Star Citizen Live: All About Spaceships - Alpha 3.5/3.6

Weapons have a range. At the moment, it's just a simple function of velocity times the lifetime of the projectile; that gives you that maximum range. They're a couple of thousand meters at the moment from the size range we have in game. That's going to change as bigger and bigger ships come online and we mold the balance around them as they come in. Whether that's going to be orbital bombardment... It depends on the thing you're bombarding. It could be a very small planet, it could be a very big one, it could have one kilometer of atmosphere, it could have 10,000. It's hard to say, but those larger weapons will be able to reach significantly further than the weapons in the game currently can.

So as far as the orbital bombardment goes, it's a matter of the situation. What capital ship are we talking about? What's the size of the planet? How far are you from that planet? What's the status of that planet's atmosphere?

You can currently lob torpedoes down from quite high in the atmosphere of planets onto unsuspecting targets on the ground. In case you're wondering what your Retaliator's for.

All the vehicles in the game have components. They're all physicalized. We don't cheat anything. Everything has a space, which some people don't realize when they're looking at ships and they're like, why has this huge ship got such a tiny interior? It's because the components have taken up the rest of the space. For obviously bigger ships, you access them from the outside. From smaller ships, you access them from the outside generally. They're always going to be behind panels that open up. We're doing some development at the moment to decide the best way of doing that. Obviously, if we start cutting up all our ships and putting dozens of panels on the outside, that just blows the cost of them. So we're looking at ways that we can not do that, but still have that gameplay of: I go up to something on the outside of my ship, it opens up without having to have artists cut holes in geometry, and you get components out of it. Talking with the graphics guys, we've got some interesting things we're going to try to do.

Not every ship has been converted to the full component system.

No, it's an ongoing process. Any ships that have been built in the last year or so, you'll see spaces for them in the ships. And some quite a lot older, but particularly the single-seaters where you can't get into them, we'll be going back and finishing them off.

Some of those new ships already have panels.

Yep, a lot of the new ships do. Even some of the smaller ones, you have the panel lines ready for when we decide which way to go with the tech to do that.

So the long-term goal, which we can't do in 3.6, is to actually have the 3D AR UI that we had in an older version. I think it was SC 2.0... I don't know if it was 2.0, it was 2.5, 2.6, maybe 2.4 was one of those. So the goal is to bring that back. But the problem is that, first of all, that UI was using different tech. And second of all, that UI was built around that known geometry of landing pads that we'd set up. And now the game has planets and different shaped landing pads and all sorts of stuff. So that becomes a really difficult problem. And so we need to figure out how to, say, take chunks of the ground and then render low res versions of them and stuff like that. It's a really difficult problem, but that is the way that we want to do that. So when you put your landing gear down, you get this little UI and it'll give you situational awareness around you and it'll also give you alignment cues for the center of the landing pad. And there's also the actual fact of controlling hover mode, because I think especially when you're in tight spaces, hover mode doesn't really show its strengths. And so we're currently exploring options of improving how to control hover mode in tight spaces, to make inside hangars and inside landing bays and stuff a little bit easier to control, because right now I think you slightly move and you move way more than you expected. It's not great. The visibility also should mean that you don't need to rotate your ship down to look where you're going.

Not necessarily just a camera that shows you below. We're looking for a 3D AR solution, so you don't just get a 2D representation of what's below you. You actually see the terrain, you see the slope, and you see some guidance to your best potential landing area.

Yeah, that's the plan.

You got an ETA?

No, not 3.6.

So, all ships have an armor item. It doesn't behave how the long-term vision for armor is. At the moment, it's very simplistic: an incoming damage reduction modifier. It could be increasing if we really wanted to, but that's not really armor. So it really just scales down different damage types coming in to give that pseudo armor behavior. In the future, we're going to have the physically based damage system. So that will essentially be a layer on top of that that determines how the projectiles interact with the actual hull of the ship. Between now and then there's things we're looking at doing in terms of it not just being a flat modifier but having its own, not health pool, but its own properties. At the moment in game you can go up to a spaceship with a pistol, and if you had infinite ammo you could kill an Idris by just tapping away with a ballistic pistol, which makes no sense, whereas we want to have minimum thresholds, which is what physically based damage would do for us out of the box. It would go, this projectile is doing X amount of joules of energy, that's less than I care about, so it will just bounce off. Whereas with the current system, we'd need to go, this projectile is coming and doing 45 damage, we only care about damage that is above 90 before it starts chipping away into health.

