Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Friends With Missions

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Frankfurt

Yes, we plan on opening the Grim Hex hangars. Maybe not soon. It depends. At the moment, we have other things which are of high priority in the schedule. Things like Lorville and everything we need to do there, space stations and other soon to be announced things, but they are on the backlog, which is a very big backlog, but it's on there. And moving forward, the general idea is that most locations will use hangars over landing pads for landing, and landing pads will more convert over to refueling and other things. So Grim Hex needs hangars.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Frankfurt

Well, it's more of a convenience thing. First of all, we can land ships and we can have more traffic going into Grim Hex because as you land, we can move you to another hangar and it opens up and more people can land. That's pretty much it, really. I mean, it's kind of a fancy landing pad with walls in a way, but it's a better way to handle traffic.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Frankfurt

It's like Trans-Siberian Railroad kind of things. Well, I guess it would be pretty cool to have that. Everyone, I guess, wants to do this Firefly train hijacking where you have a train across the countryside and you fly with your Gladius above it, jump down, cut it open, steal some stuff. I would love to do that. I like Firefly. It's possible that we do that. It is quite time consuming to build those because our planets are huge, which means that these networks will be huge. But someone actually has to build them across the terrains and mountains and everything. So at the moment, it's easier to just jump in your ship, fly there, takes 15 minutes versus a three hour train ride across the planet. So it would be cool and it might be something to look into, but it's not on the schedule right now.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, I think it also has to be a little difficult because the terrain of the moons and presumably Hurston can change between patches. We've noticed that ever since the first moons were put in, ever since 3.0, that the terrain of one of the moons is not exactly the same between every single patch because they're refined as new technologies come online. So if you were to lay a track along, you probably want to be pretty confident that that terrain's not going to change much.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Frankfurt

It's a lot of maintenance to keep that stuff going as well. Ideally at some point we stop iterating on the planets and the moons and kind of have something that is more of a final version. And then it will be more cost efficient to dedicate that work because it's going to be a designer spending a couple of weeks putting down kilometer after kilometer of train tracks.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I know Luke Pressley's talked in the past about why that's one of the things holding up planetside racetracks and stuff. They want the terrain to kind of settle a little bit while we're in development here.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Frankfurt

Yeah, exactly. But absolutely, it'll be super cool. I will love it and it might be some good gameplay too.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I just want to make sure you're not confirming it's going to happen.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Frankfurt

I'm just saying it's cool. That's pretty much it. I mean, you can jump on a train going from Frankfurt to Beijing or you can take an airplane. At the moment we rely on the planes.

Kirk Tome · Ship System Developer

Okay, this is a pretty deep question. So let's talk about the different systems to start with. So radar on ships are the items that allow you to detect entities that are within your radar bounds. And so they become active targets that are on your radar. And so everything is based off the signatures. There's EM, IR, and CS, which is not in great shape right now. I think it needs some work. EM and IR are our primary signatures that we use to detect entities that are within a certain distance from your ship. And then there's a new signature type, which is RS, which is resource. That's what you use to find mineable targets.

So what the radar generally does is that there is a certain radius from your ship at which you can detect certain levels of those signatures. Anything that is around your ship that generates signatures, like ships or people or things like power plants or anything that is tied into our signature system, generates those signatures to a certain level. So say there is a spaceship that is generating 1,000 EM and 500 IR, which would be a pretty tiny one. Because our signatures fall off at a rate of one unit per meter, that means that it generates enough EM to be detectable at 1,000 meters away from it, because the EM level was 1,000. Now, your radar, say it has a radius of 5,000, and it's set to, at that 5,000 level, detect any EM that is at a minimum of one. So 5,000 meters away from your ship, you have this big radius around the ship. If that other ship that was generating 1,000 EM is just under 6,000 meters away from you, because it's generating 1,000 and it falls off at a rate of one per one meter, at 1,000 meters away from it the signatures decay down to one. And since your radar can detect at a minimum of one 5,000 away, at about 5,999 meters you'll be able to detect it, because those two circles overlap. When you get outside that distance is when they fall off the radar. Or if the signatures drop at a point where you can't detect them. And so we need to do some tweaking on the radar to make sure that our distances and our sensitivity levels are more in line with the gameplay we want, which we haven't taken a pass at yet. Once we do that, you'll see some more fine-tuned distances. We should get better also at displaying what those values are to the player, because they're completely invisible right now. So we need to do some UI work on that. That's how radar works. And so when everything's active on radar, that's when you see it on your HUD and as AR markers, and that's when you see it on your radars.

