Star Citizen: May Subscriber's Town Hall feat. LA Design Team

25 May 201600:58:461,488 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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oh are we live now oh hey guys welcome to uh to uh reverse the verse this is the uh May subscriber edition special subscriber edition of reverse the verse um your community manager Jared Huckaby uh if you've never watched reverse the verse before reverse the verse is cloud Imperium games uh live stream with the fans and once a month we do a special edition for our subscribers where we take questions from our subscriber chat on the RSI website so so uh when we get to taking the questions which will be real soon here go ahead and uh submit your questions in that subscriber chat uh first we want to introduce our special panel of guests this week uh to my immediate immediate right is designer KX Renault hey was really enjoying our Awkward start yeah yeah well it's because we have a different setup than
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we normally do so we can't see we can't see Hennessy's your live signal anymore so we just had to kind of guess uh to his right is is a senior uh Tech artist MH yeah Matt in how how you doing how star of one of the most watched ATV segments of all time explosions explosions and to our to the end there last but certainly not least designer Mr Matt Sherman everyone how you doing Matt good good so why don't we take a few moments and tell people you know who it is you are what areas that you work on and what you're working on currently so so they can try to shape their questions to that we'll start with a Matt at the end there okay yeah so I'm a technical designer here in the LA office uh pretty much I work on spaceships their gameplay systems and ship components uh just you
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know designing out some of the new ships that you guys will be flying uh we've got the Reliant going hang ready with two4 did some of the work on that and then the uh upcoming Buccaneer sale for this coming Friday now what are some of the ship the ships that you've been the specific designer for uh th those two specifically right now so the Reliant the buccaneer uh also some work on the dragonfly which we've announced uh few other ships that are still also in work or in the works and just in the pipeline right now so cool and Matt ineri our senior technical artist what's a technical artist do uh well primarily we're we're focused on uh tools optimization and we do a lot of the setup on the ships as well I've been working on um the ships for a couple years uh and I've worked on every ship
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uh that we've reduced uh mostly doing the damaged lighting and um various optimizations and KX uh I'm a technical designer here and what I do tends to uh to vary by the day I'm incredibly ADHD so I have to keep switching it up uh lately I've been working on uh more systems stuff but it's begun to swing back around towards ships with a with the caterpillar and and some other things that I've been working on the before that I was doing uh everything from damage to balance to doing a lot of the the ship designs and and the flight behaviors uh right now I'm working on uh well finishing up the the C caterpillar support but also working on uh the the
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design for terminals uh which we had a little glimpse of in the uh caterpillar Ship Shape uh from ATV last week I think it was last week they all blur together so because especially since I've been working on this week's so uh so yeah so that's a brief glimpse of the things that they work on uh we'll be taking questions from our subscriber uh chat you can go to robertsspaceindustries.com and uh join the chat and uh join the subscribers tab uh if you're a subscriber and you don't see the subscribers tab uh you can choose from the more channels hey have we're hearing ourselves coming back through so you can you can go and uh choose more channels and add the subscriber channel to yourself of course that's only if you're a subscriber uh
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and if you're considering being a subscriber so you can ask us a question you can choose subscribers from the uh main menu navigation at the top so uh We've also stage some questions so while we're collecting questions in our chat also please preface your question with the word question uh capital letter surrounded by brackets it'll help us pull it out we've got a question from our Forum thread where we staged a couple ahead of time right off the that um hello Matt hello Matt Matt and Randy uh we replaced Randy with with with with Mr inary so he said hi to you no no we replac Randy with KX oh that's right I can't keep uh surprisingly not named Matt yeah after watching ship shaped caterpillar 2 I have to say the ship is looking great and I can't wait to have more non-combat roles in the
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proverse his question is what kind of emerging gameplay are you three looking forward to while having to crew a larger ship like the cat or the Carrick uh I mean oh it's it's all the basic stuff like I all the stuff that that sort of falls out of having these systems is going to be incredible to explore uh but I'm just excited to to touch the ship like you know crawling around and and checking out all the little nooks and craning and all the bits that that move around that's that's what sort of gets me going we were talking yesterday about playing gyromite with the doors yeah where you'd be able to to sort of control the flow of battle by trying to manipulate it through the terminal while you're trying to repel borders you know you're you're up in the cockpit on a on
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a console opening and closing doors trying to trap borders in with your security forces and stuff so they can't progress through the ship sure open air lock exactly send them out into space those points going yes I also had to explain what your might was cuz I'm apparently much older than you are no it's that few people even in the NES era played gyromite because no one wanted to deal with the hassle of the Rob I love gyromite I love Gite PlayStation 2 was my first console so I have no context with any of this all right um our next question is from bacon of War he wants to know how is The multisource Shield work coming along uh actually really well um so that I actually want to say Sandy posted an image a couple weeks ago onto the main Facebook uh showing uh one
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of our programmers Chad uh zamza uh he's been doing a lot of work getting the uh backend Tech that we need to get the the shield pooling up and running so we've got some really cool stuff in the works for that with just making making Shield management uh involved and not just okay I'm just pushing it to this face but the the trade-offs and the consequences of reinforcing a shield of letting a side get weak of you know how much power management you're doing to to keep the The Shield values at at optimal level so the moment to moment is a little bit more meaningful yeah the amount of time that you spend at any given Shield priority can drastically affect the outcome because of the the different weights on on how things refill on on
