Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - New Flight Experience

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So, this is a really big question. I think it means a lot to a lot of people because it's going to describe how we go ahead and talk about the new flight system and what the expectations are out of it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

I think the three different models that we... We'll probably talk about this lots over the hour, that there isn't just one thing and every ship or vehicle is going to do that one thing. There are sort of three different models or explanations, I guess. We'll call them three different combat styles, I think. And depending on the ship, depends on what they do. Some are designed for certain ones, others are designed for multiples, or some are just restricted to one.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

It is worth pointing out that this is kind of a design challenge that is extremely difficult to try and balance, because it's obvious that, say, a six degrees of freedom alien ship fighting against a ship that can't fly sideways is obviously going to have a huge advantage, right? And this is the sort of thing that we have to balance.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yeah, a lot of that balance goes beyond the flight model. It goes into what people call the gunnery and that sort of stuff. So the flight model is one layer of it and there are multiple layers on top of that or underneath it.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I think we can give a bit more detail on this, because there's more than just it varies between ships. It actually varies between environments as well, because I think the expectation is that the new atmospheric flight model is going to give us a lot more aerial combat like you would get in World War II planes. So you're going to have a lot of forward movement, an enormous amount of vertical turning acceleration. So there's practically no slide in vertical, especially in things like the Gladius and the Hornet. And you can't really strafe. If you try and strafe with, say, the Gladius, the drag on the back of the ship and the tail will actually pivot the ship back into the airflow. It wants you to fly straight. And the result is that atmospheric flight is going to feel like you're in turning battles, and you're going to be trying to get behind onto the six of other players, and that's how you're going to do the best. But in space, that's not the case, right? In the same ships. And I think for a lot of the human type ships, we're going with the more main-centric flight model. So less six degrees of freedom and lower maneuvering thrusters.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

And a lot of our ships are visually built that way as well. We don't want to go, here's a ship with a huge main rear engine, it's going to be a great strafe fighter now. It's built into that character. A lot of them are main-centric, but then you do have those alien ships like the Scout. It's supposed to be the strafe master. It can strafe in any direction. That's its big selling point and its big plus point. The downside of that, because obviously against something that is main-centric that has a huge advantage, is it's relatively weakly gunned, has no missiles. Yes, you can outmaneuver them by doing all this movement that I'm doing here, but you have to use that to your advantage to land multiple successive hits onto stuff that cannot do that.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I think another concern that I've seen a lot in the community is that going with the heavily main-centric model is going to end up in just jousting fights, right? And that's definitely something that we don't want to be the major thing. We don't want this to be boring. We want it to be believable and realistic, but not boring. So we can do things like, we're not going to reduce the angular velocity such that it's more like World War II. But if you try and joust too much... This is sort of the more difficult thing that we're still kind of working on, is how to make this not so effective. So first of all, we can increase the maneuvering thrusters just to the very limit such that it's not the dominant method. I think probably you're going to have inexperienced pilots who come and just fly past, and they have a short window to do their combat, and then they're going to drift off, and it takes a lot longer to slow down in the new ships than it did previously. So you're going to carry on drifting past. And the hope is that we can balance that such that it's not boring and it's not just straight up jousting.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yeah. And again, you've got such a small, tiny window to do stuff with our current weapons setup. There are people that only need that tiny amount of time on target to destroy other people, which is something, obviously, we want time to disable to be a thing and time to kill to be significantly longer than that. If you're just jousting, you're just going to be... and then half a minute later, you come back and it's going to take absolutely forever to do anything effectively. So yeah, there's always going to be people that joust, there's always going to be people that circle strafe, there's always people that are going to turret. Is that the most effective way to... Yeah, absolutely.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I'll go with what the discussion in the community has been recently, because I think it's easy to relate to. We have pretty much the World War II flying, which is low angular velocity, turn battles, which is the atmospheric flight. We have the straight six degrees of freedom, move in any direction you want. And then we have the... it's like Asteroids. Yeah, the Asteroids main-centric model. And I think to be reasonably clear, a lot of the human-centric ships are going for that style. The Asteroids one. Yeah, the main-centric, lower strength maneuvering thrusters model.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

