that [pass] we are doing currently on the Retaliator, where we're making sure the metrics are correct, making sure the components are in the right place at the right height for accessibility. Because if you look at the Constellation at the moment, I think there's multiple component hatches on the wall labeled quantum drive. Obviously, that's not the case. The Connie doesn't have two quantum drives. That's just an art issue. So we'll be going through, doing all that, making sure that everyone's favorite seat-table combo actually works and you can fit in it, and doing something about the struts. So I know I said in the past that we would look to do something with the struts on the Taurus. We didn't have time to do the struts and update the pilot seat with all the new buttons that we require. So we did the pilot seat first, which people will see in 3.14. And then when we do the gold standard pass, we'll touch everything else.

Let's see, in the traditional sense, biome implies it's a different asset pack, ties into the flora and fauna that you'd expect there. But one interesting part of the development of Crusader is one of the things that the tech allowed us to do is to have not a variety of visual designs spread horizontally across the planet, but we have a variety of visual designs spread vertically. So on the video last night that went out, people could see a slight glimpse of the variety there. So because it's texture driven, we were able to design a format where on the very top, around where Orison is, you have some wisps above the player that catch the light, that gives you that classic skybox vibe. But then if you go down one step below, we were able to create these kind of canyons. We wanted to describe the effect of wind. Wind is the unsung hero across everything to do with Crusader and Orison. It drives everything. So we wanted that feeling where these winds have stretched the clouds. So you have a kind of a ravine. And then lastly, on the bottom, you can actually get into a cavernous space where you're completely enclosed in cloud, but it feels like you've gone down really, really deep. And then below that, it's the hard deck. From there on in, you're just going into clouds, and then that will kind of limit the play space. So in a more traditional sense, no, but actually, I think, yes. And in the future, Todd and I were discussing that we want that to tie into a variety of play space, a variety of gameplay experiences dependent on that depth.

Partial joy, I guess, is the answer there. So the bug is still there. The main cargo grid on the rear ramp is still not being detected by the cargo system because it's an item in an item. I think a few of the ships have that issue, but it really impacts the 890 because that's its primary amount of cargo. So that's still unfortunately not fixed, but we actually found an issue with the cargo in the front hangar, where it wasn't actually putting in as much as it was supposed to be putting in there. The cargo, we'd put the right numbers in, but there was a little bit of proxy geo from the hull clipping in and stopping rows and rows being added to the front. So whilst you're not going to have the full amount, there is a small bump in what you can actually use in the 890 in 3.14. I can't remember the number off the top of my head. I think maybe roughly double what it is at the moment.

Oh, I got an itemized list from Luke and team, if you want. So: removing trespass zones from all underground facilities on planets. You are no longer receiving crimes for EMPing or interdicting the ship that you're using. So basically, you're getting it off of yourself, or if you EMPed, then you got a CrimeStat for yourself. Destroying a party member's empty vehicle will no longer result in a crime. We have updated the prison code entry interface and prevented it from resetting the code with incorrect attempts. Made a reduction in time to remove individual crimes when hacking. Crime for assaulting a security guard should no longer be given outside of a monitored zone. Knockouts will no longer kill. Fixed an issue where players were receiving a CrimeStat for shooting a vehicle as it was destroyed. And then fixed an issue when falling into lower sections of prisons that would count as an escape attempt. And then the other big one that Luke said was basically adjusted splash damage. So in particular for EMP and interdiction stuff, if you've done more good than bad, then you shouldn't get penalized for it.

Well, I mean, considering I think last patch we fixed over 3,000 issues, and before that, another 3,000 issues. Now, again, with a lot of these things, we're creating them as we're building the features and building the content, and then trying to squash them as much as we possibly can. So one of the ones that I want to basically fix is the zoom out on the star map. So making sure that when you start the star map, it's actually zoomed out versus zoomed in. Then from there, we're looking at trying to fix a lot of the AI issues, in particular, them standing on chairs. And the reason for that was it's not necessarily on the AI. It was basically the way that the actor was persistent. And so it would go to sleep when you zoomed out. And basically the AI would be in the usable, and then as soon as it got woken back up, when you came back in and reloaded, it didn't know what to do. So those are things that I want to make sure we get fixed. And then from there, we've outlined a crap ton of quality of life fixes that we always try to hit. This patch, I was much more strict on what should be a live must-fix and trying to force these issues in.

