Developers answer fan questions on character and ship customization, a player-driven economy, PvP arenas, and boarding and passenger mechanics. The CTO covers his role and the CryEngine 3.4.4 upgrade, plus DirectX, Oculus Rift, controller support and anti-cheat for Squadron 42 saves.
Yeah, absolutely. Everything's expanded as we go. Some of the stuff, we read the forums all the time. You guys inspire some stuff. Well, obviously, we've got some ideas on how we want to do it, but customization is a big, big part of our universe, from the characters themselves, but more importantly, the main characters are the ships. So the customizations on the ships are going to be immense. So look for that. Look for more detail on that in the future, too.
TL;DRThey want players to drive the economy through supply and demand, with some game masters nudging things, and players will help test it during alpha and beta.
Well Travarists, the honest answer to that is we want the players to actually drive the economy. Everything you do, supply, demand, everything that happens, if we do this correctly, which is what we're designing, it's going to be very vibrant. So there might be health shortages on one planet over here which generate missions that people need to bring medicine there. There might be a war going on over here and so they need more ammunition. So we'd like the economy to be vibrant and driven by players. We'll have some game masters in there that will put some stuff in here and there to make it work, but as much player-driven stuff as we can do, we're going to do it. And again, you guys are going to be helping us test this going forward when we release the alpha and the beta, so you'll have a lot of input there.
Yeah, why not? Obviously, we want PvP. We're talking about having things like jousting tournaments or things of that nature where people can go in there and battle each other in an arena and maybe other people can bet on who's going to win and test things out. So, yeah, that's absolutely something that we're talking about right now.
If you've seen any of the old Chris Roberts games or any of the games I've made, Starlancer with Chris as well, the simulator's always been a big portion or a big part of those games. So I think you can look to the past and extrapolate that to the future. Cryptic answer, but not one hard to decipher.
Blow-up dollies. Could be cargo. We're working on that mechanic now. We don't know whether that's going to be something that you have in your ship or whether we control that with AI troop transport for boarding parties. We do know boarding is going to be a big part of the game. But how that actually works is still TBD.
Space is a very dangerous place. So space is dangerous. And we will have some missions that you have to take, be very wary of where you're going. And if that means it adversely affects your body, well, that means it adversely affects your body. If you go into a nebula that knocks out your shields and slowly deteriorates your ship, hey, baby, that's just the way it is. That's the risk-reward you're going to take. But maybe the reward is really good. So probably is the answer to that question.
Basically, making sure the technology of the game works, that we don't over-engineer, we don't under-engineer, that we can put out both the Squadron 42, the single-player and the multiplayer parts.
In three words or less. No, I'm just kidding. Basically responsible for all the technology, the project, and the studio. It's different every week. It's especially hectic right now as we plan everything and really get the project going. Could be anywhere from looking at technologies we can reuse or license, working with the programmers for what we're doing now on technical design, reviewing that and working with that. Team building. Hiring, interviewing, and I actually get to code sometimes, too.
Right now, probably planning. Getting the short term and the long term of the project planned out. We have a lot of moving parts right now. We have several people who know the CryEngine really well and the rest of us are really learning it. We are looking at the server side, and planning what to do there, technical design.
So for the prototype, Chris started out with version 3.3. And then we upgraded to 3.4.3. And just a few days ago, we upgraded to 3.4.4, which brought in some bug fixes and new features we needed to break up the world into pieces, since our universe will be so big, for it to work right. And we'll have more news on that in the near future, probably, too. Don't want to give too much away.
Currently, CryEngine supports DirectX. And it probably wouldn't be an efficient use of our time to add OpenGL support ourselves, because we'd rather be developing features for the game. So we'll wait for Crytek if they add OpenGL support.
So right now, like a lot of people, we're waiting for our development kits. I know Chris has visited them recently and talked to them and is really excited. The CryEngine has stereoscopic support already for us. So right now, when we get our dev kits, we'll be trying them out and seeing what the next step is.
And by the way, regarding Oculus Rift, there's going to be a much bigger thing coming up from us and Oculus Rift on the visit Chris and Sandy did there. We kind of teased it a little before, but there's going to be a huge segment coming out about that in the near future.
Anything that uses DirectX or XInput, which are pretty much all controllers. We'd like to have a very mappable system. So any part of the controller could be mapped to whatever you want. What you want right out of the box, you'll be able to hook up all the controls to the different controls in game you want.
So for Star Citizen, we'll make it so that anything we bring into the game is within the limits of what's possible. Anything that comes into Star Citizen only is what is possible with Squadron 42. So if anybody ever would alter it or anything, they wouldn't be able to get anything more than they would if they did really good at Squadron 42.
And then Star Citizen will make sure that it's server authoritative. With it being a twitch game, of course, we have to listen to the client of, oh, ship turned here, ship shot. But we'll do everything we possibly can to make it no cheating.