Vehicle developers cover landing gear decoupling, Caterpillar cargo lifts, drones, modularity and the new Resource Network, capital ships like the Idris, and ship naming and customization. They also give status on the Hull C, Ranger, 600i, Polaris, Apollo, Retaliator and Crucible.
TL;DRYes, they want to decouple landing gear from wings, but it's a low-priority tech limitation with no scheduled time, and work in nearby areas might or might not fix it.
Yes. It's only like that at the moment just because of a pure tech limitation that is quite low down the list of things to solve. Basically, they're all just skinned meshes and attached to the vehicle in one go rather than three separate. However many landing gear you have, in the case of the Caterpillar, they all just get essentially compounded into one object and put on the ship, so they don't go with the bit that comes off. And we do want to fix that because it does look terrible when you lose a wing, or in the Eclipse's case where you see behind the scenes of all the other things that we make landing gear to get around things working. So yes, we want to do it. There are some bits and pieces in the pipeline that may help us with this in the near term, but it's not like, hey, here's a block of time on the schedule, we're going to fix landing gear, it's going to be on this day. We're doing other things in the area. It might fix it, it might not fix it.
I don't think so now. I know we did a bunch of work a while back to try and split it up, and we're very aware of the bug where people would log back in and the ship's in the wrong state and then you can't get to the cockpit, and we're looking at solutions for that, which is likely going to be a little button just on the cabin side of the cockpit so you can press the button and then rotate it back.
TL;DRThe Caterpillar's multi-state cargo doors need an expanded version of the original door system with linked animations, which is hard, but the team says it will absolutely get there, likely starting with a simple full-open animation.
This was actually something tech art were looking at the other day, seeing whether we can get somewhere with it. I could speak for hours about doors in video games. Doors in our game. Doors in Star Citizen. Anyone that's ever worked on video games knows how problematic doors are. They seem like they're a really simple thing, but they just go down a huge rabbit hole of questions and answers. And in Star Citizen, we essentially have three ways of doing doors or lifts or elevators, however you want to call them. We have a simple door, which is just basically an item that rotates between two states. You see it on all of our internal doors, simple back ramps. And as long as it goes between open and closed, that's good. We can't use that for the Caterpillar because it naturally has three states. It has open to horizontal and then down to the ground. We have the elevator system, which is used on a lot of our ships for moving between floors and transitioning to the outside of a ship. That has some issues. If you've ever been on a 600i elevator in quantum and found yourself with the elevator in the middle of space, that's one of the issues with that. And then we have the new transit system, which is primarily built for environments, and you see that in a lot of ships, but there's an issue with that at the moment, a limitation that we're resolving soon, where it can't go between zones. So it can't be a lift inside a ship that then goes outside the ship. So if you look at the Carrack's lift, for example, that only ever goes internally. That's a transit lift. But transit and the legacy elevator system can't do complex synchronized animations, which is what the Caterpillar needs. So the Caterpillar needs the original door system, but expanded to have multi-state doors with complex linked animations. It's a fun problem to solve for what looks like a relatively simple thing. So we could change the animation to just go all the way down to the ground for all the doors, and that will fix one set of issues. And then people will ask, why do I have to open the doors all the way every time? And you would likely run into the issue where, because they will open all the way, and the Caterpillar has such a long nose, you're going to have to have a nicely flat surface along all those areas for those doors to not lift the entire ship up.
It's a nightmare. Yes, we want to do it because it's cool. But we hit this problem with a lot of our ships when we're in early stages, white boxing them. And we're like, oh yeah, we're going to do this bit here. And then normally someone that understands the complexity of the issues comes in from design: yeah, it's not quite going to work, we're going to have to change this bit.
There's been a bunch of really good articles on various video game websites about the complexity of doors in video games. And especially if you have no insight into game development from the outside, it's like, hey, it's a door. It opens, it closes. It's simple, right? But behind the scenes, they are simultaneously, one, one of the most complex things in games, and two, the most abused things in games to get things done. Anything that moves in games, probably a door.
Yeah, we'll absolutely get it. Like I say, I think a sensible first step will just be to change the animation to be the full one and see how bad that turns out. It may not be as bad as we think it's going to be, but we'll see.