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how much health it takes how much health it has and how much damage it takes uh accordingly so it's it makes those Split Second decisions much more important than than they used to be and now that's also further supported by the ability to to make those deeper Loadout decisions because uh now that you don't have just the one Shield generator to the one Shield uh then we can have a lot more interactive interaction between the components on that and and Visually speaking uh we're going to move away from the kind of Blobby looking shield and more to a form fitted Shield uh and we're changing the way we're implementing shield in general instead of using the these Shield meshes all around we're going to uh use uh the Collision that's already there and kind of like push that out and then create the the shape of the ship from the those
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uh collisions that we already have in place so that's coming in the next month gotcha uh he had a followup question will burning and other visual effects be added to ship damage uh we already can do a a lot of that kind of uh burning and uh effects work um so when something attaches it can trigger uh the effects to play and we can add like fire and Smoke and Things onto the debris uh we definitely want that vision of the Titanic you know breaking apart and like the you know the fire and the debris falling out so that's that's where I'm always trying to push towards we've been also we've been talking about uh driving similar behaviors in in the actual flow of damage uh where your component could reach a critical level of damage that
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isn't so critical that it explodes where where it's it's actively uh taking damage over time you need to shut it off or cycle your systems some to address that um so we we're beginning to to to look at how we might actually implement the concept of having fire but we're we're doing that in sort of a a controlled approach because uh Star Citizen is big and just introducing something like that can get can get crazy so we're looking at it more in terms of like you know how does the broad scale of Heat lead to the behaviors that we want to see in in ship destruction either explosion or uh failure or possibly the fire State yeah okay all right uh looking at some of the
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questions want to give a couple guidelines here guys uh obviously uh no when questions when is this going to come out when is that going to come out these aren't the guys to talk about that uh Second uh networking questions or programming question questions that that's for Network engineers and programmers these guys are designers and a tech artist and uh third uh for Buccaneer specific questions uh we have hvv tomorrow which is dedicated fully to the buccaneer both primary segments are dedicated to the both the design and the Art of the buccaneer so we're going to save Buccaneer questions for ATV tomorrow and then the following Q&A that we always do for every concept sale so if you're wondering why you're asking questions related to those things and I'm not asking them that's why or yes uh I don't know how I don't know if you
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guys if you guys are you guys involved in the localized physics grids at all that's more yeah yeah I mean for setting up any of our ships especially anything with an interior now I mean making sure that we get the the physics Grid in there that we have a a a high enough detail of the grid uh Geo inside that we can can you know line it up to the ship but not so uh overd detailed that it starts becoming problematic in terms of uh performance and gameplay gotta well uh we have a person so so honor naine n sorry guys shouldn't even try to say your names uh how hard has the localized physics been while at the same time trying to emulate space such as explosive decompression or even a ship rapidly speeding up or speeding down certainly we've had problems with the
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transition between you know different physics uh areas like going from open space into the back of a ship and and we've kind of conquered some of that um there's a lot of work that has yet to be done and we're we uh have some uh temporary code in place that's making it work but we know there's a solution uh that's going to make it uh much better in the future yeah well the localized physics grid specifically stops that interaction from happening like the whole whole point of it is that uh I want to be standing on a ship which itself is moving through the universe uh so implementing it in this way um specifically breaks that connection and so in these specific cases where we want there to be a connection where you want to have momentum carried through the
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space or you want to have uh physics interaction here intera also in the uh interior physics grid those things have to be now built in specifically uh because that way they can behave the way we want them to and not the way that whatever the physics code might believe they might work yeah which tends to be much more chaotic it's pretty challenging making flying FPS levels through a larger Space level and then being able to transition out of one into the bigger one and then into somebody else's and it's a it's probably one of the most ambitious aspects of this game I'm constantly amazed at our progress with it even just on the PTU right now I was I was kind of Blown Away Monday getting in seeing the the handful of
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videos of people who did figure out a a clean functional way to pull the Merlin inside the back of the starf farer and that's that's I mean dead on what what it would have to be because no you can't just fly it in NOS first because of how the wings handle on that and getting it in cleanly getting the door shut cleanly getting it landed and seated cleanly I mean you can already see the improvements of the physics grid because in in the live version you try and do that and say a constellation well uh no ship that you could sort of cram in there is going to sit cleanly on the floor so as soon as you go into Quantum it detaches it flips back it blows your ship up but now with the the scope and the size of the grid and the starf it's like okay well this this is big enough now this is almost safe enough now for how it's compartmentalized to let you bring that ship in have it sit down
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cleanly doesn't mean you'll get 20 of those Merlins in there but being able to pull a couple of those things in we definitely do want to make sure that works and it it has to play nice with the physics Grid or you blow up when you go to Quantum I I I'll believe you can't fit 20 Merlins in there when I see it okay you can't fit 20 Merlins in that you can cleanly fly out without at least 12 of them exploding as for like the explosive decompression uh that's another thing that has to be specifically built but I've I've actually seen uh some designs uh being worked on that that seem like pretty pretty well featured uh those are still in the design Des phase so it's and I'm not directly involved with it so there's no telling how that'll shake out but I know that we want to have atmosphere yeah we we've seen the very beginnings of it in the pipe system preview that we