You don't want armor to be just more health, right? You want it to be different mechanics.

Being more health is not interesting gameplay. The same as shield health being just an extra health isn't particularly interesting. There's lots of ways we can make hull health, armor, and shield all interplay together.

So this is such a difficult problem. We've heard all of the feedback about the toggle and we're going to go in that direction. But it's a really difficult problem to solve because if we say just add a toggle, right? And I know the intention, when everyone asks for a toggle, is that when you turn off hover mode, you get no assistance, right? So if you don't do anything, the ship will just fall, right? And then you have to manually thrust in whatever direction. So say if your ship is like this, then you just strafe up by however much gravity is and you'll stay level. But then if you rotate like this, you'll have to manually thrust backward and that'll be kind of a difficult problem. And that's the direction we're going to go in. But there's also more problems with that, because that is at odds with the core idea of coupled flight, because coupled flight is essentially having velocity dampers on, and so when you fall you pick up velocity and the usual function of the ship is to cancel that. And so making that not contradict that, and also making that falling gameplay work, is super, super difficult, and that's why we can't just do it and send it out. So we will do it, it won't be in 3.6 though, because we need a bit of time to make sure that it doesn't have any loopholes and it doesn't have any problems and stuff. For example, you could turn off hover mode and then hit space brake and you would just stay there, because that's what space brake is for, right? And then you would have the same gameplay of floating there and being able to do this. And so that's why the toggle is so hard to do. But we will go in that direction.

It's also important to remember that our live environment is still a testing environment. So we want hover mode to get its time and then we want people to experience it. We want to get all the feedback we possibly can on hover mode, because your first impression with it may not be your next impression of it as you get used to it, as you find different ships tackle hover mode differently, or hover mode affects different ships differently.

Why would we not want to do that?

The whole point of hover mode would be undermined to some degree if we did that, because in terms of just straight up competitive gameplay, say you're in a ground troops versus air fight, you would never use hover mode, because why would you? You can just stand there and be a floating turret in the sky. And so going back to how it used to work is probably the most undesirable, at least in its current form, of just doing that simply without any other sacrifices. Maybe we could do something where you go back to the old flight system where you kind of hover there but your thrusters burn out and fail in 20 seconds or something. That would be more reasonable than going back to what we had.

Exactly. Since the initial release, between Evocati and Wave 1 PTU, there has been a big dump of improvements to hover mode from what people first got to what they have currently now. And I can't remember when that actually went through and whether you've done stuff since.

Yeah, I remember the patch notes, but it was earlier this week, Monday or Tuesday.

So there are some big quality of life changes in there, because there were people that were totally unprepared for hover mode, came in to do landings and didn't walk away from it.

It's case by case. We were looking at the Freelancer the other day. It's not as simple as just making those engines rotate like the Cutlass, because the Freelancer actually has its landing gears built into those rotating thrusters, and when they then rotate, there's no way to land when it's in T-Rex mode. You can't land because the landing gear are pointing out to the front of the ship, so you'd have to go out of it to land, which, if you could land without it, why would you do it? And the other big thing is that when it would be rotated like that, there are actually no thrusters pointing forwards and backwards. So you'd go into hover mode and you'd lose all ability to stop. So you'd be coming down without your landing gear out. So that would be quite a hefty...

I think I remember that original Freelancer commercial where the engine is rotating and turning into a little T-Rex. It was definitely a striking visual, but as it comes down and it's landing, right before it lands, it switches back to the other mode and still somehow manages to float down. It seemed a little bit like have your cake and eat it too.