The alien stuff, the Xi'an stuff again, will be more the six degrees of freedom. And then in atmosphere, certainly the human ones then go back to being the World War II, not in space, but in atmosphere.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I would say it's more like human-like design ships like the Gladius and Hornet, they're always going to be that main-centric model, with obviously variations between them. And then the more alien, weird ships are going to be the six degrees of freedom, but balanced so they're not overpowered. And then atmospheric flight will be the World War II style.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

And I imagine there'll be some crossover. You have things like MISC that uses Xi'an technology with the Reliant and stuff.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

On that note, I think the Reliant is actually a really weird ship because its significant lifting aerofoil is vertical. So it flies very strangely in atmosphere. That'll be interesting.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So I think there actually is a question about the large ships. So the capital ships have really high momentum, so low acceleration. They feel really, really heavy. And the expectation is that you're not going to be fighting those. They sit still and they fight [unclear].

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

And as people found out with the Reclaimer when we introduced it, which is really the first big ship with a huge amount of mass, the amount of people I saw just going, oh, I'm going to fly down onto this moon now, and they didn't realize they had to stop so far in advance. It's going to be like that. If you're going to be moving these things, it's a serious effort and it requires a serious amount of forward planning to work out where you're going to stop, if you choose to. In the atmosphere, if they even get into atmosphere, naturally, they're going to be a handful. They're going to need big VTOL thrusters orientated correctly to even stand a chance of staying in the air or even getting back out. Because a lot of them, super big ships that don't have landing gear, if you're going to start dragging them into atmosphere and gravity, it could be a really bad time to try and get back out.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Absolutely. Yeah, that's one of the really cool things about the new flight model, is it's very reactive to mass. So you can add more mass and it feels more sluggish. Well, actually, currently you can't do this, but the hope is that you can put all of your cargo on one side of the ship and the ship will actually be unbalanced, and you'll actually feel that in the handling. That's a little bit more difficult to do because it's in a different physics grid, but we would like to do that.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

Chris has mentioned that desire several times over the years.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

I mean, just quickly touching on that before people have a heart attack. If you fill your ship so much with hugely heavy cargo, we almost certainly will have warned you before you do that, before you spend all of your money filling your ship up with lead to the point that you can't take off, and then no one's going to buy it back. That will be a choice you have made and ignored all of the warnings. If you happen to land and your buddies then fill your ship up with stuff for you, that's beyond our control. If they fill your ship with vehicles and tanks, then it can't take off.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

And then, as more planetary bodies come online, as more moons come online, and they all have varying atmospheres and varying gravities, this loadout on this ship flew great on Crusader, but you take it to some other moon and you can barely move.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

It's actually one of the great things about the current stuff. The moons, they all have very slightly different atmosphere and gravity, so it does impact... Daymar is almost like Earth atmosphere, I think, so it's akin to flying on Earth. It's a bit weaker than Earth. But Cellin, which has very little atmosphere and very little gravity, is this. So you have that atmospheric state and you have the space state, but then it does blend in between the two.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

You'll even have the atmospheric handling change in the upper atmosphere. Dogfighting in the very high atmosphere is going to feel different to dogfighting right at the ground.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

And again, you can use that to your advantage. So if you know you're weak fighting in space, but if you can get down to the planet surface...

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

That is a bit outside of flight. I guess this is the leading question going towards, can we have render-to-texture MFDs to look outside our ship, which the graphics guys always get very nervous about. It's very expensive, because essentially it's rendering the world twice, unless you do a full screen view, at which point you might as well just be looking through.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

It would be more doable to have some kind of small geometrical representation of the ship so that you can see its orientation. And then if we have the landing pad shown in front of you.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yeah, we had this quite a while ago, and it's something that we need for specific landing zones. The automated landing had the representation of your ship, and you lined it up and you saw it come down. And that will definitely come back for that, but it won't help you with unauthorized landings.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So that feature essentially needs to be expanded.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So that's very topical, because I'm literally working on that right now. Not right now; back at my desk 20 minutes ago, I was working on that. So the atmospheric flight model will affect it to some degree. But the bigger thing is that grav-lev itself is getting a lot of redesign in terms of how it actually feels, right? So it's not just, oh, grav-lev bikes are going to be as they were, but with extra atmospheric physics. They're actually going to feel quite different. And we're kind of reevaluating that to try and make them feel more grounded and feel like they're interacting with the terrain a bit more.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

More reliable. I think everyone's probably experienced unintended takeoff at some point.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