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had on the hvv fast forward the last two weeks uh shooting out the glass and watching all the all the cargo that's in that room fly out and stuff so I think crine has some kind of um object that can actually pull along a stream so we're kind of planning on putting those at the airlock area is and like if you breach it it'll it'll just kind of suck in what's in this like cone and uh so we should get that nice effect leg you right next question is probably from Matt uh uh Griff Spectre galmore would like to would like to know more information about the moo and and how we plan to implement it's broadcasting its filming any of that gameplay do we have a plan in place yet are we still figuring that out so we're still
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figuring out a lot stuff for the mo um when that one was originally pitched and I was working on that it was even to me I was like okay this is a little bit lofty but I mean just the community interaction that you guys have brought to us uh you know it's something that we want to make sure you know our streamers and our players have have that kind of hook and that kind of opportunity for game playay so uh it's very much going to be like a layered on system it won't be the full scope of what everyone's probably hoping for and even while I'm kind of hoping for it to be you know even 5 years out from launch type of gameplay opportunities but at least uh in the in the very barebone setup of it we want to make sure that if you're the co-pilot on a reliant uh or on a reliant Mako you're looking through that camera you have this just great unimpeded view we want to make sure you won't have any
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HUD in the way so you can just capture full-frame image of whatever you're pointing at whatever you're looking at um looking at trying to do some better things to make sure you get enough zoom and distance so that you don't have to put your ship right in the middle of a firefight to to get a couple good images um but then the long term is just to sort of layer on everything else that we can do with that and make uh compelling so uh some aspects of info running are even going to bleed into the news service aspect where uh just identifying who who was in what system and when you know like tracking the tracking people's movements tracking General uh intelligence about what is going on in a system um and making that another aspect where it's like okay hey this reporter now just saw you effectively commit a war crime do you try and go chase them
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down what if they get that back to the right news service in time um but a lot of these things are still those those layered on gameplay features that we need to build on the pieces that we know we can do really well now uh and then just slowly keep moving moving forward and adding new and newer and newer layers on top of that to really flesh something out um basically what the core of the entire Star Citizen experience is build it right in front of the people yeah they'll see an early version then it will continue to iterate think our philosophy all all along is we we know where we want to go but we know the tech that we have currently to build it so we'll we'll put in the initial versions and then build on that over time as as as Tech new tech comes in yeah got all right next question by John smallberries
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definitely know how to pronounce that nice bugaro bons I referen John uh hi everyone I have a question regarding explosions uh ship explosions don't inherit the ship velocity and as a result tend to hang in front of the attacker like a dead deadly wall of well death fire any chance Pursuit kills can be a little less risky also I was wondering if explosions will take into consideration the load out of the exploding ship uh you might be talking about the uh we have a issue with debris right now where um it no longer has physics when it detaches from the ship in in the current build uh it it's going to be part of uh the item 2.0 upgrade that we're currently in progress on uh so we will get physics back on the debris item so they won't hang in space
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but I think right now you can just pass right through those those debris items and they won't kill you uh but as for like a say an explosion effect uh leave like leaving the ship leaving the explosion behind there's ways we can attach those effects to stay with uh the the ship as it as those effects fire so we'll be looking at reviewing effects um so part of what I'm doing right now is like assessing uh our whole Fleet of ships all 30 odd ships that are out there flying right now and looking at um all the you know missing pieces of tech uh Tech that can be improved uh and just just uh making sure everything is set up in the same way and as each new pieces piece of uh code gets written from engineering we have to go back and kind
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of uh redo a lot of the ships and as you can imagine like as ships get added that iteration through the entire fleet becomes a little longer each time so and for the second part about the different components we're now tying explosions into the individual components and such now right uh we are uh starting to do that again item 2.0 is going to allow us to do um the radial damage with uh effects on nearby components and then through uh Power pipes and over and overheating and then kind of a buildup and that initial uh that cool video we showed a while back with the explosion we're still uh working toward that as our uh as our Visual and the feel so you're going to have time to repair during a critical phase of the ship and
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and bring it back down to a nominal level where the goal is that that's not just just the death mask that's the result of the systems behaving according to the situation you put in the damage that you took the amount of damage the type of damage what you've done about it since then is what leads to that behavior so and also just how you're running your ship where even without damage if you're if you're running it you know basically redlining everything well overclocking yeah you're you're going to wear your ship down and all your stuff down faster because you're just pushing it so much harder than it's it's safely rated for so you should also be able to equip your ship with safer components yeah uh generally probably a lower output uh but will be less likely to explode or if it does explode will probably be less devastating to your