Yeah, if you've been playing Star Citizen a long time, you'll remember the old landing UI, which displayed a little version of your ship relative to the landing pad. We absolutely want to have, maybe not that exactly come back, but something approximate to that to give you that spatial context without you having to go into external camera view.
TL;DRThere's no single answer: some smaller ships are stepping stones and some careers move to locations, but the aim is soft gating that encourages a preferred progression rather than hard-blocking players.
There isn't one answer because it's not the same answer across all the different careers. Yes, some of them are stepping stones, but they're not the sole way of going up that career. For other ones, we see it's not going to be an entirely ship-based career. You may have a ship at one point, but then it may transition to a location-based version of that. If you think refineries now, refining is all done at stations, and in the future we'll have the Expanse in game. And people can do refining now on the station. So is that the starter? Or is the Expanse the starter? It's sort of what you make of it. Obviously, with station-based ones you don't have as much flexibility as you will with the Expanse, and I'm sure in the future we'll have larger refinery ships. But also it's there to sort of gate the progression in some way. If you think of most RTSs, you have your tech tree of maybe not vehicles, but the buildings you can build or the troops you can make. And it's sort of similar to that, in that we don't want you to go straight in at the top, ideally. We want you to build your way through it. But yeah, I'm just waffling now. I completely lost my train of thought because there was a car going outside banging down the road.
Yeah, no, I think I get what you're saying. There is a progression intended in many instances. But at the same time, there are situations that we envision in this game where you might want two smaller things as opposed to two larger things. So like anything else in game development, there's really no simple black and white answer to the question. It is a situationally based question. There will be some professions where it'll be a very clear start here, then go here, then go here. And then as the mission feature team develops things, there will be situations designed to encourage use of smaller, lesser vehicles as opposed to big giant stuff.
With the scope of Star Citizen, there's so many ways you can play it. Play it your way, whatever franchise I've just stolen that from. It's less about hard gating, but soft gating. We don't stop you from doing stupid things. We try and encourage you to go down the preferred path. You have one billion UEC, no one's going to stop you buying an Orion as your first ship in game by yourself and trying to run that. You're probably not going to have a good time. That's why the Prospector's there to help you learn about things.
Yes, sort of, the Apollo. Short answer, no. There's nothing to specifically talk about. The slightly longer answer is there are multiple scenarios in Squadron, mostly in the side missions, that make use of them. So they are on the Vehicle Feature Team schedule in the near future, to essentially do a lightweight ship IFCS that is remote controlled, that will be the foundational aspect of drones in the PU.
TL;DRModularity is paused rather than cancelled, because the team that would build it was reorganized and the upcoming Resource Network should let it be done properly; the assets exist and are waiting on that underlying tech.
Am I having problems in general or am I having problems with modularity? The team that was going to work on it was the Vehicle Tech Team. Those of you who pay attention to the roadmap updates will see they were rebranded, reformed to the Arena Commander Feature Team. So naturally doing core vehicle tech is not particularly part of their remit anymore. That transitioned to the Vehicle Feature Team. So we had a look at what was planned to be done, and we had a lot of other things to do first. And around the same time as we were doing that, EUPU started working on Resource Network, which I think you briefly showed in ISC last week. And you'll hear a lot more of that soon. And that is essentially quite a paradigm shift in how we set up the interiors of vehicles and environments and locations, everything. So any of the work that we would have done for modularity from VTT or VFT, we probably could have rushed it through, got it in now, and then we'd have had to redo it all anyway when Resource Network comes online. So the work they're doing for Resource Network should, as far as I'm aware from all the meetings I've sat in and been part of, allow us to do that out the gate. So, yep, the assets, they're all still there. They're all just waiting for the underlying tech. Not cancelled, not stealthily removing modularity from the game, as some people constantly tell me I am.
And we can never reproduce it internally as well. That's the other fun thing. We think we fixed it and then it'll go on PTU and we won't see it for days, and then there'll be one person who has it 100% of the time, all the time, every time.
TL;DRCapital ships need optimization work, must go through Squadron 42 first, and should only arrive with worthwhile gameplay supported by systems like Resource Network, refueling and player-controlled ATC, not as big, slow empty ships.