We also just want to hone in that feeling. I think we made the analogy this week that it needs to feel almost like a jet ski. You're sort of floating around and you can drift and get the back out and roll a bit left and right and stuff. And the hope is that that will make it feel definitely more grounded. Maybe more visceral.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yeah, we had a lot of goals for it, and some of them we hit and others were not quite there. And there were lots of factors in that beyond IFCS that contributed to it. We're still working on that though.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Eventually, yes. This is not a thing that's going to be in 3.4, though. Not in the initial release. We would like them to do that. In terms of the atmospheric flight, you actually can do that now. If you, say, turn off a lot of your MAVs, but just have enough that you can rotate the ship, you can actually just fly straight on the ground and then get enough lift to lift off. That is already the case in the new flight model. But the problem is we don't have any runways, and places like Daymar have pretty rough terrain.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Trying to get the environment guys to clean a lovely straight patch out of their beautifully crafted environments...

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So we've talked about this before, because we don't want to be in a situation where there's some ships that are so useless that they have to have a runway, in which case we need to go and add runways to all the landing outposts in the world, which is just unfeasible. So yes, you should be able to do that, but a lot of the ships, especially the smaller ships, also have the ability to do VTOL, just because it's so impractical to have runways everywhere.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

And whilst you were talking about that, it reminded me of this video we didn't show at CitizenCon that a lot of people came up to me afterwards asking about, which was landing and takeoff. We had a video that we showed internally of you using the thrust magnitude, just having it hovering off the deck like 20 meters, and then just scrolling it down to the point where the thrusters no longer had the capacity to keep it up in the air. So it gently settled down, and then scrolling it back up to move it pretty nicely up and down, rather than just the current sort of coming down, coming down.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

I just want to know if I can use an M50 for a ground race. It's got wheels and a really big engine on the back.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

You're going to have to resist it taking off, though. It's going to want to fly.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

You can sort of do that now already. In some ways it's a more optimal VTOL. The problem is a lot of the ships are not really designed to sit on their tail. Again, using the Reclaimer as the example at the moment in game, when you're in VTOL mode, you keep up, and then you see this weird dance where they try to get high enough to go out of landing mode to put the engines back, whilst aiming as high up as possible, and kicking it into normal flight just before they hit the ground.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

I think I would much rather you do a run-up and get lift off of your wings and then pull up and carry on like that than just sitting on your tail and taking off. The ships are just not really designed to do that. They're going to struggle.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Not really, but there is a caveat to that, right? For a start, in the interest of this game actually functioning and having a reasonable frame rate, we don't actually simulate all the intricate details of the aerodynamical shape. So when you're in atmosphere and you make a hole in the ship, it's not really going to change much, simply because we just don't simulate to that degree. It's just mostly not necessary. However, if you lose chunks of your ship and the mass changes, that will affect the handling. So shoot it more.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So pretty much we voxelize the shape of the ship to these big... they're about half meter wide voxel squares. And so we voxelize the shape of the ship and then we take the area of those voxels in each direction. So it's kind of like a very simplified silhouette. It's not completely accurate, but it's fast, and we need good frame rates.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

I think the OCS guys would be upset if we undid all their work on performance just by simulating holes in the hull.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the feedback things that we got from a lot of people at CitizenCon. So yeah, absolutely.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

So do we know how that's going to manifest itself? Is it just going to be another tick on the UI?

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So we still haven't really decided, because again this came out of feedback from CitizenCon, but the options are pretty much to replace the current velocity indicator with the true velocity indicator, or to have two and have the true velocity one and then the forward one.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

Maybe that's something that can be customized through the component system; you'll be able to choose.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Probably more a front-end option than componentizing it. There's arguments for both options, and in scenarios like that, it's usually easier to put it in the options menu and let people pick what they prefer.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

In our panel, we talked about that. If you get up to those velocities, you can really not turn.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, you're very handicapped at that speed. Even in decoupled, you just drift for miles and miles, because the ships don't have nearly the acceleration they once did. So you just drift and it's useless. So the option is there to escape, if people want to escape fights, and maybe someone can chase them. The hope with this was also that you could chase them. One of the topics that came out of removing AB2 was, if we get rid of that acceleration limit and we let you accelerate in all directions uniformly, you can actually chase people. And we would like that to be a thing. But for slower dogfighting, you're just so useless if you're not at a slower speed.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

