Reverse the Verse: March 4th, 2016

Ships don't change every week, but we can talk about some of the changes. We had an artist who is moving. The folks who were working on the Xi'an Scout have moved on to the Herald, which, that's a good thing. Meanwhile, tech folks are working on the Xi'an Scout, getting it flyable right now. What else? Reliant is getting hangar-ified. The Bengal: a bunch of people have moved over to the Bengal because we need it for some scenes in Squadron. We just got the concepts in for our small mining ship. I can't say much more about it. This is one of the ones that you'll see in the vault someday. It will look nothing like what came out today, but I liked it. Chris Roberts had more changes than I did.

What else, Ben?

Argo pods. We've got a guy in the UK building Argo pods, because you'll be able to configure the Argo for different... They're working on the variants, I guess.

You'll glow like the sun. One of the nice things with this is it starts letting us build out bigger EM signature and IR signature ranges. So as those start to grow, we can eventually start doing some more fine-tuning with our missile tracking to make it so that, okay, if your EM is off the chart, that chaff may not help you as much as you thought it would. If your IR is just glowing red hot, the flares aren't going to be creating as much of a disparate signature as you'd want to avoid an incoming missile.

Right, and figuring out not only the benefits but the consequences of getting better or different equipment is going to be something that we're working on, because simply getting a better piece of equipment doesn't mean it's better across the board. We need to figure out how to balance things like becoming a bigger target for other ships. It will generate more heat. Therefore, you have to compensate by getting coolers that can cool the ship more effectively, and other properties like that.

Well, another thing is that it's more risky to have, because the higher the power plant, the more power going through the system. When things go really wrong, when things explode, you're going to have a far worse problem on your hands if you were using a larger power plant than if you had something smaller.

Similar reasons, really, just on the opposite side of the spectrum, where the power plants are dealing with EM and coolers are dealing with IR. It's sort of a balance between emissions, safety, cost, weight, all these things. You can disperse a ton of heat, but you're possibly drawing more power to do so. These things don't necessarily scale one to one.

And since you are cooling better, you are generating more heat by the component.

For a live in-game example of this with the cooler, I want to say it's the Aurora CL. It has more industrially tuned components, so it's going to have a higher baseline power output and a bit more cooling efficiency, but in the same regard, they do have much higher signature multipliers. So you get that benefit, but it's at the cost of, well, if you're a cargo ship, you aren't really caring as much about having a baby EM or IR signature. You're caring more about 'I want to move this cargo from point A to point B.' And so it's sort of that trade-off you make.

Also, there's damage to consider. When you're in battle, repairing a component that is more costly, larger and more beneficial requires more resources. If it actually gets destroyed, having spare parts for repairing that component will come at a greater cost.

So with shields in 2.2, one of the things we did to give us a better baseline for the bigger component refactoring is that we've actually locked in the shields on ships. So the shields that every ship comes with inside its family are going to be restricted to those ships for 2.2. And a big part of that is just so that when we do roll out the new system, we can really start fresh with the much more detailed and updated damage formulas that we've been working out over the past few months.

Why don't you talk about how that system is actually going to roll out?

Oh, yeah. So the biggest thing that you'll be seeing when we get the updated shields out there is the smaller generators. They'll fragment out into a few other parts, like the power plants and the coolers. But now you're going to have pool-based shielding, so that everything becomes additive. Your overall performance will be more an average of the sum of your parts. So how much damage of each type you're absorbing and how much you're mitigating is going to be driven a lot more by the updated components.

And the specific rollout plan for that is?

Yeah, so for that, we're targeting 2.3. Some of it will depend on when we get some of the final tech implemented and all tested out so we're happy with it. But along with that comes the replacement of the existing shield generators that we've sold on the store. With the 2.2 patch notes, we had the conversion matrix. So if you currently own one of the Seal Corp INK Mark or Splash shields, definitely check out the patch notes or the patch posts so you can see how many of the new Seal Corp WEB shields you'll be getting once these new components roll out.