There's a bunch of optimization work. Naturally, ships of that size, they have a cost to them. And as they are, the Idris and Javelin specifically, they are going into Squadron first and being adjusted to Squadron's needs, where they can be a bit more generous with performance than Star Citizen can. So aside from that, we're obviously somewhat at the mercy of those teams. We don't want to have the PU Idris and the Squadron Idris. Just to use a wild example that is not true: say Squadron want to make the Idris 50 meters longer for whatever reason. We then have to take that on the PU side. So we want to be absolutely sure nothing else is changing on those ships before we bring them into players' hands, because otherwise it's just a waste of time for both teams internally. From a gameplay side, we don't want them to just feel like, hey, this is just a ship that is big and handles slowly, and I sit in the pilot seat and I can fire all the Idris's guns from my pilot seat, but I move at 10 meters a second and I rotate at five degrees a minute.
Yeah. So things like Resource Network are critical to having a fun multi-crew experience on board a ship like that, because that gives you all that engineer gameplay that everyone loves. Then there's other supplementary systems that really gel. We have refueling. Refueling is an advancement on the docking system that we put in game. Player-controlled ATC is a refinement on top of refueling, and you need that for Idrises and Javelins for bringing ships in. And we want to put these ships in game, in players' hands, when they bring worthwhile, noticeable gameplay with them. We don't want to just treat it as a box-ticking exercise and go, hey, Idris is done, shove it in game.
I think also these ships are a big investment of internal art and design resources and all the other teams that it takes to make a ship. And like you say, if all that investment is going into just making a big, empty experience, it's kind of not great.
I think he's lying. Because if it is done, then great, because we can just scratch off a massive amount of time in our schedule. No, it's not done. What we've shown of it, and there are areas of the ship that look great, it is not ready to go out.
But as John was just saying, even if it was geometry done, it's not a question of just the geometry being done. That's not all that is involved in making a ship of that size and that scale and that play type viable for the game.
So it's not enough. And if everyone is happy with what they've seen in game so far and the classing that is done, then also that's cool, because that takes a lot of time off our schedule as well.
TL;DROlder ships wait on priority, scope and resources, since the vehicle team plans far ahead and only starts ships with gameplay guaranteed, so ships needing new gameplay like the Endeavor or Orion are still many months off.
At the end of the day, it comes down to priority and scope and resources, which is fun, boring management stuff that I have to deal with on a daily basis. The vehicle team, and I think I've talked about this in the past, we work to an 18 to 24 month ahead of time schedule, and we get fairly locked into that. A lot of the other teams in CIG are a lot more agile, so to speak, but we have quite a long lead time because these ships take a long time to make. And if there's any artists in chat, they will know that chopping and changing on a weekly basis is just terrible for your concentration and getting into the zone of doing things. The worst thing we can do is go, hey, you're working on an Aegis ship for three weeks. Oh, by the way, now you're working on an Origin ship for three weeks. Oh, by the way, now you're working on a Drake ship for three weeks. So wherever we can, and there have been exceptions in the past, once we start a ship, we see it through to the end of release, and we don't tend to start ships now in production without fairly firm guarantees that the gameplay is going to come with them at the end. That was different way back in the past. We would just work on a ship. We'd ask for the gameplay. If the gameplay wasn't there, we'd shove it out. Example, Starfarer. That's not how we want to do things these days, and hopefully people have seen that over the last, I don't want to say, three, four years, where we deliver ships with their gameplay, because it improves the experience for everyone. So a lot of those big ships that have less standard gameplay, I can't think of a better word. I'll say the Endeavor because everyone's banging on about the Endeavor in chat. It's going to be very hard for me to try and convince Todd or Tony to go, hey, stop working on Pyro, let's do farming or let's do science. And even if I could do that, that would still be many, many months away. Same for the Orion. The Orion, whilst it's a mining ship, is not planned to use the current mining system. It's going to use a much larger scale version of it. So putting it in game now to try and mine the current space rocks we have would be like trying to scoop up peas with a shovel or something equally bizarre. Again, it would not do the ship the justice it deserves, having waited that long.
Kind of. Yes, but no. It's not how we want to do it. It's just how we've got to do it at the moment, with how the Ballista is set up technically on the art side. We will revisit the Ballista when we can slot that in and allow it to take the additional paints on the Atlas platform, and then they will all be happy and shared. Just not quite sure when that time is going to crop up yet.
Get rid of all those Jefferies tubes that Ben so loves. I think it'd be nice. Again, I don't know when we would do it, but there's space where we could sneak it in at some point.