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ship yep so these are all choices you can make so yet had another thing that item 2.0 will allow us to do in the future so not stuff that you're going to see you know front facing in 2.4 it's 2.4 one one of the bigger things with 2.4 is that item Port system it's it's a under the hood implementation that's going to allow us to build out everything from components to explosions to it affects so many aspects of the game it's one of the more exciting aspects of 2.4 yeah so cool uh I had a question right there o how about a flight model question uh you like those flight model questions well I usually do I haven't been working on it directly recently so I don't have any insight gotcha at the moment all right well we'll pass on the flight model question when we get John pritchet in here again we we'll do flight model questions yeah
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I flight model um okay Michael S all I'm going to refactor this I think all right why can big ships be pushed around so easily by smaller ships uh yeah so our physics uh doesn't need a little work um you know when things we're not done when things blow up you know it's like paper mâché sometimes and it it it's it it just troubles me so um we're we're we're we're looking at those kind kind of things um and hopefully we can uh get to that sooner than later but you're saying those glaves that come down and pick up a constellation and pile drive it off the platform that's not supposed to be like that launching a human like I
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love the Eva guys and they launch themselves at the ship and come in and just blow it up with themselves that's so fun um yeah we're we're we definitely want you know the most realistic physics as we can uh we're we're just in a transition period with the tech so um the the actual physics is uh taking a back seat to item 2.0 and uh what that will bring which is you know uh not only like different types of interactivity it's it's also uh networking um sync but it it also has a lot to do with optimization one thing we found was the interior of the ship uh needs to be separate from the exterior of the ship but the way cry engine works is you have to if you want to interact with the inside it has to be part of the outside so I I won't go into more detail
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with that but it's when we can truly separate the interior from the exterior with item 2.0 we'll be able to call out a lot of the geometry that you're seeing or you're drawing from a distance and then therefore uh you'll have better performance so we're looking forward to that gotcha uh T Journey asked a question that I can't answer today but I'm gonna I'm going to read it and say tune in on Friday because I'd like to see the answer to this he asks will the million mile high club and other player owned properties be getting the port modification system I'm going to find out that answer and tune in Friday I should have the answer for you by then CU I'm curious exciting I would think so the hanger is it uses the port modification system so I just don't want to say yes without talking to somebody I don't because I don't know the answer to that the New Port modification system is so cool I love it yeah it's I me it's
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definitely something that we've needed and I mean like you've been saying the the backbone that it lays for the item 2.0 system uh it's really hard to describe just how many improvements that whole overhaul is going to be bringing for us um and I mean I know we were trying to get more of the components out earlier this year with like 21 and 22 but then we sort of had to take a step back and see like Hey we're we're pushing these things out and the gameplay hasn't changed enough to really warrant that so let's let's really dive into make that game play what we want it to be and then you know rip rip the Band-Aid off all the old stuff at once and uh just put it out there as soon as it's ready uh shinara asks what is going on with the starg is the interior a
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placeholder for testing much like the Aila or are we getting what we have now which is a Miss ship yet near nothing to do with Aegis uh I'm going to answer that one actually sure um the the star the starf Gemini is still the starf a just buys the starf far from MK and then retrofits it for military use that's a switch out of components and stuff the bigger Center Line Thruster stuff but they don't redesign the ship so that's why it looks very much the same it is it is it's when you're you're buying something from misk and you're repurposing it for the military it's not about making it prettier it's not about changing it fundamentally it's it's more a a a utilitarian you know change out of components and c and certain aspects for military use you know the increased
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armor and and stuff like that so you're not going to see a big visual difference because why would they spend that time that's not necessary the military is not interested in having the AGS name plastered all over the things it just it makes more sense I had a long conversation with John crew which is why I'm answering this one it just makes more sense for immersion and what not that they would just buy it change out the parts that they want retrofit it a bit and sell it to the military so that's why the sty is like it is then I like it I like it a lot uh bribase 1 asks can you tell us a little about the plan for optimization what's next on the list what's the biggest challenge how quickly do you think we'll be able to get the Pu into shape uh optimization is is uh we've just finished a a Full Pass of All Ships
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uh adding new uh level of detail meshes um you might see some ugly meshes out there they switch a little too fast right now but um that is in so everything should LOD and be visible in game and be fairly optimal um right now there's further improvements we're going to make which is uh uh material ID reduction and combining combining meshes at a distance so there's fewer meshes to draw so we've done uh a lot of that already as well uh the big thing is again the interior needs to be separate from the exterior uh in order order to properly Co the entire thing out because you have what you have right now is these little joysticks they're so dense and then you're drawing it while you're
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still looking at the ship it's from the outside because the the joystick is interactive and therefore due to cry engine base cry engine we need to have it as part of the exterior uh as soon as item 2.0 is then we can separate it and then uh we'll have proper calling and uh lot less lot less to draw than uh we currently are yeah another big thing just to keep in mind with optimization in general is while we can we're we're constantly making performance improvements uh it's it's not really a like a one-hot solution to fix everything especially while we're still building out all the game assets because yeah for we can optimize for what we have now but while we're still adding more ships we're going to be adding more Landing sites
