Inside Star Citizen: To and Fro with Cargo

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   cargo sits at the very heart of the non-combat Star Citizen experience and as it continues to evolve in the upcoming Alpha 323 and Beyond its next major evolution is less about the Places You'll Go and more about the ones you'll start and come back to now hangers whether they're persistent instanced personal or staging make up the next Frontier of cargo gameplay and we went to Chad and his team for an early look at where they're going and how they're progressing let's find out more so yeah we've had a couple isc's before to talk about the new cargo and Hangers features coming but now that we're here and about to release things we want to talk a bit about how that impacts your play experience even if you don't care at all about [Music]

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   cargo so let's start with persistent hangers what are they and what does that mean so a persistent hanger is an instance hanger that is going to be assigned to you whenever you select your home location when logging into the game for the first time for a patch when that happens what we do is we determine the largest ship that you have and then entitle to you a persistent hanger that's of the needed to facilitate that ship whenever you go into that hanger into the game that hanger at your home location is always your hanger and you'll be able to use it like your home you'll be able to keep things in the hanger you'll be able to leave things around you can invite friends in you can

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   treat it like your own little Oasis so let's talk about for these personal angers how do you actually get into them please proceed to sign Landing B you can make a request via ATC for landing and when we do that we will check to see if you have any personal hangers entitled to you you'll be able to enter in using largely the same methodology that you do now land and then you can just hang out in there as far as what can you actually do with your personal hanger and what kinds of things can you decorate with it what we're going to do is allow you to call anything in your inventory up by of that freight elevator you can pick it up off the freight elevator either with your hands or using the tractor beam and just

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   screw it about your location however you pick also in the hangers you'll notice several new kiosks we have the freight elevator kiosk which has a brand new uh UI and uh inventory system to deal with uh large volumes of cargo you're going to have on the left hand side a section that is showing the contents of the platform itself and on the right hand side similar inventory layout with all your armor and weapons and items and then you decide what you want to spawn in um in the freight elevator the freight elevator then comes up and then you can start doing like loading and unloading of various cargo into your ship and so on if you're considerate about how you're loading things and you're trying

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   to optimize your loading times it'll give you a lot of power as far as for example making sure that certain kinds of things are front loaded on the platform to make your multi crew loading as streamlined as possible and anything that's in your inventory you're going to be able to call up some things you might have to put into an inventory container box we're talking 8 16 24 even 32 Su size container boxes that you can put large items in now you can raise that up on the platform including in collections transfer that very quickly onto your ship and then take them to another location in your personal hanger you'll also have access to several other kiosks starting with the item bank which are another form of kiosk which you could almost consider like a small freight elevator

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   in a way in that you can retrieve personal items such as clothing armor and weapons because the item that's being delivered will be delivered in a tray that's in the same machine so you interact that kind of like you interact with a loot box and you get that out so no other player can actually physically get anything from your local inventory and uh these item Banks can be found not just within the hangers but also the wider location such as your Habs and other key areas of a location to retrieve um your personal items since you can't interact with the with your inventory anymore at any given time it means like we need to have enough item banks around each location so you don't block each other um from accessing and and a time no ride it's just a quicker way to get a quick gun or a few metap

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   pins or your armor without having to load it up from the freight elevator and the last chaoskarin2007 from within the hanger and they will appear to you but they won't just come out of thin air what happens is the ho of the floor will open up you get this like amazing view of the of the hanger the lights dim the doors open and the landing platform will be rising up

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   towards you and your ship will be there we try to balance it in a way that it doesn't take too much time for you but also that it feels like it has the right weight to it but also you don't have to wait for it too long so now you have a seamless transition and a realistic way of storing your ships away Additionally you can do clever things like call up a smaller vehicle such as a ground vehicle drive it off and then call up a larger vehicle then you'll have access to your ground Vehicles without having to go to another location you'll be able to call up multiple ships and maybe have one person fly off with one ship call another one have another person in your party fly up with another ship or you can just call up a ship change your mind and then call

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   up a different ship without having to leave or anything like that it gives you a lot of flexibility and I can already tell what some of you are thinking right now we're not going to let the system like eat your body and store it into the inventory or anything like that uh we'll make sure to account for that such that if there's a blocking change that happens we'll stop the process go back up to the default State and then tell the player about the issue so that they can account for it if you do want to jump into the platform just before it closes and fall to your death you can fall to your death if you want to so this is really cool and we're really happy to get this in it's been discussed for some years now and it's been a very tricky thing to fit in and