Well, when I say strict, it's basically calling out and saying, no, no, we have to fix this. So from there, it really is a conversation with the directors and the teams. But all I can really do with a lot of this stuff is call it out and say, hey, same with Bayer or our player relations or our player experience team, as well as other directors and leads. And so we have that stuff called out. And then it's up to us to really go through and say, yeah, we can do this in this time. Or this requires the underlying system to be fixed or adjusted. Or we're currently working on that, so we're not going to fix it right now because it's a waste of time as soon as that new feature goes live, kind of thing. So it's those constant changes. There are constant balance changes that happen within our development system. But for the changes and stuff like that, John can tell you, even just for the missile mode, I think they've done one pass, and then they expect to do multiple passes for that. I mean, that to me is kind of ninja changes that people would not necessarily see or know. Same with AI and a lot of the mission stuff too. There was a lot of rework that Elliot did for some of the base missions. But again, the player might not necessarily see those. So some of it's just quality of life. And hopefully, it just feels smooth and it's not immersion-breaking, so the player doesn't notice it.

It turns out making a gas giant is hard, right? Well, let's see. So we started off by seeing how far we could get with the current tech. I think the last time I spoke with you, Jared, we were like, okay, we'll see what we can do. Abuse the rules, see what can happen. I think we got pretty far. We showed it to Chris and Chris was like, nope, we're missing the volumetric clouds, right? So the focus then turned into the volumetric clouds. But whenever you create something for the first time, it's always hard because it's the first thing. You've got to go through that process of trial and error. So with something like the gas giant, instantly the scale was the hardest part. For example, the radius of Crusader is, I think, about 7,500 kilometers, right? And, for example, Hurston is like 1,000, or one of the moons is maybe 300. So it's considerably larger. So with that scale, when the player flies in, you come up with a design and then you fly into it and you don't see anything move. So instantly that scale became the first thing that became a concern. And then second is just, we've never made a gas giant before, and you can look at fantastic satellite imagery, but we wanted to do something that was a little bit different. Chris had a very specific look in mind for Crusader that we wanted to achieve. And remember, like I said, that sort of feeling that wind has blown these clouds over the surface, so we wanted a particular look. So then the tech develops, and then Carsten, and Seb did a fantastic job as our principal tech artist of being that communicator between the art team and the tech team and translating what features we would need and how the tech works. So like I said, there's a lot of trial and error there. But then once you start doing look development, you start getting something. There was one day, OK, it was like, cool, this is working. And then Jake, who's previously been responsible for the space gas and the gas pockets and stuff in the game right now, he just had a little play, right? He was just very curious. He took the tech and then he tried something out and instantly it was like, that's Crusader. He hit it. The man was talking about the layer in. He just tried something out. We all looked at him and were like, that's fantastic. So Seb kind of took it from there and stabilized it. But it was quite a difficult journey just because it was the first thing for the game and it's brand new tech, right? So I kind of see it where, where we were a few years back in terms of planets, if you look at how they've developed and grown and increased in fidelity, it might give a good example of where we are right now with this new bit of tech.

And then for Orison, this is a classic example of taking a concept art that you look at and go, that's just going to be the best. Orison was always my favorite of the Stanton locations. I fell in love with Orison a long time ago. I looked at the concept art. And guess what? We put that blockout in game and it was like, this looks horrible. Horrible. Turns out a floating latticework in the sky with thin struts doesn't translate well from concept art into game. It tested us as a team. It tested us. But I think I speak for the team: through hard work, passion, dedication, just trying ideas, trying things, what we ended up with, we're quite happy with.

I sit in on those Tuesday reviews every week, and I remember a year ago, the first early tests of Orison and that latticework that you were talking about, and going, I don't know how he's going to do that. That doesn't look like it's working.

