Calling All Devs - Crusader, Hurston and More

I mean, we're talking about two things, right? We're talking about Crusader, the gas giant, and we're talking about Orison as the landing zone. We have an initial white box for Orison laid out. That was just an initial sort of ideas pass to make sure, oh, maybe the shop's here, this is the medical area, this could be the mall. An initial sort of flavor pass and layout pass for Orison. So we have that. The bigger challenge, the much, much bigger challenge is Crusader itself as a gas giant. It is very challenging from a technical point of view to get a gas giant that works from orbit all the way down to essentially the surface when you have nothing concrete to put your feet on. The graphics team are working currently on the gas cloud tech. Where Crusader comes from, it will probably be born from that tech. We're not at a stage yet where we can create an entire planet with that tech, but it is coming at some point. I have personally, just as a little sort of experiment, taken some early gas cloud tech that they've been looking at on the Squadron 42 side of things. I've put the white box Orison that we have and I've stuck it onto the side of Crusader just as a little test. Yeah, it looks pretty good. Even in a sort of rough state, you can see the potential of having this floating city, essentially. And it's very nice to fly around with the gas clouds being all this sort of beautiful soft volumetrics and stuff. It's very satisfying, but also incredibly rough right now. So we're not going to show any of that.

Of course, folks can follow along with the RSI roadmap that's available on robertsspaceindustries.com. You'll notice that now that it goes out to quarter one 2019, Crusader is not on the roadmap yet. It is still very early days in its development.

So I guess I can talk a little bit from the FPS side, or the first-person experience. Yes, you will be able to swim eventually. So with the first iteration of Hurston, who knows if swimming will be ready by then? It's a brand new locomotion set, which is obviously a lot of work for our guys, and at the moment our priorities are on improving our existing animation sets. So we're actually doing a lot of work right this second. It's happening right now. We're improving some of our animation sets and our locomotion feel and everything. So yeah, our big priority at the moment is to improve the existing things we've got before we move on to things like swimming. So short answer is, yeah, I guess we will eventually be able to swim, but who knows when that will be done. It's definitely on our radar though.

I think it's fair to say that it's not something that's going to hold up the release of Hurston, basically. Right now it's a little too early to say, where you've got multiple sprints going, who's going to finish, who's not going to finish, whatnot. But we're not going to hold up Hurston if swimming isn't done and ready. So basically it remains to be seen. It's TBD, put a pin in it, whether you'll be able to swim when Hurston is first introduced into Star Citizen. It's possible. And either way, you'll eventually be able to do it for certain.

Another answer is follow the public roadmap.

As far as the ship question, I will tell you that I talked to Todd Papy on the side and he said, don't talk to me about ships flying underwater right now. So that's probably even farther back.

Yes. I think that's something that requires a bit more thought. I can say yes, swimming is something you can do. Ships flying underwater, I would definitely not want to talk about yet.

Well, my answer to that would be, you can potentially leave Port Olisar and not respawn there, firstly even without using the ship bed logout, because as we've got it set at the moment, you should be able to fly your ships to other landing areas which have respawn rooms for players, such as Grim Hex for example. If you request a landing through the air traffic control, if you land correctly at those areas, then you should respawn at them. Potentially then, if you don't like Olisar, you don't have to travel back there and respawn there. So firstly, you've got that mechanic to do that. Secondly, the bed logouts. Yeah, I do tend to get the bugs myself for that feature. We've been looking at a couple of bugs for 3.1, so hopefully it's a little bit better than it was when it first came in in 3.0. We also put in the crash recovery system in 3.1, which, although not directly related to beds, hopefully improves the respawn experience and persistent spawning as a feature as a whole. So for 3.2, we will be looking at improving the feature further. I think we're actually meeting today to discuss a little bit what we may or may not look at doing for that patch. Spawning as a whole is just something that's evolved over several other patches. I can remember back to when you were a criminal, you ultimately got put in Grim Hex. So as to when the feature is final, it'll probably to some extent always evolve over time, because we're looking to give you guys the best experience possible when it comes to spawning. So I guess watch this space for further improvements. It is on the radar amongst many, many other things. But yeah, it's certainly something that we're looking to improve on.

That's a good reminder, Rob. Every Star Citizen environment is a test environment. Whether it's the Evocati, or it's the PTU, or even the live alpha environment, which is a testing environment, you're going to see these features continue to iterate, continue to improve each and every patch, and you can do your part on the Issue Council. If you're having a particular issue with logging out through the beds and you can reproduce it, use the Issue Council to let us know. Find other people's Issue Council issues and vote them up, confirm them up. Help us identify these things and work on these things and make this better for everybody.