You need to slow down. Combat at cruise speeds is almost like its own separate style of combat to regular dogfighting. If you want to have that dogfighting experience, you can't really do it at cruise speeds. If you do it at cruise speeds, you're probably in this weird scenario where you're two ships chasing each other, decoupled, essentially turreting, but moving at high velocity in one direction, shooting each other until one of them decides to uncouple and, more accurately, just slide off into the distance.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, we lost Precision, and, well, we've kind of lost cruise as well. It's just the SCM limiter. Precision has been replaced by the acceleration limiter. The idea being that you can slow yourself down, not in velocity, but if you slow yourself down in acceleration, you have more control over the ship, and that should remove the need for Precision. That was the hope.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yeah, there's lots of weird things going on with mass in Star Citizen's history. There's some quirks with the old system. It didn't particularly like extremely high masses, which led to this scenario. A lot of those, we couldn't really put their true mass, and their true mass was still a design-derived value that we had to go calculate by hand. But because we were limited to a certain scale, we had the mass on paper that it should be versus the mass we could put in game to make it function. And then if someone was updating the stats page, they go, well, I don't trust the thing that's written on this page here, I'm going to go check the value that's in the XML in game. Oh, this is different. I'll put that one on because that's what's in game, so that must be right. But no, for this new IFCS, I think pretty much every ship's mass has been put to near enough the correct one. The Valkyrie mass there sounds like it's the too-light version. The Vanguard one is closer to right. When we did that pass, a lot of the ships got heavier and everyone was, whoa, what's happening here? That is towards the heavier end of stuff.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

And for stats hawks, I can tell you that we're working with our Turbulent and our platform team right now to attempt to basically pull those stats directly from DataForge, instead of asking lovely people like John Crewe to go in and continuously audit them over and over again in addition to all of his other duties.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Because everyone loves to moan about the stats page. Everyone keeps saying, why don't they just do that anyway? And it's because we have items on the stats page that don't exist in-game, like jump drives, and the computers have gone missing for a while. So we've always been in this position where you couldn't just do it from the in-game stats. So until we have all those items in the ships and we can do that, there's always been a manual process, and as we all know, where there's a manual process, there's room for human error.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

So I don't want to say soon or anything like that, but I'd say that we're approaching a period where we can actually start actively working on that link.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Absolutely. The reason why this actually came up, I thought, was really interesting. Some of the really big ships that have low accelerations, well, I'm thinking of the Javelin, but that's not in game. The Idris is actually also an example of this. It's so heavy and its accelerations are so low that it cannot hold itself up if it's not in VTOL mode, literally at all; it will fall. So the need became apparent: what if we actually have VTOL on a different control, so that you can go into VTOL mode when you're entering atmosphere, not necessarily landing mode? And then the Idris can hover. And without it, you can't. And so that's going to go across all the ships that have VTOL modes. Cutlass. There's loads of them, actually.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Specifically saying VTOL doesn't specifically mean engines that rotate and do crazy obvious things. There are ships that have built-in VTOL thrusters in the underside, like the Starfarer actually has some big underbelly VTOL thrusters. Visually they look like giant maneuvering thrusters. So if you hear a ship saying, oh, it has VTOL mode now, we've not done some secret rework to add big spinning thrusters left, right and center to everything.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

There's another thing that I think is useful to bring up here, which is the Constellation fans. And the Aurora fans. So we're going to make those work as well. And they're kind of a unique case. They're a special kind of thruster because they depend on atmospheric density. So we're making a new type of thruster, which we've never had before, which is a thruster based on the atmosphere, which are those fans. And so they will thrust in atmosphere when there is enough air. And as you go higher and higher in the atmosphere, they will actually become weaker and weaker, which is really cool. So those will work in the Aurora and the Constellation. The Starliner, I think, has...