I don't think the Caterpillar ever had...

I don't know, considering it's this long and those engines are just at the back.

Yeah, it's got a significant amount of thrusters underneath it, all down the center axis of the main part of it, almost tri-thrusters in that they do 45 and down, so it has enough thrust under there to counter it.

That's not to say that we're sitting here saying that Freelancer thrusters will never rotate. It's just that right now there are a couple of challenges inherent to them.

That can be many things. Lots of different bugs working together against each other. Occasionally it is purely an asset issue. The way we build the assets, you have a physics proxy, and there's two ways you can assign that physics proxy to a mesh. You can combine it into one mesh, and then that is a pretty solid, watertight way of ensuring collisions don't work. The problem is you then have a physics proxy that is combined with that mesh. So if you want to actually get to the bit you see, you have to detach it first to do your work, then reattach it. So it's a bit of a workflow pain. The other way you can do it, you can have it as a child mesh. Most of the time that works exactly the same way, but every now and then it just doesn't behave the same way. But it is a nicer way to work. So quite often you'll find when artists or designers go and do fixes to ships, they'll detach those meshes, make them child meshes, and then just forget to put them back and combine it as the solid solution.

As for the part where why is it sometimes it works one patch and it doesn't the next patch: integrations. Every patch is, okay, here's everything that was before, and now we're adding all these new things in. And the vast majority of bugs come from untested, unanticipated interactions between systems. Lots of times, if you ever watched Bug Smashers, which was a program we broadcast for a number of years, you'd see just the strangest, seemingly non-related systems. A ship uses this system to keep things in there, but this thing also interacts with this system, and they don't interact with each other, but they interact with the same underlying system that causes the problem in the other ship. It's always a challenge, and one of the reasons we have our PTU to help us identify those.

Throw in live game networking stuff as well. If you're on a particularly poor connection, or the server is having a moment, there's the difference on your client between putting the box down where the root of it is at the very bottom, flush with the proxy of the ship, and the server might think you're a centimeter off, or I don't know how accurate they do it. The server thinks you put it inside that proxy on the bottom of the ship. It now has to go, do I put it above? Do I put it beneath?

I think this is just because ground vehicles are counted as spaceships. I don't actually know if that's intentional or not.

It's not, but as it stands, you can only have one summoned vehicle at the moment. If you've got one out there, it just goes. I think we may have even done something for 3.6 for that, because I'm sure I saw a forum post. It's not something either of us actively deal with.

Are we safe saying that it's not a design intention? We're not sitting here saying we want it forever to be a ship or a vehicle, because obviously many ships are designed to carry vehicles.

For ships that are designed to come with vehicles, you'll eventually be able to spawn the vehicles in them. But if you wanted to spawn a PTV and a Valkyrie separately, you should be able to do that and just load it up and then go on your travels.

Honestly, I think originally that decision was made as a performance improvement to stop having too many vehicles on the server, because a lot of people have a lot of ships.

Just spawn a ship, let somebody take it out, then spawn a ship, move it out. Because somebody would try to spawn their entire fleet just to take a picture of it.

And someone would do that at the landing pads, seeing the framerate tank.

So, Bucks were this Battlefield Upgrade Kit promotion that was used in the original Vanguard concept, back in 2015. It was pitched as an easy way to swap between all your Vanguards. And we only ever did it on the Vanguards. We never did anything else. The reason we never did anything else was it was an incredibly confusing way of packaging these items. It was a whole new name with a whole different explanation.

It's one of those times where we attempted to make something seem easier and somehow made it seem more complex, because ships already have collections of components. Some ships have skins and stuff like that. This was just meant to be one item that was a proxy for five, six, seven different items. When you swap this one, it just swapped five, six, seven items.