So ping. Ping is a ping item on all ships. They're not too different right now. Again, we need to do a pass on making different flavors of them. But what ping does is it acts as a multiplier to the radar. So if the radar distance is 5,000 and the ping is a strength level of two times, then it can ping out to 10,000 meters away. And it has the exact same minimum detection values for EM, IR, CS, and RS. What that does is, if you do a ping, the same way that we do the radar detection for the minimum signature values, the item or entity is detected by the ping radius but not by the radar radius. So it's farther than you can see in your active radar, but it's within the distance of the ping, so you get these signatures on it. Then we collect all those entities that you get from outside your radar but within the ping bounds, and then we generate blobs with them. So the blobs are collections of entities that give you a vague info as far as what direction they're in. Right now, we do have at least a readout on the blob to tell you the distance of the blob, because it's really hard to tell what the scales of those blobs are. But those blobs are pretty massive and they're pretty far away from you. But they give you a general indication of signatures that you're detecting at a distance that's outside of your radar. We want to do some work on, again, the UI for that, to actually get some more info about exactly what the strength levels of each of those signatures are. That way in the future, when we do a ping, if you're specifically looking for mineable resources, you'll look for those blobs that have a lot of mineable RS signature and you're like, hey, I'm going to go for those guys over there. So that's how the ping works.

And then finally scanning. So scanning is different in that when you go to the scan mode and then you move your cursor over an entity that can be scanned, so far those are spaceships and other vehicles and mineable resources, then holding your scan cursor over the item will give you a readout about what type of entity it is. So for ships, we have the owner, the pilot, faction, the fleet, we have its hit points, cargo that's on it, and that's it for ships. For mineable resources, we'll tell you the levels of the mineable resource that's available for that rock that you're looking at. And we're just about to expand that right now to other celestial entities, which right now are going to be associated with that point. So planets and space stations and the like will give you some info about what you're scanning when you, again, are pointing your ship at that item.

So the question is, what are we going to get as far as the flexibility for the radar, the ping, and the scanning items? So once we kind of solidify these behaviors, we can play around with the sensitivity of the radar. Not only how far it can seek out and put active entities onto your HUD and the radar. And again, we have those four signatures to play with. So we can vary how sensitive they are and also what distances they can search for. Ping the same way. So the ping, again, because it acts as a multiplier of the radar, how much better at influencing your radar they are, how sensitive they are to getting those signatures and sharing those blobs for you. Maybe some of the pings aren't so good at distilling exactly how much signature is in a blob, but maybe others are. So we'll be able to play with those values and give you some different behavior for that. As far as scanning, we haven't really done a lot of stuff on the scanning yet. So that's to be determined. But I imagine some things we can do is simply determine what types of entities you can scan. So far, because we don't have so many, we can't really play with that. But once you start adding the ability to scan a whole bunch of different types of entities in the universe, maybe some are really good at penetrating ship hulls. Maybe some are great at telling you about the population of some kind of colony on the planet. Maybe some, for you pirates out there, are really going to tell you how much cargo and exactly what type of cargo is on a ship and give you that info. It could be some defensive ones, like some scanners can tell you, hey, exactly what type of armament does this guy have that's coming to attack me, and down to how much DPS do they have, just how powerful are they? So there are those things that we can play with. Once we get that gameplay in there, it's as simple as making sure that we just generate each item that can modify those parameters and then give players access to those items.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So the short answer is the scanners are not tied to the hull, and it'll be a component that you can swap out and upgrade.

Kirk Tome · Ship System Developer

Correct. Just like anything we make, as long as we tie it to an item, all we do is we're really just reading parameters from that item. And then as long as the gameplay is disparate enough for those parameters, we just adjust them all and we're set.

Luke Pressley · Persistent Universe lead

Okay. Well, so we had a meeting, Tony, Todd, myself, Dan, all the guys, and figured out this. Right, you ready? Tier 0.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Tier 0. Not the end design, but what we're working on first.