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

Yeah, the Starliner has those big fans in the wings.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

If they don't have VTOL mode, they can't take off, is pretty much the answer.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

There is a line that can be crossed where things become a one-way trip. Yeah, there's no way around it. Again, this comes back to what I said before: just because they don't look like they have big VTOL thrusters doesn't mean they don't have them. But things like the Javelin, if that decides to go in atmosphere, that's going down, as people have seen on Daymar, and that's not coming back up again.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Currently, they're not, if I'm being quite honest.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Missiles are not on the IFCS team. They're on another team. They are getting some attention at the moment, hence why we asked for that feedback in the PTU.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I think long term, after we release this new IFCS, it would be nice to include missiles in the atmospheric system and to try and get them a bit more in line with the rest of flight, so that we have a very unified set of flight physics. But that's not going to happen for the next release, for sure.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I think yes. And I say think because I haven't play tested that specific situation. On paper, yes.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

So I guess that is somewhat related to IFCS. Because like we talked about with combat, it's not just flying, it's about shooting. There are changes we want to do to that combat and gunnery, and interacting with aiming, and how you aim, and how gimbals work. I don't want to commit to anything here and now, but we will be doing some form of update. That is a currently ongoing discussion. That's an active discussion we're having with Chris at the moment about potentially some very big changes to how aiming and interacting with the game work.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

The reason I'm hesitant to talk about it is because we haven't physically done any changes yet towards it. We've hardly even decided what exactly we're going to do. There's some options on the table, some very big changes from what's been done in the game since day one. And really, until we've got them in and played with them, I don't want to get people's hopes up one way or the other. When we've got something, we can do this again, or we can do Calling All Devs. Maybe Chris will answer, if you can manage to get one.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yes. Was it not previously?

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

I'm trying to remember. I thought it was, but I'm by no means the expert pilot.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Given how the system works right now, they should be exactly the same.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

They fly really badly. That's pretty much it. It's the price you pay for having these odd, quirky ships: they do odd things.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Yeah, they fly strangely. I think one of the best examples is the, I can't remember the name of the Vanduul ship that has one wing. The Scythe. It has a tendency to turn and roll. So the thrusters will try and counteract that, because IFCS's job is to keep the ship stable. It'll try and counteract it, but you'll see the thrusters fighting that.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

This is a good time to mention that this is also going to be dependent on the severity of the asymmetry. Something like the Scythe is very clearly like this, while something like the Star Runner, for instance, is asymmetrical to a lesser extent.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

The Star Runner is almost symmetrical, with very minor differences to it. It's probably going to be fairly good in atmosphere, because it's got essentially a large delta wing shape-ish. Even the side, taking away the aerodynamics of it, the center of mass isn't hugely off-center. It is off-center and forwards a bit. But it's not like it's out at the very tips of the wing, which, if we had a ship like that, which I don't think we do, would be almost unflyable in atmosphere.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

I remember in a lot of the early meetings with Paul Jones and Sarah McLellan, we were talking about the severity of the asymmetry, and you want enough to give it a unique silhouette, something that's easily identifiable as a Star Runner, but at the same time, we didn't want to cripple it in certain situations. So before people start running out thinking asymmetrical ships are globally going to suck in atmosphere, remember that, like most things, it's a measure of degrees.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

As I said, IFCS will try and counter it. And in some cases, it'll be minor enough that IFCS will cope with it and you'll only feel it very minorly.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

It also depends how you fly as well. If you're going full tilt, you're at the high end of that.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So that depends on the ship. Depends on the planet. Obviously, if you're on Delamar, where there's hardly any atmosphere, you can do that. It's no different to being in space, essentially. Well, actually, I correct myself. I don't mean less atmosphere, I mean less gravity. That was a mistake. Yeah, when there's less gravity, you can do that. In places like Hurston, where the gravity is really strong, a lot of the ships really struggle, and generally they struggle the bigger they are. So something small like the Merlin can do that, and something like a Cutlass is going to struggle. And you'll see, if you roll over in the Cutlass such that it doesn't have as much thrust anymore because your VTOLs are now not pointed down, the thing will start doing this, and you do it more, it'll start drifting down more and more, and then you rotate it back again and it'll kind of steady itself. So yes, you can no longer do that, but as I said, it depends on the ship, for sure. The Gladius actually can hover like this, because the mains are really strong.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

They're so powerful. If you get into that balancing point, it can stay there. The main thrusters are just firing at full tilt.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

As long as the main thruster is below you. If you're like this, I've seen ships hovering with their nose 10 meters off the ground.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