Well, I can't answer that directly, but I can talk about why perhaps you chose me to answer this question. So right now the vehicle features team is working on scanning, specifically radar scanning, ping, and scanning for the items that you find via ping. So the system we're working on is specifically for finding surface mineable areas on planets and asteroids where you can gather resources for our future mining mechanic. In that regard, you'll be able to do a ping that gives you back some vague info about where potential targets may be, and then as you get closer to them, those targets will resolve, and then you could actually do a focus scan on those targets that you pick up, and then get back info. So you'll get stuff like these particular mineral deposits are here, and are you interested in getting that? That will become the basis for the overall system in which you could do things like scan ships and go, hey, what kind of ship is that? Is it friendly? What manufacturer is it? Who owns it? Who's on it? So life forms will be one thing that we'll eventually be able to get. Along with that, I'm not sure if this particular team will be working on a system for security for ships, but if it does, I think the future of security will involve something in which you could do a self-scan and then you'll get back the same type of resolution of info about exactly what life forms are on it. So if you do a really short run, perhaps you'll get info about the number of life forms on it. Then as you continue scanning, you'll get info about exactly who the actual individuals are. And then you could go to the list and maybe compare it against the manifest and figure out, hey, there is a bad guy on the ship, and then send security down to get rid of him. And then I think from there, once we get that mechanic established, we'll be able to do things like, how do you thwart that system? Maybe you have some kind of stealthy armor, or you could disable the internal scanner that's on the ship to make it impossible to do scanning, which will maybe give away that you are stowing away on the ship. But it might be something that would be fun for players to be able to do, like hot-wiring a car in that case. So to make a shorter version of that, I think what we'll do is we'll basically give you the ability to do the same type of manifest information resolution on your own ship that you would normally do from your ship to other targets, and then give you back some kind of info so you can determine whether you have something on board that you don't want.

So I've actually got an email, let me dig it up real quick, that I can share, because we're proposing a couple of different solutions that we're exploring right now for this. So this right here is what we've got at the moment, where we've got our six cardinal direction nav points around a planet, right? So you have to go to one of these points and then conventional travel down to the surface, which is not always a short flight, right? So one of the ideas is to have some sort of dynamically [...] And as the planet scales up, you can see on the right here that the mesh would increase in density so that the maximum distance down to any given point on a planet would be a fairly consistent amount of flight time. But another option that we've been exploring is, say you've got Levski here and then you've got Levski's atmosphere, because you're not going to be able to quantum travel through atmosphere. That's a definite, never going to happen, right? But what we would do is we'd put the arrival radius of Levski up into orbit, so that if you are, say, on the far side of the planet, you would be able to target Levski, and then we would create a spline to the orbital intersection above the atmosphere, and then that would allow you to still have your angular approach descent down to the planet surface. Because that's something that we don't want, to nosedive down to the planet. But this is some of the stuff that we're exploring here. So we're definitely working on a few different solutions, and we're going to see which way CR wants to go on this. But yeah, we've definitely got some stuff in progress, because we know it's an issue that nobody wants a 10-minute travel time down to an outpost. But we thought it'd be really cool to be able to pick any. You also have to keep in mind that you're not going to know about every location on a planet. So we're still probably going to have, even if we have the spline solution, we're still going to have to have the cardinal markers, because you're going to need to scan for locations. And you'll know about major cities, but you won't know about all the outposts. So you're still going to need to get around it to a certain degree, whether or not that's the cardinal markers or some finer distribution of nav points. That's still undecided at this point.

I do want to reiterate, of course, that no decision has been made on this.

This has been going back and forth for a bit now. It's in discussion, and we're trying to pitch a few different solutions, and it's just what we can fit within the time that we've got for 3.2 here, because this is something that we definitely want to make better for 3.2. Quantum travel improvements in general is something that we're focused on right now.

So for folks watching at home, I would say stay tuned as we get closer and closer to the release of 3.2. We'll follow back up with Rob. We'll see which path we intend to go on, whether it's one of the two we discussed today or whether it's a third option altogether.

In fact, I think there's actually going to be a featurette at some point on the quantum travel and the quantum linking and some of the additional quantum travel improvements somewhere towards the 3.2 release date.