TL;DRThe team wants players to customize ship interiors much more but can't fully support it yet; they hope to commit to plans and jump in fully by the end of the year, helped by upcoming tech.
So the intended goal, I guess, from my point of view is, yeah, we want players to be able to customize their ships to their heart's content. Part of what Erwin and I want to try and tick off the list this year is getting our customization plans fully developed and committed to. When it comes to a release ship, you get a ship all done and you start walking around it and looking at it and it's like, cool, it's great, but it looks empty because there's no dressing in it. And then we start to dress it, and then we get the, oh, this is cool, but we want players to be able to do this. And we're not quite at that point where we can support that fully yet. You'll notice on some of the more recent ships, we started to give a few freebies: when you get your ship, you get your bottle of beer in the fridge and some space snacks to keep you tided over. But yeah, we do want to allow much more customization of the interior of ships. We just can't fully support it just yet. And we've dipped our toe in, lukewarm. So we'll jump in fully hopefully by the end of the year or at some point soon.
Yeah, we're in a weird middle ground of tech as well that will help us. PES, Persistent Entity Streaming, will in theory allow you to grab anything, put it in your ship, and it will stay there till the end of time for that ship's life. So that will give you a way to customize your ship, and that goes back to what Ben said. Maybe at that point we will start not bringing in ships with all this dressing and allow people to do it, or you'll be able to buy all the cute fluffy bunnies to put in the corner from shops in game, or there'll be subscriber ones. Recently we've done the bobbleheads, and that uses the current item port system. And that's why it doesn't work across all the ships, because there's a lot of ships where there is nowhere to put them that's in a nice place. But with PES, people can just shove them anywhere they want. You could have 50 stuck on a table in the back of the ship somewhere. So PES will help do that as well. Resource Network, again, will add a level of interactivity to those things. The team working on that showed a nice little demo, I want to say Tuesday, but maybe it was last Tuesday, where it's really simple, but it shows the promise of it. So there is a desk lamp that you could pick up and move around. And depending on the power state of that room, it's wirelessly connected into that room state. So your cool little custom desk lamp that can change color turns on and off depending on where it is in the ship. If that area of the ship has gone down with power, it turns off. It's not this nuclear-powered desk lamp. So there's lots of things coming, and we've tested the water in various ways, like the 300 series one. And when we settle on it, we'll make sure we hoover up all the changes to work, like anyone that's got their coffee machine in the 300i. That item as it stands will probably get changed to a different item, but it behaves the same way and looks the same way, to allow it to function with whatever the final system is.
And I think when we have experimented with this stuff so far, there's been a number of bugs where you can drop a water bottle in your ship and it explodes. Or we had a rogue beer bottle that would cause lots of physics issues because it would never go to sleep. So there's a lot of things to work out. Forever rattling.
TL;DRPublic ship naming rollout was stopped because of unresolved visual problems like tiny, unlit or paint-obscured names, but newer ships already have the tech, shown by serial numbers, ready for when those issues are solved.
I'll go first. So we rolled it out on limited ships at the time, and we learned a lot from it, not just on the content side but also on the platform side, of how to deal with the waves of naming. But primarily on the content side, there was a lot of issues we thought would happen that did happen and we don't have a good solution to them. Like, hey, I've named my ship a four-letter word, it's teeny tiny on screen, whereas someone who's named it 32 characters looks fine. Or it's in an area where there's no light shining on it, or I put a paint on it and now I can't see it. So we decided with the platform team to stop the public-facing rollout of that until we figured out what's going on with it. But every ship that's been released since that time has the tech there to enable it. You'll know if your ship supports it because you'll see serial numbers popping up on the ship in various places, because that uses the same system behind the scenes, but we have a lot more control over it because we know it's always going to be this amount of characters. So yeah, if you see a serial number on your ship, you're pretty safe in the knowledge that that ship is ready for ship naming when we solve the visual issues alongside it.
Yeah, because I think naming your ship is quite a big deal, and the kind of attachment that brings, feeling like that is part of the whole experience. And then like you say, when you get it and it's Space Bob and it's this big and you can't even see it unless you get the light just right so it's catching on the glass. So I think we definitely want to make better use of the feature and improve the quality and the experience that the player gets to see.