I believe at the time you could do that and then you could also individually customize them after that as well. That's what we allow you to do now on all our ships anyway. Going forwards, like we talked about in the shipyard articles back in 2017, instead of having a Buck for each Warden Vanguard you have, we're just going to attribute you the items, and then you can customize it however you want. You can swap out that middle module between them all. Even the Hoplite now, because we've reworked the Vanguard, the Hoplite central room actually fits in the same section as all the others. So all the Hoplite owners have a way to customize their Hoplites now. With the Harbinger and Sentinel in 3.7, we'll be releasing all the nose gun options. So each of the variants is going to get its own nose guns. They're still bespoke to the Vanguards, but they all have different ones. There's laser repeaters, there's distortion cannons, there's ballistic cannons, ballistic repeaters, and there's more than that as well.

What's happening with the Bucks is, when the full in-game ship modularity comes and we swap out modules, people who own those Bucks will get the collection of items, all the items that were originally supposed to be in there. The difference will be, instead of one-clicking a collection of things, it will be click the paint, click the room. It'll be a few more clicks, but people are still going to get everything that was included in those things.

Essentially, the only thing different from what you can do now with the Vanguard in-game is you'll be able to customize that interior module, because you can already swap out the components. When the nose guns are around, you'll be able to sort them out. It's just that central room modularity.

That hard mounted nose gun has been a feature of the Vanguard since it was first introduced in 2015. Now, this rework that we're completing with 3.6 was a visual rework. It wasn't a rebalancing of the ship. It didn't change the loadouts, it didn't change the armaments, it didn't change the nose gun at all. But in 3.7, we're adding custom nose guns.

Yes. So the Harbinger and Sentinel were always pitched with different nose weapon options, so we're in the process of making those options. So the Harbinger and Sentinel will not come with the NVSA laser cannons. They're going to come with their own Vanguard-specific versions of existing weapons in the game. We'll probably change the Hoplite's nose weapons as well. And then there's a few more that are just going to be available to get from the shops in game. So the Vanguard owners at last have options to pick from, and you can also individually change the four nose mounts. So if you want to have two laser cannons and two ballistic repeaters on the nose, you can do that.

So it'll be a specialized mount for Vanguards.

Yes, those Vanguard nose weapons only fit on the Vanguard. When we looked at doing the rework, we toyed with the idea of almost taking them away and just giving it four generic size two hardpoints. But it was there from day one and it's part of it, and just replacing them just seemed a bit of an easy get out.

It's kind of like taking that gun off the A-10 Warthog. It's part of the Vanguard's personality.

And it would have changed the front of the ship quite a lot in terms of looks.

I disagree that it has the same capability. It may have the same items inside, but if you put a glass of water inside a 55 gallon oil drum versus 55 gallons of water inside an oil drum, both the same item in there, they behave very differently, sloshing around.

The heat system also interacts in ways that are not immediately intuitive. So for example, you might have the same cooling capacity on two different ships, but because they have all different items and a different loadout, the heating behaves differently.

So depending on the size and make and model of a ship, two different ships may use the same component differently, with different levels of efficiency, different performance characteristics, even though it's the same component.

Exactly. Especially, like I say, coolers. They may seem to have the same values across multiple ships, but on the Arrow, it may let those guns fire for much longer, but it lets the F8 fire everything for a much shorter time.

So they certainly behave differently, although in that particular example, it's not great because the Cutlass has a bug at the moment. But what happens is that when you move a rotated thruster in IFCS, it completely rebalances all of the acceleration capability of that ship on the fly. And so if you, for example, rotate a thruster down, you lose all of the forward thrust that you would have had and it's now facing down. And so you can't strafe forward as quickly, but you can move up and down much more quickly. And that's the difference that you'll feel. I know a lot of the larger ships are balanced such that they really struggle to hold themselves up without rotating those thrusters down. But then again, the Hornet may have more difficulty because it's not got a thruster pointing down, but it's also much lighter, so it ends up balancing out a little bit. In the case of the Cutlass, it has an issue at the moment where that thrust capability is not being balanced correctly, and so it's not as nimble up and down as it should be. But the intention is that you get the same amount of thrust, but directed in different directions, which will naturally change the handling.