Luke Pressley · Persistent Universe lead

But it's a very well fleshed out thing, okay? So missions can only be shared with your party members. The way you do that is the party leader will be able to see everybody's accepted missions. So they're the missions that they picked from their available list and actually accepted. And he'll be able to then share that with the entire party. So imagine I'm a pirate and you're not. You can't even see these missions. But I'm like, hey, Jared, I've got a really cool mission here. Would you like to play it with me? Yeah, sure? Okay, great. I'll accept this. You're the party leader. You can then share that with anyone else.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I bring up my mobiGlas. I can see your pirate mission, and even though I don't have the mission, I can see your mission and I can choose to share it with everybody in the group.

Luke Pressley · Persistent Universe lead

Yep, that's right. At that point, everyone in the party will receive an option, and it'll be to either accept that mission, thereby it'll become the overwriting kind of mission. It'll be your active mission. All your other missions that you have active at that time, those will still be ticking away. You can still fail them if you run out of time, but you can't get back to those. You can't set them back as active. You'd have to leave this party. So your other option is to leave the party for a while, until they've done this. The reason for that is just because you can only have one active mission at a time visible, and this should be the most important. You imagine you can have multiple missions at once and see all the markers. It's going to get extremely confusing. But you're in this party to play this mission at that point. And so you're either in or out. And if you want to then leave later on, obviously you just leave the party.

You can see all the markers that the mission owner sees. You're a mission owner almost just like him, as in you can complete objectives. But when it comes to things like making a decision, talking to someone and picking a decision, that will only be the mission owner. Only he'll be able to do that.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So everybody else becomes kind of like a mission renter. There's still the owner. He's the party leader.

Luke Pressley · Persistent Universe lead

He's the one that can make the decision. Junior owners, I guess, like a junior partner. But for instance, if a decision is to let someone live or die, and that's on a trigger, then one of your friends can just pull the trigger. Now, that's the mission owner's decision in allowing that person to come into this mission, right? But that's on them. They'll all share in the rewards, and that's also the reputational rewards. So if you're a goody two-shoes tagging along, getting your kicks by proxy with this pirate, you'll still take the reputational hit for that. So you don't get away scot-free. But I think for now, I mean, it's kind of up in the air, but I think we'll probably, for tier zero, just split the rewards down the middle for everyone, monetary-wise. And everything else just works like the party does. If you are not happy, you leave a party. You can pass leadership of a party. I'm pretty sure it'll have to be that if the mission owner leaves a party, he takes his mission with him as well. So if he's not happy with you guys, he can just leave and keep that mission himself, but you lose it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And if I've gotten the mission through the share and then I leave the party, do I lose the mission?

Luke Pressley · Persistent Universe lead

You lose the mission. You must stay with the mission owner.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So allow me to recap just to make sure that we have an understanding of this. Tier 0, initial implementation of party sharing. You join a group and the party leader can see everybody's active missions. They can choose to share one of those active missions with the entire group. At that point, the person who originally owned the mission stays the mission owner. Everybody else becomes what you referred to as junior owners. They can participate in the mission. They can see all the waypoints. They can complete objectives. The only thing they can't do is decisions and conversations. That is still the prerogative of the mission owner. So the mission owner is the one who can talk to the NPC mission giver, or whoever the mission giver wants you to talk to, and make the decisions. They are still making the calls while everybody else can do everything else to influence the decision. When they complete the mission, the rewards, at least in Tier 0, will probably be split evenly, just for simplicity's sake. And if you leave the group at any time, you lose your shared mission. And if you are the mission owner and you leave the group, you take your mission with you.

Luke Pressley · Persistent Universe lead

There's always going to be caveats. For instance, you won't see invites to mission givers. It's only when you get to that mission giver and accept one of their missions that you'll be able to share that. Other caveats could be that you might not be able to complete objectives such as checkpoints. If you're all in a race together, you have to take the mission owner to that place. You'll be able to see all his markers, so you'll be in the vehicle shooting and you'll see who's in the lead or whatever, so you'll be able to participate that way, but it has to be the mission owner's body that gets there. And it could be that the mission owner is given a virus to upload. Now, it's not that all of a sudden everyone has the virus, but they see where to plant it and they can protect him. They have to get him to that location.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So it might work slightly different depending on the type of mission involved.

Luke Pressley · Persistent Universe lead

Exactly. I'm excited. I've been looking forward to this for so long. We've been building missions that are kind of cooperative, but you have to all be at the same place at the same time. And it doesn't really work out without this kind of connective tissue.