It's actually on the list of ideas we have internally that are somewhat, yeah, this is a valid ship idea. Trust me, this list is... We could fill a book with the ideas that we've had internally and taken externally of, hey, wouldn't it be cool if this ship was a thing? And a food truck is actually quite high up on the list of things that, hey, that actually makes sense for the game. It would have benefits, it's just finding a time and place for it. And a manufacturer.
Yeah, it's something that comes up quite a lot. It's something I personally would want to have happen. Again, coming back to the gameplay side of things, it probably makes more sense when we have, and this is something almost every time I see Chris in person in the UK office, he asks me when he's going to get his forward observer role for vehicles, for relaying data from scanning targets. And that's the thing that would take an artillery truck from, I can point my gun in that direction and blindly fire, to an actual usable, hey, I've got my guy on a bike who's a scout spotting the rounds or laser designating targets so they'd land accurately. So maybe.
TL;DRShip lighting varies because ships were made at different times by different teams without full unification, and tech changes and the art-versus-design tension affected it; guidelines now exist to unify it as much as possible.
Things change over time. People's opinions change, tech changes. Different teams do them at different times. I think we've got to remember that there are ships that were worked on a long time ago, and there are ships that obviously we're putting out every few months. We haven't necessarily gone back and unified all of that across the board. There's a wide range of lighting on some of our ships. What I can say is we've got guidelines now that we've set in place, and we've had input from the lighting team to unify as much of this as we can. I think the other thing is, with game development of a game of our size, quite often things can be set one way and you think they're good and you move on, and you're two years down the line and you've worked on 10 different ships since then, and someone's small change in one area of the game has impacted something unexpected in other areas of the game. Everyone loves the Scout lights.
We use them in the design playtests. We send someone in a Scout ahead of everyone else at nighttime to light the way. Following up on Ben's point about people changing things in unexpected places, I'm sure years ago there was an issue where the graphics team changed something with lights, and it broke a bunch of them, and a lot of the ships at the time used them exclusively. I can't remember which way it made them go, but it either made them go really dim or really bright. So you could have two ships that were released at the same time, and the one that used projector lights with a projector texture suddenly became wildly different to the other one. And there's also the forever battle between design and art, over art wanting it to look nice and not blow out the definition of the terrain, and design going, hey, we want this bright enough that I can fly at full speed.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure I remember at some point there were some non-arty people that went in. But then I guess I'm taking the 'art is more important' route, as John's probably taking the 'no, you should be able to see where you're going' route.
TL;DRIt's a mix: early metrics reserved space for expected ship items, but changing feature needs can force changes, which are easy on roomy larger ships and a headache on ships at their size limit.
I think it's a bit of both. From very early on in the project's life, metrics were established for what we thought was all of the ship items we would require. And from that point, we made sure that they were accommodated in the ships we were designing. It's sometimes impossible to have a crystal ball and see that far into the future, though. If we take the resource network stuff that's going on at the moment, that's a great example: we knew we needed an item in there. We thought we would need one item of a certain size, so that's the item we accounted for. Now that feature is starting to be developed, and design documents are being written, and people are starting to actually develop and playtest and see what it's like, we realized that actually it wasn't going to be particularly fun, or the feature team realized it wasn't going to be particularly fun. So from their point of view, oh yeah, it'd be great if we could add this and add that, especially on our larger multi-crew ships. A core element of what Star Citizen is, is this multi-crew gameplay. And I think there's certain things where you can just go, actually, yeah, do you know what? It's a little bit of a compromise, but we're happy with this for the amount of time it would take. But in this case, personally, I would much rather make it fun and make it good. And if it means that we need to put a little bit more time into doing it, I think that's fine. In general, we're lucky that a lot of our larger ships have some space. We've allocated space for them. If we've got something that's Hammerhead sized or whatever, and we need to go in and add some additional items that are relatively small and can be swapped out and the player can carry them, that's not too much of an issue. It becomes more of an issue when we've got a ship that's right at the limit of its size class, and we want to take the power plant from the back and move it to the front because we want to add a bit more excitement into the gameplay. If there's not room for it, it means that, well, we need to extend the exterior of the ship. And if the exterior of the ship needs extending, it means it might bump up a size class. And if that ship is supposed to fit in another ship's hangar, then it no longer fits in there. So there's a lot of knock-ons from what you would think of as quite a simple change of, oh, can we just add an extra meter here? Can we just shift this room about a little bit? If it starts really impacting the exterior of the ships and the size of the ships, it just causes a lot of headaches. That's not to say we'll never be doing it. It's just we've only got a finite amount of time and we want to make sure we spend that time wisely. And I think we focus it on stuff that's going to really improve the fun of a feature. I'm rambling.