It's an art and design thing. Art tend to go in and make really pretty looking things and get the glass behaving how it would do. And then when it goes in game and it reflects really well all the wrong things around you, it gets bugged up. They get a bug. It might not be the original artist that gets that bug. That artist goes and slides it back down again. And then it gets fixed, then the original artist sees that and goes, that's not how I made it, put it back. So it's coming up with a compromise. If you don't have glass with some level of reflection and impurities to it, it doesn't look like it's there and it feels very odd. We've talked a lot about how everything in Star Citizen wants to be a nice physical experience. You want to see and feel like you're in that world and be immersed in it. If you're sat in a ship with completely transparent glass, it doesn't feel nice. But sometimes we do definitely go too far the other way. And generally that's a bug and it's something we will work on. We had some big changes to the glass shader in the last year that made things a lot nicer. There's definitely a few ships kicking around where someone's taken a heavy pan scourer to the window that probably shouldn't have, and they'll just get tidied up over time.

So we could do this. However, it creates a really difficult to deal with interaction where you can effectively nullify a lot of the heat mechanics by doing that. And so we either have to balance it such that you still have some heating effects even when your coolers are overclocking, or we need to make that horribly damage your cooler. We now have the misfire mechanic that is going to be out with 3.6, and that provides a good opportunity to provide some of those compromises that you have to make if you want to overclock a cooler. But before we had the misfires and wear and damage and stuff, it was the more reliable solution to say it's much easier for us to balance and deal with the heat systems if you can't overclock the coolers, because it's effectively like tuning two different setups, one that's overclocked and one that's not, and it actually more than doubles the amount of work.

You want to set the base level before you set the customization. It's like when we talked about the law system: you want to set the way laws are supposed to work before you introduce all the ways you can circumvent it. So you want to make sure that you've got the heating and overheating system working the way that you want it before you introduce the way to circumvent it.

It's also another weird thing with overclocking. A core concept of overclocking is you're essentially letting the item have more power or request more power. And the more power it has, the more heat it generates, which on the cooler makes no sense. So the coolers have a power requirement to function, because without power they won't function. So the coolers themselves actually generate heat that they then get rid of themselves whilst dealing with everything else. But the more power they have, the more heat they make, which can make them actually worse because you've overclocked them. You go around in a weird circle.

Short answer is it makes life very difficult. So still working on it.

It's not in game. We want to do it. We wanted to do it from the start. We've built everything to support it. We just ran out of time to do it.

So it's got a place to retract.

It's got a place to do it. So the one big thing that's left is we need to remodel the outer surface of the upper turrets. If you remember, on the original concept the guns on the turret rotated up onto it and then the whole turret goes down. We just haven't modeled and set up the guns to do that. The turret itself has space to dip down. It doesn't go all the way down like the original concept, because that actually just went into the interior room inside it, which isn't great. So when we did the rework, we actually bulked up the top of the ship to give it space to put the turret back down into it. So we'll get to it one day. It's just not in the rework release.

So it's got better handling full stop now. A lot of the fixed thrusters have been adjusted into joint ones, so they've got a little bit of gimbal motion, which makes a huge difference. And when we redid the exterior, we redefined where the sections of it break up. So it's got those two booms with the engines on the back. The old one had the maneuvering thrusters very close to the end of the thrusters on the back, and then the break for where it fell off essentially took half your main engines away and the ability to turn in that direction. So now that cut isn't there anymore. The entire boom comes off. It's had its health boosted up to compensate for that. So even when that thing comes off, I've seen people on Spectrum and Reddit flying around in game, you can still fly it with one of those booms completely missing, which is fitting to the lore as well. It's much better. And it's got some new, slightly Redeemer-ish rear engines on it.

Right now, there's no plans to use the web platform for it, so we're going to focus on in-game.

