Reverse the Verse: December 4th, 2015

No updates on additional ships, but we're working on our plan for next year for ships internally right now, and once we have that locked down, we will share with you guys. That's a big part of what I've been working on the last two weeks or so.

PTU's going great. If you are part of the PTU, you've probably seen the vast difference over the last week or so. We were hit with an unexpected slowdown bug two builds ago, shortly after the last public build, which has been preventing us from iterating publicly the last two days. The folks are working on smashing that right now. I think they believe they may have a solution. There's a build cooking right now they're going to look at. And we're going to do a shorter than usual 2.0 update later today, and we will let you know where it is exactly then. Hopefully, at the very least, we will get another one for you to iterate on. We're talking about what to do next. We may be able to expand the number of folks having access. All things are possible.

The automated unmelt system is still on track for delivery. I can't give you the date, but it's not a far-off distant horror date. It's the immediate future.

Finishing up some more 2.0 tasks, bugs, trying to get stability for that, and I think we're very close.

I'm working on destruction, explosions. You might have noticed the ships have been breaking apart kind of funny. They're tangled and they kind of go... Well, a week before PTU, we discovered the collision was moving out of place, and that was causing it. So we worked out this issue. It should be live pretty soon. And on the Connie I've been working on specifically doing the nice breakup and refining some of the way the damage happens. So that'll be checked in today.

Actually, these aren't the folks to ask about the Starfarer. We were looking at the Starfarer; it was Elwyn and Dan looking at the Starfarer yesterday, but they're not here.

I will say that the Starfarer is looking great. It's at the point where we're saying, OK, they're doing the hangar stuff so we can put it in.

No. Not officially, although I know a lot of the folks in Austin obviously are gamers who have tickets. So look for your favorites from CIG on the floor, and they'll all love to talk to you if you stop them.

Lots of questions about the loaner system. The loaners are for playing purposes. They're not for hangar purposes. So you don't see the loaners generally in your hangar.

No updates on the Morrow Tour yet, guys. The guys who were working on it are working on 2.0. It's just a matter of priorities. So we're all hands on deck for 2.0.

Although you will see some bits and bobs of it at the livestream on the 16th.

Yes. I was just rewriting all the copy for the website yesterday. Sandi and Vincent are, I think, full steam ahead on that. We will probably be kicking off the submissions process later this month. We're going to ask people to build a Star Citizen helmet first as the test. You remember last time we did build a ship weapon. This time it'll be a helmet. So if you're a character artist, start thinking about helmets right now. Get a jump on it.

And look to the helmets that are currently in game for some inspiration, maybe, style-guide-wise.

I think we all want to see the Titan suits. The contest is going to be designing a Titan suit, one of our heavy armor mech type things for the game. It's going to be cool.

Our definitive answer about TrackIR is that it doesn't work yet. And no one has the answer to that yet either. So no TrackIR now, or until someone tells me otherwise, because I haven't heard anything.

But someday, though, it is in the feature list.

Yeah, it's intended. But I don't think that it's really up there among the stability and frame rate and all those things that we're dealing with from 2.0. So that's really taking precedence. I don't know when TrackIR will make it.

It will make it. It's just a question of when.

So when going over doing balance for the Retaliator and Constellation, getting that into the state that we would want it is interesting. Generally, our goals are to have it so that a multi-crew situation just comes out on top. We want you to be able to take advantage of having multiple people doing things, from shield management and radar to turrets and placing bullets in all directions. So to that end, we kind of envision the Constellation has been built to have a really devastating forward-facing armament. And the Retaliator has its torpedoes and missiles, and those are of course to do a ton of damage. As far as actual dogfighting, it's more about having fewer places to go where you can't be hit. So it should have guns on you at all times. So it's a matter of who is able to manage their multi-crew better. And I think that means that in a situation where you have only one player in a Retaliator and only one player in a Constellation, you'd probably expect to see the Constellation come out on top, because the Retaliator is juggling more of its things. Because of the Constellation's forward-facing priority, the pilot has a little bit more control over that. But once you have anybody in a turret, once you start having the full armament, a fully crewed Retaliator is going to be a force to be reckoned with. And we're looking at revisiting all of our DPS values on our weapons by size, looking to expand out the turret variety. So like we did with the Hornet and the Cutlass being able to swap out their mounts for more specialist weapons, you'll be able to do similar things on the Constellation and Retaliator. And we're putting in all the balance numbers to really support that.

Plus there's that interesting balance between the five 360-degree turrets on the Retaliator versus the two that are on the Constellation, with the four slightly gimbaled, forward-facing size three weapons on the Constellation. The dozens of size two and size one missiles that are on the Constellation versus the four huge torpedoes that are on the Retaliator. Those are also forward-facing. That dynamic between how much damage you're doing per weapon and how devastating those are against each other are the things that we're trying to balance. And it's a challenge, but I think we're getting there.

It goes into flight as well. The Retaliator has extra armor that the Constellation doesn't have, so its hull is naturally stronger. The shield is a bit stronger as well, although the Constellation shields are currently tuned to recharge faster. So you've got the more maneuverable Constellation versus the more heavily armored Retaliator. But there's just a bunch of different areas where they have some interesting balance going on.

And some weaknesses we have on the Constellation right now are because of the incompleteness of the stations, especially the engineering stations, right now. Once we get that designed and implemented further, the copilots will have a lot more say in the battle and the outcome of the battle, specifically by doing things like shunting power to shields, deciding which shields get what, turning on and off certain components. When we get that system in, it's going to be a lot more interactive, I think, as far as what each crew member has [to do with] the outcome of the head-to-head battles.