To give a good example of how things change over the years: as soon as we're aware of a gameplay feature coming in that affects the ships, we work with that team to try and mitigate any knock-ons for us. But sometimes things are just wildly out of our control. So the example is, probably five years ago, we used to have a radar item on a ship, and we made the metric for it, and it was basically a cube. At some point after that was decided, another team was like, hey, no, we're not going to have a radar item. We're going to have a radar and a scanner item. And I'm like, well, we just spent all this time carving out this space in all the ships. So sure, we can do that. But what we'll do is we'll carve that metric in half. And then you have these oblong or rectangular boxes, one for the radar, one for the scanner. And then relatively recently, that team has gone, actually, we're just going to have the radar now. We're not going to need a scanner. I was like, oh, fine. We've got all these spaces now that have no use. And handily, the resource network came along and went, hey, guys, we need a space on every ship to put at least one relay. I'm like, ha, have I got the space just for you to put these relays in. So sometimes it works in our favor. Sometimes it doesn't. But that's game development.
Ideally, we'd have them all on the side. And I think as we go through the gold standards on a lot of ships, you'll see that happen. But if for some reason we can't, and they're on the top or they're on the bottom, then maybe not per room, but per sector of the ship, gravity control will help you in that instance, in that you will be able to turn off gravity for that area, and then you can just float out there.
See, this is all news to me, because I'm sure John said to me in the past that, no, no, we've got to go on the side, and I'm like, oh God, all right, fair enough.
From my side, it's getting pretty close to being complete. We had to spend a bit of time bringing it up to metric standard. And that ship was an example of what we were talking about earlier, how we would much rather finish a ship and put it out than have to keep jumping on and off it. That ship got parked a reasonable amount of time ago. When we came back to it, we realized that our standards have changed in terms of some of the ways we approach things, and metrics were much more important than they may have been. So there's been a decent amount of effort put into bringing it up to how we expect it to be now. But it's getting pretty close. Got a couple of artists just finishing it off.
Naturally blocked by the tech of two wheels. We did some work on the Vehicle Feature Team to scope out the work needed, pitched it to Chris: hey, here's what it's going to take to do it, and here's the other things that we need to do in that time. And we're doing the other stuff. So it's a shame, but it's sort of understandable when you have the priorities that we have.
The concept is totally complete for the 600i rework. Looks sweet. You mentioned an upcoming event that we can't talk about. It won't be shown there, but maybe I can twist Jared's arm to show a...
Yeah, I know it was on the roadmap. It was going to start. So the team that would work on it, which is the US vehicle team, they're finishing off the Corsair at the moment. And we have a few options for what they will go on to next. The Apollo is one of them. I'm not promising that it will stay being the Apollo. It might be something else, but you will see that change on the roadmap when that's decided.
TL;DRThe Retaliator rework was paused when resources were shifted; the interior is roughly 90% done, including a side docking collar, while the exterior still needs work to modern standards.
Yeah, so again, the Retaliator, we did a decent amount of work on that, getting the interior up to scratch, just making sure that corridors were wide enough and ship items fit where they needed to fit, doors could fit AI carrying things through, and all that sort of fun stuff. This is the one where we've moved the docking collar to the side on the interior. Unfortunately, we had to shift around some resources internally, so we paused it. So the interior is probably like 90% done. The exterior, we need to put some work into.
Pretty much just bringing the exterior up to modern standards and accounting for the changes we made on the interior, which was that docking collar being on the side rather than top and bottom, and the lift.
Yeah, luckily on that ship we did have space to do all the changes we needed to and not make it any bigger, which was great because it's a very beautiful ship. It's just, yeah, John told me I had to move the docking collar. Now I'm learning I might not have to.
I saw a question go flying up chat about the Crucible. That absolutely will get a concept rework from scratch. It will still look like your favorite flying space crab, but it will have some changes to account for all the changes that have happened with the game and the mechanics since then.