Yeah, it was a definite... okay. We had to fight for every win on Orison. Although we came with the experience of making previous LZs and previous modular locations, it tested the team to the fullest. But I think they did a fantastic job.

Yeah, so missile-wise, the intent is yes, that co-pilots can use them. Certainly from my testing personally and the Ibukati one, there are plenty of ships there where a pilot can be flying along using guns, co-pilot can be there using missiles, so that really, probably for the first time, gives co-pilots something to do rather than just being sat there and looking at things. The intent is also for them to be able to control capacitors, but there are some technical hurdles we're working through there, so I don't know if we're going to get that in for 3.14, but that's certainly the longer-term goal. But missiles, definitely yes. In ships where there are co-pilot seats, you will be able to independently go into missile operator mode outside of the pilot and trade control of these things. To touch on the ninja changes question from earlier as well: people would look at the missile operator mode as just a way to control missiles, capacitors, or it's just an extra layer. Those things have necessitated us to change and rebalance every single missile in the game, every single weapon in the game, all the ammo counts for every weapon, every single shield, the default loadouts for every ship, the hit points for every ship, the maneuverability of every ship. So they are huge, wide-reaching changes. So 3.14 is going to be a vastly different combat landscape to 3.13. Obviously, with things of that magnitude, they are going to be iterated on in future patches, because we're not going to get the balance right out the gate for the magnitude of ships and component possibilities out there. Same for radar and scanning. So we have this new HUD, missile operator mode, capacitors, radar and scanning, and then all these other balance changes. There's a lot of big features at work there in 3.14 that are going to take a while to bed in, and the beauty of this project is that the people playing the game can help us dial that in, because there's obviously only so many of us, there's only so many QA, things will slip through. You guys are great at finding them in PTU, and hopefully we fix as many as we can before live.

So fundamentally, the base system is still there. Capacitors are a thing. We haven't got rid of them. They are there. But in the review process, we sort of looked at it all and went, capacitors are really just the new bit that's been added. What you're actually doing now is you're managing your power and your energy. Anyone that's familiar with real-world plane dogfighting or sim dogfighting, you know it's all about energy conservation and using that to your advantage. So what we've done is, rather than capacitors be this separate entity, we've merged them into the power triangle. So the power triangle in previous patches never quite worked how we wanted it to work or how players thought it worked. So to give a very simple, quick answer for that: all the items on your ship wanted X amount of power. So the power plant would go fill them all up as much as it could first, based on a completely separate priority list to what's on the power triangle. And then the power triangle would dictate what's left over. So if your items had all the power they needed, moving the power triangle around did nothing for them anyway. It was sort of just false advertising. You pushed all to the thrusters, but if your thrusters had enough power anyway, it made no difference. That is completely gone now. So the power triangle in 3.14 directly controls the capacitor assignments. So you are dictating where this capacitor is expending the energy available to it. If you put it in the middle, if you want to play the game without capacitors at all, you can. You don't have to manage it. You can just leave it alone, fly as you did in 3.13. You'll still be able to partake in combat and do things. But if you come across someone who's actively managing it, you're going to be at a disadvantage. So it's there for giving players extra depth. And I can't remember what we showed in the ISC a while back about it, but it is the three states. So you have your boost, previously known as afterburner. So rather than gating your boost by heat, it's now gated by the capacitor. Heat is something we want to be a long-term consequence, not the limiting short-term consequence, because if it's a short-term consequence, there is no long-term consequence for it, because you're having to get rid of that heat quick enough to allow you to get back into the gameplay. Heat is a long-term consequence now. The capacitors are the short-term consequence. That controls how much boost you have and how quickly it can regenerate. On the weapon side, energy weapons now have essentially a regenerating magazine, so you can't just hold down your fire button and let them fire forever. They will fire, they'll deplete their magazine capacity, pause for a second, then regenerate, and the capacitor itself controls the speed of that regeneration. You can also turn on and off your energy weapons to increase the pool available to your energy weapons. So a good example would be, say, the Super Hornet, which has a lot of guns on it by default. At the moment, that will split the capacity between all those weapons. So if you turn a few off, the ones that are left will have more and also recharge quicker. So you've got some trade-offs to make there. And then the last one is shields. And shields sort of behave how they did previously, because they had that behavior built in where they would go down, pause, recharge, go back. But what we've done in addition to that, aside from all the rebalancing of the numbers, is all the fighters have bubble shields, which is something we used to have pre-Alpha 3.0. So rather than having four faces on your shield system, it is one all-encompassing shield face. So no matter what direction you are being hit from, it's all getting hit on one face, essentially. And then larger ships have the four faces, so you can manage your directionality, which you don't have to do in smaller ships. So yeah, it's still there. It's slightly rebranded because we wanted to take the emphasis away from this new thing that's being added and put it onto you managing the whole system of power rather than just this one little thing. There's a huge amount there. There's a huge amount to play with. You don't have to play with it if you don't want to. If you find that side too complex, 'I just want to get in my ship and fly', that's fine. But for those combat players and PVP players, I think they're going to really enjoy it, because there's lots of nuance there between: do I stick it in the middle? Put it into the thrusters to recharge my boost quicker, and then take it back out to put into weapons to do a big alpha strike, and then take it back and put into shields. There's a lot of fun things there.