Some of the behavior is being updated. We're looking at having it scale. For instance, with ballistic penetration, you would have a certain amount of ballistic penetration when the shield is at 100% health versus when it's at zero, and it will scale between the two. So if you've brought the shields down a fair way, you'll be significantly more effective with your ballistics. And the curve on that means you probably want to have mixed loadouts. We're changing it so that the regen delay only happens when you hit zero. So if you hit zero, you get a big reprieve: now is your chance to really push, because they have some number of seconds before they even begin to recharge. And the recharge itself is switching to be basically on a curve as well. So you're recharging at all times. And when you take damage, it resets your regen rate, which then recovers over time. It doesn't actually reset it to zero. It chips away at it towards zero. So what this means is that, conceivably, the smallest weapon in the game could eventually overtake the strongest shield in the game. It will take forever, but it also means that those small weapons still have a place in a massive cap ship game. Because if we're dealing with something with hundreds of thousands of shield points, and you're doing 20 damage per shot, that still matters even though the regen rate is clearly going to overtake that, because you're interrupting the regen rate. And so if you have large ships doing the real meat of the damage and there aren't support ships, a lot of that health just comes back. Because at those larger scales, your rate of fire is reduced. You just have fewer incoming hits. So there is a reason to have the jabs from your small support ships.

And probably the biggest change that's going to occur is that each of the ships is going to have its own shield emitter. The shield emitter will derive the stats for the shield that it generates from the shield generators. So faces are going to be locked to each ship. If it's a four-face shield ship, it'll always have four faces. However, things like the overall health, the rate at which health recovers, shield hardening (where you choose the priority of a particular face, which means a bigger percentage of the overall shield health gets shunted to that face), how fast it recovers, the absorption factor and the waste ratio, those stats are going to be derived from the shield generators that you can install and then upgrade on the ship. So upgrading a shield is done by acquiring better shield generators. So if I have three shield generators and I get one that is much better at generating shield resource to repair the shields faster, I've upgraded the way the shield works. If I get one that is much better at the face hardening aspect of shields, getting one improves that aspect; getting all three and upgrading improves it dramatically.

The thing about shield hardening is that it's specifically a feature for multi-crew. With shield hardening, we can balance our shields so that if you don't ever touch shield management, you get basically the performance that it says on the tin. If you are constantly moving your shield health towards incoming fire, then you're increasing the amount of health, improving the percentage of health in that system, and that improves the hardening against incoming damage. And the way the numbers work out in some of our early tests, you could potentially be multiplying your total capacity for damage by a factor of as much as 5 to 10. So it's really powerful to have somebody, not in a supporting ship, but actually on your ship managing your shields.

Right. That's exciting, because it makes shield management a real thing. So doing things like shunting power, figuring out which face is going to be the priority, turning off shield generators if you need to conserve power, or regenerating the shield health at a faster rate at the cost of turning shields off for a limited amount of time. These are real things that we can achieve.

A lot of it is also coming out pretty systemically, which I'm pretty happy with. He mentions that if you turn off a shield face, it regens faster. And the reason it regens faster is that it's still drawing the same amount of shield power, or shield resource, but it's no longer using it for the maintenance cost of actually having it up. Which means that you can drop your shields to bring your shields up faster, accepting whatever window of damage you have. Or if you think you can get behind a rock real quick, drop your shields, they charge up faster, and now you have the benefit of all that hardening back. It's a pretty nice interlocking system.

Shields are hard. This also lets us do more realistic damage simulations. So if you damage one of the many shield generators you have on the ship, it has real consequences for the overall performance of the shield. Destroying one completely has a very dramatic consequence, but these are things that you can see and are going to be tangible.

Yeah, we're really trying to get a lot of the groundwork in for the core function of a lot of the things we've been talking about. Some of the nuanced ability for players to actively configure these things on the fly will sort of layer on once we've got the core formulas and back end implemented. But it's absolutely something that we're pushing for, because, like Calix was mentioning with multi-crew ships, we don't want the engineering station to just be something where you think, 'I'm going to just assign an NPC crew member to this all the time.' We want it to be something where, no, this is the most badass shield-managing engineer in the galaxy, because he can take a 100,000-health shield system and get 400,000 health out of it in a single fight.