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    certain text required to be able to do it you be able to have this hanger your own space and and call your own ships and do a lot more within the hanger now now that we're adding all of this new facility to the hangers in the game allowing them to be persistent adding these freight elevators adding the ship platform there's a lot of more things that we have to have in these hangers for them to be useful for what we're adding so the hanger sizes um had to increase um quite a bit we did not want to do that originally in the beginning but soon when we did prototyping figured out that not not all the hanger I said like the lowtech hangers in particular are quite old by this point not all of them were to the same standards or metrics so we figured that with the landing pad now going down you had this

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    gap for like quite some time before the um before the doors close so there was a very narrow walkway for the player sometimes so we had to redri some things and made it actually larger so the um large and XL have had significant size changes so the XL is about 20% larger and the large is about 30% larger so certain ships that were a little tight can now fit a lot more easily so you don't feel like your wings almost scratch the walls of it so it feels a bit more natural and and better to the play experience to land in your hanger now the medium is the same but taller and the small has not been changed but we we have classified ships to fit into the medium that were once

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    classified as small so hopefully a much better player experience than there has been before and it's been interesting to take uh the design of a elevator and the door uh and extrapolate that across multiple sizes so in some cases you can kind of widen out the door and use the same shapes and in some cases you need to think really about how those shapes work and sometimes they don't work within a small door for example when it did work in a much wider door so we've had to play around with that and keep them looking consistent with each other but also uh adapt those shapes to work for each size so this is an actualization of a long-term goal for this entire cargo career to make the whole thing feel more real it means that the whole experience is going to allow

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    for manual loading it'll also feel more rewarding because it'll give you more interesting choices to make throughout the process it'll make multi crewing a more interesting and useful experience it's going to just make the whole experience a more skill intensive and interesting and uh tactile another thing that we've talked about is automated loading in the games this allows you to still do commodity trading without needing to actually move the boxes yourself it will be an option in the commodity terminal whenever you go and you pick the destination inventory you'll be confronted with several options one is the location inventory the next will be all your ships that are at the location if you choose a ship you'll have the option to

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    have it be automatically unloaded or loaded for you of course with an added cost the ship has to be stored to allow for the transfer and it will be time locked while that transfer is occurring different locations in the game will have different amounts of time places that are more optimized for trade are going to allow for faster transfer you'll be able to still do the trading you just have to wait a little bit and pay a bit more money so your profits won't be quite as good in that case once the automatic loading process is finished you can just go to the asop terminal in the hanger access it raise it and go off and you're on your way if you care about cargo this is going to be

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    transformational but even if you're not interested in cargo at all it's still a foundational change for the game that fundamentally changes principles about inventory physicality and your play experience the work's ongoing we're nearly there I think the team's done a great job on this it's been tricky to get it working as it should be it's a big milestone for the game that's been years in the making and coming while I'm here to talk about it today there's been a large number of teams across the entire company that have helped everybody from art animation bfx through to all of the gameplay teams engine teams we've had a huge effort from Austin Montreal Los Angeles Frankfurt Manchester it's been a big Endeavor so I want to thank everyone that's been

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    helping to see this Vision through and I'm really looking forward to getting this into your hands so that you can play with it so what do we learned this week what we learned that the days of big ships scraping by the edges of player hangers are almost behind us that you'll soon be able to spawn your ships and have them rise up directly into these newly expanded hangers and that the freight elevators and item Banks within will Herald a new future of physicalized cargo loading that should have long-reaching ramifications for life in the verse and of course while everything you see on ISC is always an early work in progress because of the dramatic and far-reaching effects these systems will have on all life in the verse you can expect this work will continue to iterate and evolve from what you've just

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    seen between now and its upcoming targeted release in Alpha 323 for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckaby thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week hi um we had a meme image for the end of the show it's been our thing this season uh this week's was a little too hot for TV so we're going to put this week's image in your hands um I'm going to give you a frame and you put whatever you want on here uh there you go and here's my face knowing this is a bad idea that's a mistake it's a mistake

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    it's a mistake it's a mistake