So capital ships generally have most, if not all, of their items size four or capital class, which means they are bespoke modeled into the ship. So size zero, which is vehicle, one, two, three, small, medium, large, those items are actually made by the props team, and they are essentially swappable between any vehicle that can take them. Whereas when you get to capitals, they become an integrated feature of the ship. So they're made by the ship team themselves as they're making the ship. On the 890, the power plants, you probably would have seen them in whatever media we've shown of it, are the two long, huge tubes in the engineering bay. Those are the power plants, rather than being this cube. Well, you're going to see it soon. And there's lots of other things in there that are specific to the ship. That doesn't mean we're never going to give an upgraded 890 Jump power plant. It's just going to be a very rare thing to have. It's going to take time to fit, because essentially you have to take your ship to a dry dock and leave it there for a period of time, because they've got to rip out half the ship to put this new thing in. There might be a subtle change to how it looks, but it's not as easy as the current ship customization. The 890 does have some size 3 items in there, so there is some level of items you can tweak, and of course all the weapons and missiles.

A combination of things. It got bigger over time. There was a few reasons it got bigger. So the primary one was making sure it fit two 85Xs in the hangar at the front. When we got the original concept mesh, I can't remember how long it was, it was 100 and something meters. Between that concept and when we started, we made the 85X, which got bigger. The original concept mesh didn't actually really fit two 85Xs in comfort in there. So by the time we made it fit two 85Xs, it ended up getting significantly larger to just keep the overall shape in sync. Everyone originally called it the Dorito or the Mighty Ducks thing. It would have looked even weirder if we just made the front long enough and kept the back. The engine style didn't really fit the new Origin. So when we reworked the back of that along with the new size, this size actually feels fine. And then when we came to filling it with all the content that had been promised with it, we ended up going, yep, this is how big it is. When we did the initial estimates for the ship, we based it on the concepts of what was in there, and as we broke it down it just got more and more work. The Origin art style isn't a particularly friendly art style to pick up. We have a lot of hard sci-fi art guys, so building Aegis ships and Anvil ships is their bread and butter, which is a very different construction method in Max and a very different styling method. Part of the problem with the 600i: the art style of that was very brutal luxury, minimalist luxury, which didn't go down well. And then we were trying to adjust that, so everything we'd learned on the 600 immediately became less applicable to doing the 890. So we had to think about it in a different frame of mind.

And it goes without saying that our process of concepting ships has evolved since 2014. Those earlier ships had fewer answers waiting for us when it came time to build them than the concepts we do today.

Yeah, pretty much. Aside from the external concepts, we couldn't really use any of the other concept imagery for it.

The problem with that is it restricts that ship's abilities.

It can never go in space, really, or would be very bad in space.

We'd have to do something like a hard transition. It would have to have thrusters that can make it maneuver in space, and it would have to fly really well as a plane and have wheels and everything. But then I guess if it has thrusters for space, it can't. It would have to essentially be an airplane only, can't go in space because it wouldn't have the thrusters. So probably not. I'm going to say probably not. There is definitely the potential of ships that are aerodynamic, like the Gladius and maybe the 300i, landing like a plane. That's definitely a possibility.

You can glide. Cut the thrusters, lower your heat profile significantly.

The awkward thing about that: they can glide, right? However, they're not nearly as lift-creating as a jumbo jet in real life. And so when you cut the thrusters, they'll glide for a bit and then they'll just fall like a brick. So they could land, and there's definitely discussion to have them land like a plane at some point. Needs a bit of work.

I think that's specifically the Dragonfly and the Nox. That was there as a temporary workaround for the problem with size one fixed guns on a vehicle that goes like that across the surface: it's fundamentally useless until you have a stable firing platform, which ships can do because they can just stabilize. Whereas on a Dragonfly or Nox, you're constantly going over the terrain, and if you have fixed guns and no way to control it, you might as well not have them. It's definitely a valid concern that size one weapons on ships can't be gimballed, and it goes back into a very long debate we're having about making size one guns effective, which we could sit here for another hour and talk about.

It's a difficult challenge, because you want players in starter ships to have a good experience. But at the same time, you want to create a path towards upgrading, so they can't be too capable.

Yeah, we don't want them to be completely useless either. They should be able to hold their own against appropriate targets. But at the end of the day, if they're going to go up against something significantly better, it's balance. Balance never stops.