I would like to know how FPS combat will feel when done. Can you explain how the character is going to move around, take cover and which FPS's do you think are the closest analogue to what you are creating?asked by Daz

So, how the character is going to move around and take cover. So, in Star Citizen our character does take cover, he does have actually cover animations set. So we have him come up to the cover object and when he gets there, he's using his idle animations, the weapon ends up raising, now it's not technically correct.

Why is it not technically correct?

Because you raise your weapon up towards your head, so you can blow your brains out or something like this. For us to be able to allow the players to read what is happening it's important for design to be able to see that weapon, so we're bringing it up here and we're trying to be nice and safe. Then you can move back and forth across that cover object and around it and everything like this as well. Now when you hit an edge what happens is your character is going to then go from whatever that position is, to another, the weapon is going to move to another location. So say I'm going to my left hand side, to let me know that I'm at the corner of that cover object, and then I can peek out or if I go to aim I will then step out and come around the next corner and try to fire. What is the closest analog to what we're creating..?

That's tough huh?

Yeah it is.

None of the shooters, really that are out anyway, are third and first.

Yes.

With the expectation that you can really play in both. There's some that you can bounce out of, third, and see yourself.

There's a distinct connection within Star Citizen that doesn't exist in majority of first person shooters, where the third person and the first person assets are the same assets. That took a lot of, sort of, engineering figuring this out.

I like how you called engineering art 'chasing the tail'.

It actually came down to just a day in the Frankfurt.

I explained it on my sort of intro to you but I actually had a little explanation to the subscribers about Evo's one line change and then the little meme I did right after the fact, "1000 man hours? I do in one line." But it was pretty cool, like it is interesting to talk about the first person/third person thing, and it does go totally in line with this only because we had tried for years back at CryTek to kind and get this right. This kind of started in Crysis 2, and like you know him far better than I do because you worked with Evo and other people at CryTek. It started in Crysis 2, you gave it a try.

Yeah we tried.

"No this is not going to work."

Because the problem really was an engineering issue and a time issue, during Crysis 2 were making a lot of major changes to a lot of different systems. It just, there were certain promising things about it, but there were going to be issues with it, we could see those issues and we certainly found that we couldn't solve those issues within the time we had to ship the particular product. But changes that happened between Crysis 2 and Crysis 3, in the way that the third person character and the AI aimed, actually sort of set the ground-work for what we're doing here, because, you know, later last year we were looking at some of these issues, and connection issues, and we were trying to figure out why this wasn't working; why this other thing wasn't working.We saw the, we were like, the custom aim joint isn't being used properly. So once we got that working, and we were able to get the aim system working properly, it was a simple matter of tying back to the camera setup, now we had control of being able to make adjustments within first person, that made the same actual adjustments in third-person. So where you are pointing the gun in first person is exactly where he's pointing it in third person. Zero difference.

And there's just a huge disconnect with that right?

It was such a simple, it was one of those sort of answers where you just look at it and you're like, I remember standing there in the room and going, well can't just bla bla bla? And tie this to this? And it was like...

But you've been in game development enough years to know that, as soon as someone says "Can't we just" usually.. not, can't we just. So. In this case,SB: In this case, it was! In this case it was just like, huh. And Evo went back, he made the test, and totally fucking worked.

Yeah, which is super awesome, and I remember that we're the initial naive sort of implementation, literally take a camera, strap it onto a joint, and see what it looks like, and like it looked cool but you realised, I'm kinda getting sick, this doesn't really make sense, and then yeah.

So, what is the FPS combat going to feel like? So... Start Citizen, from a feeling standpoint, is going to be a little bit different than a lot of the games that you've typically played. It's not really a Call of Duty, but then again it's not a Battlefield 4, but then it's not an ARMA 3, but then it's not a Crysis 3.

Yeah, right.