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space stations planets uh like once planets their surfaces and all the the new objects that that are associated with those go in um as you you keep increasing that load the what you need to consider for optimization also keeps changing so uh it's not something that we'll have you know a oneandone solution for but it's absolutely something that's worked on patch patch to patch and we're actually looking at having a section devoted to optimization in the 2.4 uh uh release post that we do every every time we release a new post a new p 2.3 2.2 we do a big old post about what's involved and what whatnot and uh and then we got some guys actually writing up a bit about the process of optimization so um no promises but we're working on that and hopefully that'll be in the post by the time 2.4 is ready to go
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live all right next question is from cig Ben Le Lesnik cig Ben Lesnik who's that uh question if one Jared leaves the Jared station traveling towards Jared City at 350 mph and a second and Jared leaves another Jared station traveling in the same direction at 288 mph how many Jared both Jareds die purple I think yes I I agree with things uh I mean I I didn't check my math there but um couple questions on organization 2.0 uh these aren't the guys for that but uh tune in on Friday we we usually answer that question every uh Friday reverse the verse so that's a common question that comes up a
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lot um taros has a question is the plan for most or all large ships to be made with FPS in mind many of us do not want Flying FPS levels but real Starships well it it is part of the game playay so the potential for FPS is everywhere and we have to kind of uh allow for that um because different people have different play Styles too and you want you want to board a ship and and take it over by force you know that's part of our game play um if you want to avoid that then uh don't hang out with pirates and you also need to have things built in to help you repel those borders and stuff like we were talking about you know the gyro might thing door control and coming at it from a perspective of FPS levels like okay there's there's an element of that that
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is about uh supporting the FPS gaml but there's also the element of just determining what it's like to move through the ship mhm uh and what's realistic for actual life isn't really that realistic for game Space uh because you don't interact with that space the same way you don't treat uh the same distances in the same way like if you if you model out a room one to one and put it in cry engine and then walk around it will feel very cramped it will feel very different from how it actually feels to be in that space so you can't you can't think about it in the same way of like just we build out a blueprint like architecture and then expect it to actually work you have to you have to actually take into account the the distances at which players uh interact with things uh the field of view that's available uh the the walking speed um
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these things all all come into account in addition to the potential that somebody could be shooting at you yeah when we say flying FPS level in space I'm talking about the technology it's it's that technology not that we've designed an FPS level that's meant to to go you know around I would say FPS is a consideration but it is not the driving force behind your interior white it's always about what makes sense for the ship first yes uh and then only after that is it a question of uh how do we make this nicer for shooting yeah we wouldn't add a wall to impede like a uh you know going down a hallway just so you could peek around and shoot CU you want to still have traversal from one side of the ship to the other really smoothly apropo example would be the caterpillar right which we
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just uh had had the Deep dive about and that did include a consideration for FPS uh where we extended we we moved the the catwalk over to one side and we that helps you have visibility on uh the people moving through your ship it gives you you know the crossfire if you find yourself in that position and it doesn't really cost you that much in terms of cargo because we do still allow you to fill that that space uh because you have the catwalk which can't be included by cargo so you now have you still have a way to get through the ship I even think like it it can open up a little bit more opportunities just because like the the tractor beam setup that you had on it where now instead of having to worry about pulling a piece of cargo or some object into the ship and having it run up to that Center catwalk
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in the middle of the hall now it's all the way to the opposing side of where the cargo would be loaded in by the tractor beam so you do get a much better just clearance room for bringing things into the ship for rearranging the cargo into your ship and making sure it all fits as opposed to having that you know blocker uh right in the middle of the ship uh altered perception asked a question that was asked of me last Friday and I said I would find out and now that KX is here I can find out now uh for the caterpillar with the cargo and stuff can you stack cargo along the center mhm corter so so you can block off your entire you can block off that door because you have you still have access to the whole ship through the through the catwalk cwalk that's one of the purposes of the catwalk then yeah yeah so you can fill up the entire cargo module front to back
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side to side I mean good luck getting anything out of it yeah but you're as long as you are capable of doing it it it happens yeah M cool I I expect we'll probably see plenty of people doing uh you know your your Tower Defense um mazes kidding um also in the caterpillar uh chip shape we did Dax asked we saw some early tractor beam work uh has that progressed any and or how how do you see us using the tractor beam in game uh the tractor beam is uh sort of fundamentally in flux at the moment because we're you know we're playing around with with a couple different approaches of like you know uh single object Push Pull having a force having a point of
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Attraction uh there's there's prototyping to be done uh and the work in the caterpillar was more to be like does this feel like a space War I feel like I have control over the dot moving around space uh and so I felt like I I had a pretty decent view of the ship to to make that call but the actual tractor beam design uh is is still something that's that's being built out because that also takes into account some of the uh some considerations in Austin with uh Tony I know has a lot of desire to sort of see that system move forward so cool I have a question when we when we're moving cargo from like outside of the caterpillar to the inside how are we placing it inside or like what's the