So with the ping, it's really going to be affected by the EM and IR. So if we took, let's say, Yela's asteroid ring or something like that, and there was a fair amount of EM or IR being put out of those, then the ship could basically hide in those, because it's creating a large enough ambient signature for the ship to be able to hide in or hide behind, kind of thing. So it will really depend on how we set up our celestial bodies. But as far as just pure terrain, no.

The masking side also applies to ships as well. If you have an 890 and a bunch of small ships near it, you might not even be able to target those smaller ships because the 890 is emitting such a large signature. They won't show up on radar. You won't be able to target them. You won't be able to get a missile lock on them. So you've got to sort of play with the system there. You get some ways to tailor your radar scope so you can focus in to do that. You can get closer. You can spread those things apart. So yeah, there's a lot of extra incidental gameplay coming from those systems as well. And then obviously environments stack on top of that. So that's all amplified, or whatever the reverse of amplified is, in a gas cloud where everything is harder. So going into a gas cloud, it's no longer the case where you're going to be locked on by the enemy's targeting. You'll probably lose that lock because they won't be able to actually keep their signals high enough to track you.

Well, let's see. Probably the biggest one is movement. See, I always wanted this feeling like it's an evolving landscape, and we always talked about the idea that it'd be cool to, sometimes you go to Orison and you're just in a cloud, right? Or other times it's nice and open. Obviously, the focus was on the core version of that tech. Movement is obviously an adaptation of that tech. So it's a shame it didn't make the first release, but it's something we're looking forward to in the future. Performance is going to be ongoing, but also that, combined with quality. With crazy drops of tech like this, obviously, it takes years, right? It usually takes years. It's very rare that people get to see tech so early in development. So quality and performance, seeing those two increase, obviously will be coming in soon. Also lighting and player interaction, more complexity there. So like I said, the analogy I gave for the gas giant: it's the first one. We're going to have many more gas giants in the game, but we'll see this improve. So it's going to hopefully follow a similar sort of evolution format to what we've been doing with our planets.

Regarding the Crusader aspect as well, right now, as Ian had talked about before, we have kind of a no-fly zone. Now, eventually, the idea would be that there's not necessarily a hard deck. It's really kind of what your ship allows, how much atmospheric pressure is associated with it. And so that's one of the things that I know Dan's team is currently looking at and starting on. So eventually, that will be released with basically the gas giants.

In 3.14, no. It is the same interaction, managing it by the triangle, between small and large ships. However, it's not like one item across all the ships. Every ship has its own set of capacitors. So for 3.14, we're not letting you change them, but we do want to do that in the future so you can sort of upgrade them and have some pros and cons. But for small and large ships, it is the same system. It does have varying different things based on the size of the ship, just because multi-crew ships tend to have more things on them, so adjusting it will have a different experience, but the core interaction is the same. And down the line, when we have multi-crew and capital ships, then I would expect those larger ships do not really deal with the capacitors too much, because it'll be a more in-depth engineer turning systems on and off rather than moving a triangle around.

