Chad McKinney · Persistence Developer

It's something that we've been thinking about for a long time, and I have had it on my mind for a long time. With 3.0, we did a really big push to increase the level of persistence in the game. And this included some work to get, for instance, loose item persistence working in ships, which was necessary to get cargo working. However, we've known for a long time that we have this kind of trick that we're relying on, the giant magic bag of holding that the player has, where you just kind of stuff everything and you just kind of pull it out. Where was it? And so, yes, physical inventory is where we're headed. So we want to have it to where you don't have this magical place where all your guns are stored. You have it on your person, or maybe in a bag that you're holding. And if it's not there, then, well, you don't have physical access to it, so you can't equip it. You may own it, it may be in some location that you own or a ship that you own, but that doesn't mean that you can equip it. And we want to start using the ships, the ship storage, habs, physical locations, eventually that the players own themselves, as the kind of physical storage.

However, this kind of starts to get into something that we're also working towards, which is global persistence, which itself is pretty closely tied in with server streaming and server meshing. So actually these are big topics that we're starting to look towards, now that we've got object container streaming starting to look good on the client. And now that we're considering what server-side streaming needs to get working, actually one of the big things is global persistence. So we need to be able to stream out parts of the universe on the server, and in order to stream it in correctly, that means that place needs to be persisted out correctly. So that actually is going to help for physical persistence and physical inventory, because that means that if I leave something somewhere, say in an outpost, it's still going to be there if I come back next week, potentially, unless somebody took it.

So the plans are, we're going to do it. We have some ideas. We're going to increase our global persistence. That said, some fine details, like can I use my PMA app in the mobiGlas if I'm standing next to the locker? Do I have to physically take it out? Things like that, those details are still a little bit in the air. I think as we get closer to working on it, we're going to hammer down those kinds of details, but we're working on the big tech that's necessary to deliver on it. And it's not something that we've forgotten about at all.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So I imagine it's something that people are going to want to keep an eye on the public roadmap for, as far as when they can expect things like global persistence and then the physicalized inventories to make their way into the Star Citizen Persistent Universe.

Chad McKinney · Persistence Developer

The other thing that I'll add, just quickly, is that in addition to the core system work to get the persistence behavior working, there's also a lot of other miscellaneous work surrounding it. So that includes any kind of item game code that needs to be written, for maybe lockers, and then also actor code that needs to be written to do any kind of the carrying logic to pass things back and forth. We have some of that, but I think there'll be more, as well as some animation work that's going to be necessary to do smooth locomotion in the transitions with items being passed around. There's work to go around.