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idea there like we're stacking it or is there some kind of what's that grabby hands well grabby hands is one of the ways there's there's actually the the cargo design has a lot of uh opportunities for aggregation you know the idea isn't you know go to the beach and grab one drop a sand and bring it back and just keep making trips but I want to go over there and lump everything together uh using um the the the cargo Jack the um the pallets uh potentially using the tractor beam as well uh we had a couple other uh proposals for uh ways to like bind multiple groups of cargo together so they can move be moved as one uh and then you would sort of slide in there uh as as a single unit and then
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take smaller objects and fill in the the remaining spaces um it's not like what's interesting about cargo management is the plan not the the action like walking back and forth between carrying things is not interesting what is interesting is having the the Tactical the tactile element of uh manipulating something directly and having the higher macro level of how does this fit into this space that I'm designing now with the cargo uh so in order to alleviate that middle step you know you want to to sort of group things together you've made your plan for this now it's just move the one time like packing a car for a long family road trip uh if you have really cool equipment my my long family road trips are never so well
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planned uh it's a mess from start to finish that's see brth has a question will there be times when a ship will be destroyed where it is not the result of an explosion basically will ship disablement be more likely than destruction I mean that that ties back into what we're talking about like uh the goal is that's why I ask clever the goal is uh to have it so that these behaviors again are driven by the system but that also means that uh if if you're able to make intentional decisions about targeting you're able to drive specific kinds of behaviors uh so if if you're up against somebody who runs a hot power plant and you want them to just explode that's a pretty good choice uh if you want them to not explode you're going to be wanting to
00:38:10
avoid shooting that spot uh so and I I think it's that's actually one of the things that's really cool about it is that uh what your goal is in this conflict has a lot to do with how you're going about it uh because the systems are just going to react to what you do yeah but it'll be it'll be the uh it'll be the skilled player who can disable a ship and take the ship and cargo intact yeah well I mean even then like even with disabling a ship what the a lot of this new system will allow for is uh a much more hard disable where it's not like a temporary disable but also something where it's not just going to be rampant ship inflation of oh cool I stopped your power plant for 5 minutes boarded you killed these guys uh and now I'm just taking your ship outright I'd
00:38:59
be more like well now we can fry that power plant and the ship is still just a dead husk ready to be salvaged but the people inside some of the other components inside some of the other systems inside could still be up and running um and so you could get some some nice intact Parts out of that but not just It won't always just be a free ship hole for for disabling someone and but it will be sometimes but not that's where it gets really tricky to sort of describe because uh if you if you go at it with like the lightest possible touch then you it's potentially possible to put that power plant even the one that can explode into a position where it is disabled not destroyed and within range of being field repaired back into working in addition yeah you know depending on the situation that
00:39:49
could be really really narrow window uh perfectly possible to happen uh and given the way that things are going on the Pu anything possible will happen so MH uh lamac asks are there any plans to add labels to the item ports and are the item ports going to become more generic I.E if it fits it sits oh yeah we have a full menu system for our item Port so now like it'll it'll pop up I don't know if it's been yeah you were seeing the earliest you know iteration of the it Port system there are there are plans for it that go through 25 26 27 and I don't see it stopping the item Port system is so important to everything the start is and it'll we just keep adding it and building it out and refining it as as we continue to build Star Citizen we really think of the ships now as a
00:40:38
collection of of Parts instead of as one big thing with the attachments it's like it's all one part or multiple Parts yeah although even the with that old term of if it fits it sits that's still it's not a absolute truth just because the there's there's always going to be some level of technical limitations and and pairing down an abstraction that's needed to make sure that the game play stays fun I I mean it's why you know not every ship just gets to magically be a pocket carrier but there will still be tons of room for what you'll be able to do inside of the space and what's uh you know allowed and accessible inside of those spaces just it won't be uh it won't be like you know you're building your house in the s
00:41:26
where you get absolute control over everything or like a lot of the house building and some other MMOs but still baby wallet yeah I mean there's still just going to be a load of options for what you can do all right Aiden Arash asks hello guys simple question is there any word on what other ships will be on sale with the buccaneer uh the buccaneer sale is just for the buccaneer uh it's the buccaneer concept sale will be releasing the buccaneer upon the upon the community so that's what's for sale with the buccaneer the buccaneer will be unleashed bucaneer the buccaneer will be Unleashed I'm excited about I really like that ship I'm I'm a sucker for Drake though I really like I'm a big guy of the used I'm a big proponent of the used future a Blade Runner more than my Minority Report I hated Minority Report
00:42:14
everything was too clean and shiny I was like yeah who want future flawed versus future perfect uh Mr volog asked a pretty uh common question since that ship shape how big has the caterpillar actually become now that it is Advanced yeah I this big uh this big I I don't I don't remember off hand I I'm pretty sure we we passed 100 m I think I think we're at 107 M but I might be making that up I'm I really I really feel like I'm remembering that from a conversation with elen because like we also you know the way that we're we're building it out made the uh each of the the modules a little bit thicker um so we we gained a few meters there I think it was over 100 with the door folded out on the nose yeah I think I think it's like 100
00:43:02
nearing 110 M uh it's a pretty big ship it's giant how many constellations is that end to end like or at least some other ship like yeah at least at least a couple uh I I I haven't had it fully intact I pulled it apart for the but uh I mean you can see it in in in the Ship Shape uh the front of the the caterpillar at its current size give or take a few meters is right next to where that freelancer is and the back is the uh the floating engine behind the uh the back walkway so it'll go all the way back to that engine so what is that like four Freelancers absolutely no help four like four Freelancers yeah okay everything you're saying right now is