Yeah, just overall, next year we're going to see a lot of great headway, especially for what is going to make a multi-crew ship sing. Even the stuff Kirk was mentioning, for making all the stations work out, a lot of that is our big avionics computer systems in our ships. These things aren't just for one purpose or another; they drive everything digitally in your ship, so we have to make sure all that's set, so then when you're doing this insane Macross-style missile volley with your Constellation...

Which we've seen a lot of videos of, which is awesome.

Yeah, so long term, that's absolutely going to stay, but as the system gets developed and things become more tangible and meaningful, that'll be a much more deliberate choice you're making for your ship, to be like, no, I want my ship to be this multi-target missile boat that people are afraid of. Or you want to set your ship up where, no, I can just drill all of my missiles on one guy, locking on extremely fast and getting a new volley out there. So a lot of good choices that we want you guys to be making coming down the road.

And hopefully we'll get the Merlin to be actually pilotable and be another either escape ship or help you out in the battle itself.

I saw someone asking about multi-crew versus dogfighter ships. We are still intending for it to be three Hornets against a Constellation, they'll have taken pretty severe damage. Whereas the balance for the Retaliator is three Hornets for a Constellation and one of those Hornets is dead. So that's generally the goal balance we're looking for. It's going to take some tuning to get there, but I think we've got a decent start.

No news on grabby hands. I'm looking forward to getting that in as well. I've been talking about getting that maybe pushed a little harder to get it out sooner, but it's a complicated system. It literally touches all of our game.

That is actually how it's supposed to work. There are bugs in which that doesn't continue to work. We're still trying to work that out. It's specifically with network. [If you] enter, say, a Hornet, a Super Hornet, you're supposed to have control over the turret if there's no co-pilot. But there's some weird order: if the pilot gets in and then the co-pilot comes in, who's supposed to be able to take control over the turret, and then one of them exits and re-enters, all sorts of havoc happens in which the turret is either unable to be controlled or unable to be taken over by the priority seat. So we're still trying to work that out, but that is what's supposed to happen.

We're probably going to wait to see how the current balance actually plays out. We've been using the PTU mostly to check out the multi-crew. So that's been our focus, because that's the thing that's going in. So that'll probably be the next...

I'm actually working on that list right now. I have it completed, I'm just waiting for other eyes to confirm it, and then it's something we'll put up on the forums in a little bit.

Well, I will say again, tune in to the livestream on December 16th for more information. There'll be more info on the site about the pre-orders and pictures and all that in the next week or so. I think they're going to be doing a poll about it. There's some information Saitek wants Monday or Tuesday. We will let you know.

No. It's all being done in Austin. I haven't heard an update in a while. I found some of the alien language stuff Chris did for the Wing Commander movie the other day. They did a whole language font and figured out how Kilrathi was supposed to work for the movie. Kind of a hallmark of Chris's stuff.

I hate them. I'm generally pretty happy with the stuff I'm seeing, but that's why I'm putting it out there to see it. We need way more interaction with it. Even the early stuff, we're already seeing people flying around and doing cool things, which is awesome. So I'm optimistic.

And of course, even when 2.0 goes live, that's not the end of development, guys. There's still a long road of development ahead. This is not the end.

No, the idea is that you're using your own skills rather than, oh, you're a level 2 Hornet pilot, level 3 Hornet pilot. You have to actually be good at space combat or making deals. It's not an artificial leveling system.

We want player skill informed by your item choice and loadout and your circumstance, and not the other way around.

And that involves us as well. When we start doing balancing... like I think I mentioned a while ago, our mass system is completely haphazard. So we need to actually refactor that and have more realistic mass values for all ships, by determining their materials and what they would actually be, so that... flight characteristics, it affects everything. So that's one system we need to revisit when we're doing these balance changes.

Eventually, yes. It's not going to be Grand Theft Crusader forever.

I'm looking forward to not only locking ships, but turning on and off the lights. I mean, they have the O button, but going into the back of the Constellation and just having a light switch rave.

In 2.0, it would be the flight. That's been such a long process, and having it actually out and playable, and having precision and cruise, and having mass affecting your top speed and your behavior, afterburner, making it so that racing is a bit more interesting than just line up your straight-line shot and then wait until you have to turn again. There's so much more there now, and there's going to be so much more. I'm really looking forward to putting that stuff in, but I'm really proud of where the flight model is now compared to where it was. It's obviously still a process, but I'm very proud of that.

I'd probably say just having the large world maps and multi-crew even up and running, because that's always been the big dream pitch for the game, where it's not just you controlling one ship abstractly, it's you and your buddies can pile onto these great crazy machines and go blow your other friends up, or random people up.

I'm actually really proud of the Crusader map and just having everybody kind of just jump in there, all the GTA stuff where people are jacking each other's ships, people are shooting each other, playing some FPS. It's kind of a big push for what Star Citizen kind of is, and starting to build that persistent universe up, start building encounters, start building all that up. It's super awesome.

So I'm most proud of the Constellation, implementing the Connie from Gamescom on, actually from before Gamescom, getting it up and running, at least the semblance of multi-crew to begin with. It also serves as a testbed for what multi-crew entails, and we're refining that system, and we'll be implementing more of what each crew member will do and how the crew works together as a team to make that big ship experience come alive. And it's an ongoing process, but at least we got one ship out there to work with.

I forgot. The UI update with Zane, that one was also really exciting to get in. And it looks so nice. And we've been talking about that for so long, and to finally get that in is really satisfying. And the Crucible is really nice to have out, too. Although that's not in the patch, the way that's shaped up for the concept sale was really nice.