That will drift down, for sure. And when you've got your Gladius hovering like this, you should see all the thrusters firing to keep it steady, which is cool.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So we actually already have an autopilot, but it's not for player use, I guess. We use an autopilot for all of the AI flight. So we have this internal autopilot where you can queue up commands and the ship will go and execute them. And the flight AI team uses that to control the ships. We do sort of use it, I guess, for the automated landing to an extent.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yeah, that's true. The automated landing and takeoff uses the same autopilot. And for small ships, single seaters, it's like, you should really be doing that yourself. For multi-crew ships, I would imagine you'd task one of your AI crew members to fly. So yes, it would be doing autopilot, but it's by proxy: there's an NPC in the seat.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

There's no plans currently for a player-authored autopilot, like, I'm going to sit in my ship and plan a route and then sit back and watch it fly. We don't have any plans for that.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Even on the big capital ships, you would plan your route, but it then sends it to the helmsman: go orientate to this direction for this amount of time. Now change to this one.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Auto landing.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I don't think there is for players. We do have a takeoff system, but I think the AI ships are using it. Theoretically, we could do it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yeah, I mean, it might be something that we want to do for Squadron. We had a very rough version of it for the Squadron livestream, just because it makes it nicer to show off than letting players in the Idris hangar with the Gladius. That's obviously a very confined space to hover up and then go out the front. So that bit was automated during that livestream, but that can be done manually at the moment. It's just for the purposes of showing it off, it's much nicer to automate it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Content Manager for Global Video Production

I'm thinking about Lorville, getting into and out of Lorville as more people go there. We're saying that the tech exists, but there's no currently planned implementation for an auto-takeoff for players.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

Nope. Tech exists for AI, but not players. We would like you to fly the ship yourself.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

This was something that came out of CitizenCon feedback. A lot of people asked for this. It's definitely something we're discussing.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

For sure. It's got some benefits, obviously. Downside is it's stuff that we hadn't planned on doing, so it's not in the original scope of work. Yeah, we're talking about it.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I think the thing that a lot of people talked about was presets for the power MFD. So you can hit a button and overclock specific thrusters, which we might need to...

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

We briefly touched on it in the panel talk, that this was literally the existing UI at the time with all this stuff jammed in. Whereas if we were doing this from scratch, we would have a different interface. And from talking with the UI guys, even in the original concepts for what's in game now, rather than just being one humongous list of items, it essentially grouped all the items together, and then that group had its own toggle. So you could toggle off all the coolers in your ship, or you could toggle off all the power plants in your ship, rather than just having to go click, click, click, click.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So you could, for example, change the power settings on all the maneuvering thrusters as a group and then all the mains as a group. I guess that would be the end goal. Yeah, we could use that.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

So not in space, but we do have a... It's not really a speed cap, but there is a speed limit in atmosphere that is dynamically determined because of the drag. So if you overclock all your thrusters and stuff, you can actually increase the top speed, just because you can push against the air harder. But in space...

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

I'll never forget all those people on the landing pads at Olisar just going up to their ships and taking off all the bits and just leaving them on the landing pads just to go slightly faster. So pretty much no, we're not going to do that. If we were to do it in the future, not that there's any current plans to, there would be some restriction on it still. I don't think we'd ever consider just an infinite expanse of it. If you took off one thing, it made it X percent faster. If you took off everything, it would only be a little bit more, rather than dynamically scaling. That's what happened before, and people proved why they weren't allowed to do that.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I think one of the big takeaways from today should really be the first question we answered, which is our goal here, which is the main-centric, low maneuver, where we're going to find some balance where we make that experience fun but also realistic.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

And the skill to learn. So all the pro pilots out there have something new to learn. It's not going to be like how it was. The day it drops, everyone's going to be back to square one. And if you want a challenge, then the challenge is going to be learning how your ships fly and how to maximize them.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I think it's definitely the case that when this flight model drops, there's going to be a lot of relearning how to fly, which I think is exciting. I don't know if everyone's going to be [unclear], but I think it's really exciting and it's really cool.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

It's good to finally talk about it, because we'd sort of been quiet about it for a long time, and now people hopefully know why we were quiet about things.

David Colson · Gameplay Programmer

I would like to add that there's a point that we want to get to with this flight model where we can tentatively call it finished. We have the vision that we've laid out today, and we're going to work toward making that vision fun, and the hope is that iteration will get smaller and smaller over time until it decays to: it's done and we're happy with it and we can leave it alone. We don't want to keep revamping the flight model every couple of years, forever, forcing people to relearn every two years. We're going to get it to a fun state and then we're going to call it a day.