And having internally accessible items is something that we're also trying to achieve. So there's that excitement of: shield generator A is down, engineer, go run down the hall and repair that component, or grab a replacement component from the cargo hold and pop a new one in, because otherwise we're dead meat in the middle of battle.

So for a lot of the components that we'll be rolling out, most ships have a placeholder right now. And it'll be similar to what we're doing with shields, where we take something we've had a somewhat functional but more simplified version of and just expand on it. So fleshing out radar, making that a more compelling set of choices in what the component does. Fleshing out avionics, getting life support to matter so you can't just meat-wagon your Constellation. Just slowly taking all those things we have the stubbed-in foundation for, really fleshing them out, making them nuanced, and making them something compelling for people to interact with.

Gravity generators, avionics. Probably we'll be dealing with the more specialist components on a case-by-case basis until there's a strategy for unifying all that. But things like mining equipment are probably going to be built for the ship.

Yeah, it'd be more specialized for some of the role-specific functionality.

Some cockpit views will be changing. Probably not any of the ones you're thinking of, because we actually do design these cockpit experiences to be as open or limited as... I mean, generally, we don't want every ship to feel the same. First of all, you want it to fly differently. You want it to have different strengths and weaknesses. The Freelancer cockpit is fundamentally different from the Merlin cockpit or the Mustang cockpit. And really, the driving force for improving or altering these things is bringing in the improvements to HUD and screen MFD interactions, and making it so that when you sit down in front of this bulky thing, that bulky thing is doing something. It's part of the gameplay. And maybe you aren't seeing space, but you're not seeing static art either. That, I think, is where a lot of the issues with some of the current cockpits would fade away: when the thing that's blocking your view is actually doing something other than just being pretty art.

To be determined, really. The goal is to try to get a patch out every month. We will sometimes slip, sometimes we won't, and we'll see how it shapes up. I imagine we'll know a lot more in about two or three weeks. I imagine we'll know a lot more in four weeks. Yes, we'll definitely have the answer in five weeks. Hopefully.

We've gotten the patch to PTU every month on schedule. It's always impossible to fully estimate how long a PTU period each patch will need, though. It depends on the available testers and the available resources to fix things.

There are two essential criticisms, one of which is totally invalid and the other of which is true. 'Star Citizen is a scam, we're stealing everyone's money,' blah, blah, blah. No, we're delivering something every month and you can see it. That's what really, really matters to us from a public perspective. We want to show you what we're doing. The second criticism is that this game has all sorts of delays and so on, and to that I would say it's Chris Roberts' game. It will never be quite on time, but we will always try.

No, no, that means all the Avengers will have the same shield on them. The Constellation has its shield set for it. So the Gladiator has its own shield setup fixed to that ship right now. So there are still going to be differences between the ships. You just won't be able to move the shield components around between the ships.

Yeah, the main reason for this has to do with the changing numbers, and how quickly and easily this can break the system when we don't have 100% of the components tuned up yet. If you'd like an example of this, go ahead and look at the Vanguard in PTU.

I've said a few times that we're very much spinning plates as we get a lot of these components set up, and no one wants to clean up a bunch of broken plates, so we're focusing on the spinning.

It was the Reliant interface, wasn't it? That looks very good. The HUD previsualization: Zane did awesome, awesome work on that.

Now, this is a previs. It's not something that's enabled in game. Another word we use is look dev. It's them finding different ways and finally figuring out what look they want before they have to actually build it in the game. The MISC UIs all tend to use 3D holograms. I think that's the direction we've been going with that. So you can expect similar-looking HUDs on all MISC ships eventually, at some point: Starfarer, Freelancer.

And actually, looking back to the earlier question about viewing angles, one of the big things that helped prompt that was that we wanted the Reliant, more than any of the other MISC ships, to have just an unprecedented viewing angle. It has the biggest open cockpit. We removed a bunch of struts from some of the initial concept art to make sure you just have this great clean look. And now the HUD helps with that, so you don't have anything really in front of your face. It's all cleanly tucked up at the top.