00:43:50
going to generate posts and threads that I will have to deal with for the next week it's it's a big shift it's big and then it still has to be built out in cry engine so so that's really when we know yeah is when it gets fully built in cry engine that's when we know I'll remind me to get you the number so that you can respond to those posts okay I'm sorry okay and that's still won't be the numbers to get me still won't be the absolute final numbers until it's built out until we've been running around inside it and the physical thing that's complete yeah that's when we know all right dead weight asks can you talk a little bit about Drake e of repair and durability how will this play out in the Pu is there an advantage to being repaired with common materials when traveling far out Beyond civilization so uh big thing with that is just making sure that whatever
00:44:39
whatever components are come stock on a Direct ship uh and also you know even into the larger ships like the caterpillar wherever we Stow these components and have to put the panel access to make sure that you it's very easy to understand okay in the like in the engine room the caterpillar everything that you need to ensure propulsion you're you're going to have some way to affect that from that one room you aren't going to have to go running around from like an engine room to a shield room to a computer room or anything like that um onto the smaller ships it's just making sure that you know the idea is you you should be able to just pop the hood once and have access to 80 90% of the parts that you're going to have to work on as opposed to having you know five six different panels uh covering up the
00:45:27
different parts yeah the Drake approach tends to be like everything's exposed and it's out there but yeah I think this also ties into some of the work that you've been doing on uh the component definitions because uh certain components will like the difference between a a high class component it you know might be the the Jaguar of like really good performance but uh don't hit it with anything yeah uh don't look at it wrong whereas you could have you know extremely high durability a little lower performance and these uh you know you're more familiar with that system but yeah it's the idea I you know people who have a lot of classic cars may I understand this where you know if you if you're taking care of your car even if it's not the most powerful thing you're you're able to get I mean I've heard of you know Honda Civics with like 300 plus
00:46:15
thousand miles on it most cars you know you get about 100,000 before it starts shaking a bit and so it's just having that you know built to last kind of thing uh just easy access uh and not an over complicated mechanism like it's not uh some overly ornate engine or Shield generator or or power plant that'll ever be in a drake ship it's going to be what it needs to function for what that function is made for that doesn't sound confusing enough and repair is going to be tied in with um reclaiming quite a bit because they we're going to need these resources that you're Gathering we're talking about stripping you know the hole off of deric ships and and you gain those materials to then craft new
00:47:05
components to uh or subcomponents to like yeah shove into like a fuse You' make a fuse or something I mean this is like our in our our design dock right now so we're not in the implementation phase but our hope is to have some gameplay where it's really fun to uh you know to put these fuses in and like make it work again you know maybe even think like a Bioshock mini game or something I don't know but like um the the pipes the pipes yeah pipes it won't be pipes but there'll be something um but yeah I mean absolutely the subcomponents are going to be a huge part of that for also you know tuning and adding some character to your individual Loadout so it even if you know we both had the same ship with the exact same manufacturer and line of
00:47:54
Parts uh I could have all my subcomponents in those parts leaned if I want to say you know focus more on energy cool Downs uh making sure all my systems are back up and replenishing faster where yours may be just raw output raw performance you want the biggest the biggest number on the power plant output the biggest number on The Shield health output um we've been looking to have those sub components tie directly into the behavior and the performance of that component so you'll have your base stats that is the item itself but then when you put the sub components in um or you alter out the sub components that are already comes outfitted with that will uh shift that balance a little bit like you can think of it like those are the points that you can move around on your stat sheet but yeah uh you can you can bolster it a little bit towards this uh this
00:48:43
performance or that um depending on what you need if you need more durability on this high performance low durability component subon might be a good way to do that uh they're also the easiest uh for as far as a field repair because you just remove a thing and put a new thing in yeah um so that that gives you an element of like that consumable for repair okay and once all those components the new component system is in uh how does that play into time to kill time to death valkor wants to know it seems very quickly to drop very easy to drop a starf far constellation very quickly in the game right now right now every single sort of part of the ship has a health value so if you like nail like a single part you'll drive its Health down and then if
00:49:33
that part dies any further damage will transfer up so that's like the current system but once we get to the component damage system where it's radial damage and pipes and all that uh you'll see like more strategy involved in taking a a ship down instead of uh just like okay just nail this one area until it explodes kind of situation they're saying that as it is right now Crusader uh the time to kill on things like the starf fair the Connie and what not not expect that to grow explain similar to like before when we had only single seeders I think the time to kill was even shorter like uh it's it's not super useful for us to increase the time to kill to what it will be when the gam play to support it isn't there because that just leads to you repeating the same action over and
00:50:20
over again yeah without getting the reward for repeating the same action over and over again yeah because there's no gameplay for it to progress into the part where where that would be you know expanding out uh so hope you know as those things come online as there's a thing that you would be doing during that time you know that it makes sense to start increasing that yeah we'll be balancing the bigger multic cruise ships so that you know there is that time to repair there is that time to do that game play to like survive um and so you know it's just not the the the uh the interaction of repair isn't in yet and we may not see that until we're we're focused more on the Pu right now we're obviously all on Squadron 42 and the ships that are involved in Squadron 42 mostly um so we're we're we're our attention is there but but when we get