So basically with V2, we have a fair amount. We have three different shops that we're focusing on. And then we've got a thruster experience. We've got a whale tour experience that will happen as we roll out. But the whale tour obviously won't be turned on until we actually have the whales. Otherwise, it's going to be a really crappy tour. Then we have things like building interior stuff that some of the Montreal guys are working on, which will feed into actually all of our landing zones and allow us to have FPS experiences or missions within major landing zones that just aren't, hey, go deliver this fruit to the person over here, kind of thing. But that's really kind of one of the mandates that the Montreal guys are working towards right now. So those to me are kind of how those things will change, because we want the player to be able to go into the islands and be able to go into the bowels of those islands and actually have missions in there, whether it be repair or clear out or take over, that kind of stuff. So attack and defend. And then the other thing is that the barges that were created, being able to do combat on those or being able to do missions on those are another thing that we'll be looking at.

The focus is exclusively on Orison; that's the major landing zone on that gas giant. But what's interesting, right, is, remember what I said right back at the beginning, building Orison was hard. It came with certain challenges, where on previous LZs, you had terrain for the player to land on and get out and experience the location. Whereas we didn't really have that option there. So right from the very early stages, we were like, and it's kind of listening to the community as well, they don't want restricted areas. They want to make those decisions. So right from the get-go, we're like, how do we make this? So it is almost exclusively open for the player. So when you look around Orison and the entire stretch of it, I think there's two restricted areas, and they're around the commercial area and the industrial platform, just because of the social spaces, right? It's to stop griefing, but everything else is open. So to answer your question, basically, when you look at the latticework, think about it as a hierarchical OC system, whereby, okay, it's a habitation platform, and then within that habitation platform, you have the buildings, and then within those buildings, there's rooftop OCs, and there's going to be the building interiors that Todd mentioned before. So the way in which we've built it, if we wanted to create sister platforms or additional platforms or additional locations in the future, those OCs are already made. And when people do get to fly around Orison, one of the reads I really wanted is, I want to be out on a lonely platform in the middle of nowhere. So if you think about how big this is compared to other LZs, you could be on an industrial platform way out in the distance, and it would feel like you're looking at Orison in the distance, if you know what I mean. It was an early look we wanted to achieve. So to answer your question, initially, no. But we've kind of done the hard work to do that setup already.

I mean, we've talked about things scattered around Crusader so that they're on complete opposite sides of the planet, so on and so forth. So those are things that we will be looking into and trying out. But like Ian said, we have the base now for these things to be built off of.

I'd say it's a step towards it. In 3.14, we're not specifically focusing on those ships having their superior radar and scanning abilities. Our focus is getting all the ships working to a state where we're happy with this new system. And from then on, we will start tailoring those ships to it, because I think myself and everyone would probably be happy to have everything working to a good standard rather than a few ships being significantly overpowered and some poor Hornet owner might not be able to scan anything at all because we missed it. So we're doing the big wide pass. Like Todd said, we've done a first pass on all the systems last week, and every three or four days, we're sort of doing the next iterative pass based on internal feedback on each of those big systems. So one day, we might have the next step of tuning for the missiles, and the next day might be the armor and health. The next day is the scanning values. So it's coming thick and fast.

I mean, part of it is basically server frame rate, and then part of it is just how many entities, I think, we have and all this stuff. So from my standpoint, I think Clive and his team have constantly been trying to fix those types of things. And then same with Gordon and his team from the actor side. So this is something that we know is plaguing our game, and we know that in particular Xenothreat, with everything like the big capital ships, exacerbates it. So obviously with Nine Tails, it's a little bit smaller and doesn't have as many of the big capital ships in it. For CIG, I view this as one of our top priorities, to try to fix and to constantly strive to make sure that the combat and basically the overall player experience when running around is smooth and solid. So I can tell you that Chris would say the same thing. Aaron would say the same thing. We don't joke around with this. We do constantly try to improve this.