We're taking sort of pieces of each of those, building something something new, and utilize what I like to call competitive analysis. So what I'll do is, we're playing something so, for instance we're working on the cover, and something is not feeling right, or it's not playing right, and I'm trying to explain what it is that I'm looking for, or what is wrong here. So what I'll do is I'll go get video from competing products out there, and I'll take those videos and I'll also take examples of videos of myself doing something, or animations that we've done, and really break 'em down and go, you see what they do here? You see what we're doing here? This thing isn't working here, right? And this is how we can fix that. I like what they're doing over here. So, it's kind of hard to sort of...

It's a nebulous question. How does it feel, how do you explain that. Now...

And that's going to change over time.

And maybe I'll give it a stab, because it's... it's somewhere, it's not a twitch shooter, it's not a Quake, it's not a Doom, it's not a fast shooter by any stretch of the imagination. Can you look around fast? Yeah, definitely you can look around fast. But it, things are not moving at that rate. It's just not that quick.

No, we want to promote ADSST: Exactly, Aiming down the sights. We want to promote some tactical movement, you want to promote teamplay, so, it's, it's definitely definitely somewhere between the Battlefields and ARMA. Where it's not full simulation but it's also not so simulation heavy that it becomes tiresome or frustrating.

There's some things you'll see you may go "Oh hey I know that from say Crysis 3". And things that we do with the character in the game because it is an engine game. It's a similar engine so even though we have heavily modified it.

Even this bit of it, which is the most fundamental sort of part of the CryEngine is the first person aspect of it or the first person character aspect of it. We've kind of re-did that, which probably doesn't make sense to a lot of people. The easiest thing to do would have been to say "Alright just copy paste Crysis 3 and go to town". Again with this game we wanted to be something new something unique and we're not afraid to give that a try right? I think that's an important point anyway.Maybe and to extend the question a tiny bit. I did one like, one of the examples, just to bring up one of the examples we were looking at. Between Battlefield and our turning in place. So and still we're actually in a very real, realy shape that we have to fix our turn in place which is not as good as it could be in both our opinions I think. Or just our general turning. Battlefield has a really interesting system of you'll be standing there and your character is allowed to rotate almost 180 degrees before his feet do anything right? You recall this we were taking a look over a multiplayer server?

I remember you shooting me constantly as we were testing.

Yeah and then I was prone and you shot me in the face and you teabagged me sometimes it was... I remember this too! So we were taking a look at it what happens is with our game right now in Star Citizen in what like 30 degrees or something like this? I can't remember what the foot turn start is. We've got different animations for 0-45, 45-90 and then 90 plus I think or I might have gotten that wrong, 30, 45 whatever.Basically as soon as you're outside of that rotation we start adjusting your feet so that you can align to that new position now. I kind of like the way that Battlefield does it because you don't get a lot of this foot shuffling which a lot of people are not liking with our game right now cause one there's a bug where you can get stuck shuffling. But mostly because and again this came from other bugs with the camera, you could see yourself shuffling and you don't really see that anymore with the fixes that have gone in.It does almost make a lot more sense when you're holding a weapon you wouldn't just rotate 30 degrees and then start doing that you would probably go just about as far as you can go and then you would make that rotation so it's things like that just to wrap an example into that.

Yeah we're taking to that exact like originally it was 30 degrees off center. Now we're going okay well ... For instance when we're in relaxed and we're looking, I can go like this, I can go like this, I can go like this and now this is ... I can go all the way over here, but naturally if I'm you're here from me, I'm just going to, at this point I'm going to start to rotate. So it's a balancing act between the no weapon. So when you're relaxed, that behavior is a little bit different and the having the weapon so we want to remove a lot of that ticky ticky ticky ticky ticky coming across, but we also want to make sure that when I am aiming and I'm gonna go aim this way that I as I come this direction, right about here ... So it's maybe 60 degrees or so, I'm going to attempt to re-orientate.

Right.

That way we're still keeping the feeling of realism in the characters poses when he's firing and stuff like that, but we're not getting that ticky ticky ticky.

Right, right right, perfect. So hopefully, daz that was enough info there to give an idea of what we think it's gonna feel like. Of course we have the way that Chris wants it to feel, the way that we want it to feel which are all pretty much in line so I think we'll get there soon.

So let's go to BigDave.

I like that BigDave question.

Yeah.