Wingman's Hangar ep024 . June 7, 2013

So it's going to be a combination. So we were thinking that generally for the heavy repairs, you have to be down on a planet and have proper repairs, and your repair bot will be able to do certain level repairs. But we're also thinking about having a situation on the bigger ships that maybe there's some damage that you can go and sort of patch over and repair, kind of think of the Millennium Falcon and getting the jump drive working, or maybe even potentially, which I'd like to try and get and we'll see though, some EVA, like you could maybe get outside your ship and patch up a few things so you can sort of limp to the nearest space port and then have them properly repaired. So a little of both is the correct answer.

That'd be kind of fun to do, actually, getting out there and zooming around in space.

No, it'd be cool. I mean, it's a first-person engine. We just have to do some stuff for the zero-g maneuvering. We're going to have some of that already. So then it's really a matter of getting in and out. Some ships it will be easier in than other ships, because they have airlocks and stuff. And we've got to deal with the transition animations, which just adds more sort of content we have to do on the animation side. But other than that, it should actually be quite doable.

Brian can do that, though. One-man animation gang, right?

I know, we're going to have more animators.

Well, no, I'd say when you're down on the planets, pretty much that's sort of the safe zone. So the danger of being in a sort of more lawless area is what happens as soon as you leave the planet and you can get jumped. And there'll be shady people on the planet that'll be tracking you. But not necessarily there'll be any thieving or robbery happening down on the planets. At least anyway, at the beginning. I mean, who knows? Once we're live and we're changing things and we actually start to do more stuff in first person on the planets. But right now the first-person planet stuff is about buying, trading, talking, communicating, finding missions. But it's a safe zone, there's no combat, so therefore there's not going to be any sort of theft or anything like that. And as we open it up, maybe some of that stuff is, but we're not supporting that game mechanic yet. We've already got enough of other stuff to support to get this game out there.

So the simple answer is yes. And I think we've discussed it, but there are different levels of hangars. So the hangar that we were showing in the very early preview is the base level of hangar. So that's the hangar that's really for if you've just got an Aurora and basically an Aurora, not much else. The next level of hangar up, I think, I'm not sure if it starts at the 300i, it may start at the Hornet; a Freelancer level is one level up, and then there's another level of hangar above that where the Constellation would fit inside. They're all built to design and fit the ships, and they all sort of modularly scale depending on how many ships you've got. So yes, we're trying to support some of the crazy number of ships and configurations we have out there. I can't warrant that the frame rate is going to be amazing in the first drop if you happen to have 50 ships sitting in it, because we're not really working on the LOD aspects of the engine right now. And in the first iteration of the hangar, we probably won't have every single ship. Like for instance, we won't have the Idris Corvette and a few other things that you can have in the hangar and have access to in the first drop. Eventually we will, we'll iteratively do it. So the drop of the hangar that will be in August at Gamescom is the one that will have all the ships that were the base pledge ships. So Aurora, 300i, Hornet, Freelancer, Constellation; may or may not have the Cutlass, we don't know, because that's sort of on the edge of potentially being done or not. And there's a very small number of backers that only have a Cutlass. I think there's like 200 out of the hundreds of thousands of all you guys. And then as we go on, as the new ships are finished, they'll automatically get dropped into the hangar, and we're also going to be expanding the hangar locations. So it's all part of our iterative development. So we'll see. So this will be good. But yes, Ruben, don't worry. Your Constellation will have plenty of room, and room for its friends. He's got quite a few ships in his hangar. So big thanks, definitely big thanks for doing that. And just make sure you have a fast machine, because that's going to be a lot of polys to draw.

So in the first iteration of the Hangar, no, you won't be able to create your avatar or dress them up. I think we're just going to allow you, and you won't be able to choose male or female. It's just going to be a male avatar. I think it's only just going to be the RSI space suit. But as we go along, again, sort of referring back to what we were saying before, those are all features that will be coming online. You don't have to wait till the final game comes out. It'll be sort of coming online. I can't remember on which one of our iterative release schedules the customization is. I think it kind of involves the planetside stuff too. So that would probably, I would think, be debuting more in sort of 2014, early 2014, versus this year. But it's part of our iterative release schedule. So we basically are going to have a basic hangar to cover the sort of necessities, and you can do some ship modification, and then we'll sort of be adding more items you can modify on your ship, more ships, more variety of hangars, and more functionality, then the dogfighting and the planetside module. So basically just think of it as a lot of the functionality being added and added and added, and then by the time we've got most of it done, we'll be ready for the single-player alpha of the story and beta of the Citizen universe. It's kind of helping us test that process, because nobody's ever done this. Adding and adding and adding, that's what we're going to do to the final game as well. It forces us to have our ships polished much sooner, the game functional, and hopefully we'll deal with configuration issues. The very first version of the Hangar will be our first version of our client downloader and patcher, and all these things, just the process of efficiently downloading new patches and all the rest of the stuff. Over time, we'll get this all honed, so by the time we actually start the full game, it's ready to go, and hopefully it'll be a fairly smooth process. But at the very beginning, don't expect it to be all perfect and flawless, because this is the beginning. So you're going to be on the rocky path at the start, and then it'll get better and better and better. And by the time the final game's there, it will hopefully be really smooth.

