Calling All Devs - Cap Ship Navigation & Death of a Spaceman

The direct answer is yes. Obviously teleporting is not nice and not something we want to do. It's not something that's very safe to do in a multiplayer environment. I mean, someone else could be there. So it's something we really want to improve if we can. The ideal scenario is you guys are right on the money when you use your enter interactions and everything looks great. But of course, we want to be generous. We don't want you to have to stand on pinpoint accuracy to hit that ship enter or get the soda from the drink machine. So there's various things we're doing, and some of the things should already be coming your way in 3.2. One of them would be the ship enters: it used to be you set it going, you can run away and then it teleports you back. Now it shouldn't teleport you back anymore. If you run away, that's telling us you don't want to get into that ship anymore. And then if you're close enough, we should slide you into position a bit better. But what we're hoping to do is more the things we're doing when you choose to pick something up, where it actually walks the player over if it's close enough. Obviously, at any time, you should be allowed to pull out and say, hey, I actually didn't want to pick that up, I didn't realize you were going to move me. We don't want to take control away from you. You're the player, you're in control. The kind of animation is the length of which we don't want you to have control. Even then, wherever we can, we should allow you to break out.

It's a delicate balance like everything else with Star Citizen. You want it to be as diegetic and realistic as possible, but you have to measure that against time and technology and priorities and whatnot.

Everyone wants different things as well. Some people are very happy with if you click to use a vehicle, it will just teleport you into the seat and off you go. Zero second delay kind of gameplay. And our animators will obviously love you to see the beauty of the things they create.

It's permadeath, but the idea is that you pass on your belongings to your next of kin. And with Death of a Spaceman, the idea is that you can die so many times and basically be revived, but you've lost a lot of your equipment that you took out on that journey. And you can be revived and then you'll be damaged. It'd be similar to Luke losing a hand or Thor losing his eye kind of thing. Spoilers for people. Especially Luke losing his hand, that's a good spoiler. From there, you basically have your body adjusted and modified and you get older through the game. And it's more just looks, and I don't think it'll affect your reflexes right yet or anything like that, or stamina. But then there'll come a certain point in time where you basically have to create a new character, and your old character dies and passes on, and now you're playing your new character. And it won't have all the scars and be battle-worn, old and jaded like we are. It'll be the new young pups.

And just to assuage any fears, when you talk about losing items, you're talking about losing the items that you have physically on you at that time. The stuff in your bank or in your hangar or whatnot, those bequeath to your new character.

Correct. It is basically about your local inventory and what you take out on, let's say you die going and exploring a sun. Go explore the sun. Or go and explore, let's say, a jump point between Pyro and Stanton. If you die in there, then you're losing the equipment that you took on that journey. And we'll have to worry about, is it there for X amount of time? So if you revive and you hurry back there, it might be there. That's something that we would still need to work out, but the idea is that you lose that. And so you want to be careful about what you're doing. We want to create that sense of urgency of: I want to stay alive, I don't want to lose what I have.

That's a great question. So the feature team that I'm a part of right now has been working a lot on improving quantum travel in a lot of different ways. And this is something that we were seriously looking at amongst the discussion about the ways that we can improve quantum travel. It is definitely something that we want to address. The idea is basically that you could open your mobiGlas and say you want to go to whatever, Delamar, some other moon, and the path to get there actually requires multiple jumps, perhaps because of obstructions or because there's a sub-node that's involved. And the idea is that we could actually construct a path dynamically based on where you are and where you want to go. And then in a further iteration, we would allow the players to then modify that path. So if they wanted to reroute it, so maybe you didn't go through pirate space because that was a less direct route, but safer or something like that, then you would have the capacity to do that. But yeah, we definitely want to have multi-jump path selection available. And the idea is that not only would it make it easier for you to jump, but also now that we're getting quantum linking in the game, it'll make it easier, because otherwise just the process of getting a whole group doing this whole thing over and over, it's going to be madness.

It's a bit laborious.

Yeah, it's something that's definitely on our radar and we want to do it. Actually, I've already done some of the work to make this happen. In fact, just before you called me, I was working on something that used it. Previously, we didn't have any kind of relationship that was established really between the nav markers. We had some kind of implied relationship between them, but it wasn't codified in code in a way that was an accessible data structure. But this is something I actually just made recently for some of the changes that we needed for 3.2. And so that is actually a really good step. Now we have a hierarchy that is the relationship between these points. What's next is just a way to be able to be in one location, select another, and then have some pathfinding algorithm figure out the most direct path, and then we build up a user experience around that path.

Yeah, so I'm not gonna go through all of those things, but at a high level, yes, the navigator role is gonna be a thing, and the day-to-day duties of doing that is what it is. It's not gonna be something people on single-seater ships have to do all the time to get anywhere. It's a role that scales up with the size of the ship, as you have to split up the functioning of the ship between multiple people. The navigator role becomes more and more important. So by the time you're getting to Idris, Javelin-size stuff, that is a full-time role of plotting those points, making sure what you've plotted is suitable for that ship to do. Would it even fit? You're plotting these points with the size of your ship in mind, rather than, I'm in a small Gladius, I'm just going to fly there and just do it anyway.

Absolutely. So it's something that's actually started to get in game with the latest patch for 3.1, 3.1.4. There were so many that I lost track of them. The big ships, Reclaimer especially now, you have to be in VTOL mode or you have to have your engines orientated appropriately to counter that. And other ships of similar ilk, if they're big, they're heavy, they either need VTOL thrusters or you need to pay attention to where your thrust is orientated relative to the gravity of the planet, otherwise bad times.

Now, of course, we talked to John Pritchett a couple weeks ago that this is just the next step in an ongoing series of revisions and adjustments. So I just don't want anybody to think 3.1.4 is it and we're done working on atmosphere flight. We'll continue to iterate, we'll continue to tweak and modify and take your feedback into consideration in this patch and future patches.

Yeah, it's a great taster of how it behaves. I've been reading a lot of the feedback. There's a lot of people going, this is great, this is how I always envisioned it. And then there's the people that haven't realized this is a thing and are smashing into planets left, right, and center. And then they realize it's a thing.