Well, I just mentioned in the previous answer that there is no combat down on planets. And that won't be a feature in the game until sort of post proper launch, and eventually we'll bring some of that on. And it's mainly a content issue. Because then we sort of have to have larger areas, more characters, and we've got to design sort of the equivalent of first-person levels to have combat in. And just to do that with all the worlds we've got, with all the spaceships we've got and all the other action we've got, is just way too much. Animations for all the characters. But the engine itself actually can sort of handle that. So that will be functionality we'll add on down the road. But I can't exactly say when it's going to be at the moment, but it'll be sort of post-live, maybe it's an update a year after the initial game goes properly live. There will be combat aboard ships, so the ship boarding, and there will be combat aboard space stations, or an asteroid base, because they're considered sort of persistent locations in space. So potentially you could get kind of a Greedo encounter if it was on a space station.

And so you're saying that sometime in the future, a war might break out on the planet?

Somewhere. I don't know. I'll have to see. Let's not get too ahead of ourselves.

Well, actually, that would be sort of an answer for our lawyers. But I will say that for the Hangar app, we're intending to have a sort of terms of use screen or something that says basically: I understand that this is very, very pre-alpha. There'll be buggy code. There may be issues. I'm happy to report these, et cetera, et cetera. I understand it's work in progress. In big capitals, and you accept, and then you can play the hangar. Because the only thing I don't want people to feel like is that the hangar is completely finished and polished, because obviously it's not, it's the very first iteration. And part of the reason we give it early is so everyone else can give us the feedback and say what they like and what they don't like, or find configuration issues, and we can basically crowdsource bugs in a way that helps actually save us money, because otherwise we would have to have a lot of testers. And we are going to have testers on it, but for something that's this ambitious and this big, the only way we truly figure out what the issues are is getting it out there super early. So doing it this way, we're hoping to avoid some of the problems that you saw SimCity have on its release a few months ago.

That's a good question. I mean, the default is always that you can tell what a player ship is and what an NPC ship is. I think generally, because of the sort of handle situation, you probably will be able to, but we haven't really made a choice yet. I'm actually kind of in favor of immersion, so I think it would be kind of cool if you didn't know whether a ship was an NPC ship or a player ship, but I don't really want to commit one way or the other just yet until we sort of see it and play with it and see kind of how it works, and it also has to work with our handle system. But my goal would be that you would see the universe getting simulated and people going about their business, doing trading runs, police actions, piracy, and potentially it's not obvious, it's not night and day that one's an NPC and one's a player. But like I said, I don't really want to commit one way or the other until I've had a chance to see what it feels like. The default is obviously you would know, but if we could make it more immersive, it would be cool.

That's going to really depend on kind of what the ship itself will be set for. So the way the thrusters work is that basically it takes the thruster's type, rating, and if it can articulate, its range of motion, and then the hardpoint that it matches up to also has a range of motion allowed on it. And then it will take the subset of those, basically whichever is least of the two. So theoretically you could maybe mount a fixed thruster where an articulated thruster is. I don't know whether it necessarily would be the other way around. It's sort of going to depend on a ship-by-ship basis. I mean, a lot of the way the thrusting is working out, most of them would probably be articulated, and if not, it would have to be replaced by, so this is the maneuvering jets, a sort of fixed thruster that would have the standard sort of ability, to look a little like the lunar lander thruster, where you can see sort of a nozzle up, nozzle out, left and right and down and so on like that. So it'll all depend on a ship basis. So it's kind of hard to say, but potentially you absolutely could be able to put a different type of thruster on: if it defaults with a fixed thruster and the ship allows you to upgrade it and have a jointed thruster there, you'll be able to put that on the hardpoint.