00:51:08
to just pure pu stuff then that's really where the Salvage repair and all that stuff will will be uh tuned to uh be fun we've also uh we've been talking about ways to link that directly to the ship a bit better uh for instance currently our health is just assigned uh open the The Hornet and I say that it has this much health and that's how much health it now has um we're looking at uh tying the health to perhaps the mass because it makes a certain kind of sense that you know the the materials that are actually used uh on the ship could contribute to how much health it has um and what that means is that uh because we assign Health on this sort of large scale of like I I said the the health of the Hornet to be something
00:51:57
versus uh if it's by mass then this panel of the Hornet has this much mass because it's this subsection of the ship so that makes it so that as you lose parts of your ship you're losing Health uh more directly related to what's actually happening to your ship because the there's less abstraction between the health and the actual condition all right without giving any dates or anything can you talk about the uh the roll out for the new component system like what they can expect first what you're working on first then what you're working on next uh so I think the the real big one that we want to get in front of you guys uh first is going to actually be the shield generators um to to pair along with that we've also been doing a lot of work uh with the the power plants and coolers so hopefully uh
00:52:46
those three should all sort of go online around the same time because they they all have the most impact for you know driving your ship performance where it's like okay you your Shields are your that refilling Health your power is just how much can you ever do and and heat especially once we get the coolers really uh fleshed out gameplay Wise It's like well okay this is sort of that limiter on uh stopping you from just over taxing the ship at all times without consequence we are we are starting to implement item 2.0 items right now and and it's just there there's like this base amount of code and then now we're specializing into the various different disciplines of what components are and what they can do but the the base code is nearing completion okay uh app proportioner asks
00:53:37
you have modified certain software in Tech in order to build Star Citizen is the machine for building the game complete is CR engine complete or is building and modifying the machine a regular component towards completing start citizen well any game you're always um you know you have more Tech to end with than you begin with with um and it gets easier all the time and we're and we're doing things more correctly than we were you know initially without the current Tech um it's just it's an it's always a a moving Target game development um so we're always trying to think ahead but we're we're doing what we can now um and there's always going to be tools optimization um I mean just over the past year we've really been working on this thing we've talked about I think one or two times called Data Forge which helps us uh rapidly Au items
00:54:25
where before it would be you know we were basically doing a lot of hand edit work you know uh magically turning an Excel sheet into an actual game item and this is going to be more of a uh front-facing Collective spot where it's like okay here is all of one type of a component in the game the highle view of everything at once a unified template to build everything out of as opposed to just sort of patchworking things together and those kind of improvements are are constantly ongoing I mean even just with with building the ships you you've made a bunch of the tools that we use just for taking a ship from 3D Studio Max uh defining just the basics of what the hardpoints can do but then actually having a tool that will Author out a functioning XML template for us to start hooking everything else up into
00:55:16
and actually getting this ship flying so yeah I mean that the the toolbox that that Matt built uh was an huge Improvement on our time uh it was it really was I I I have I have plenty I have plenty of uh of all nighters stacked to the time before that this guy you don't even know it was it was go home no there were times I I'd be coming into the office at 1:00 in the morning and you and it be you and zaye and and and and me I'm like why are you guys still here it's like cuz our work never stops well Kix is also a wizard you never know if he's left the office for the day or got in early and you don't know how he managed to flow graph something but he managed to flow graph something I've seen your flowra your flowgraphs are terrifying there are no
00:56:03
rules um but that we you know it comes across really at every level like we have an optimization coming from John pritchet that's going to make it um I think it's it's almost almost done I'm not I'm not sure but he was very promising words but uh the flight tuning uh each ship took about a week uh because you had because everything involved and uh most of that week was spent having it completely wrong because if it is not perfectly tuned to start with it just it just fails in uh baffling ways um and once you get it to that point of perfection now you have to ease it up a bit to get the behavior that you want because now you have a perfectly flying ship that has no characteristics whatsoever uh because
00:56:51
you had to iron out all those characteristics just to get it working uh so that process was very involved very technical and also uh was information held by like three people total uh so if there was ever like if someone got sick you know a ship was was thrown off because it was so complicated so Arcane that it it was impossible to work with together uh much less to have something that got postponed for any like of time uh that has been optimized to the point where uh it could take really uh with with only like a a bare level of like introduction to how the systems are intended to work it should take any of our designers a day to do a a ship when when we get those things online and that's that's that's not not
00:57:40
just an improvement for the game but like day assume you know exactly what what it is you want to do there's still all that exploration once you've made those decisions there's still all the exploration before you would make a decision it would be a week of of painful toil before it could actually be a thing that happened why don't the numbers support my decision making process all right with that that wraps up uh this month's special subscriber Edition RTV yeah it went pretty quick you know painless like I said you I kept all the heavy the hard ball questions out of here no the the questions I kept out are were programming questions and stuff stuff that you guys weren't weren't involved in um Matt Matt KX not mess it up Matt Matt not Matt uh thank you so much for joining us guys we'll be uh don't forget to tune in to round the verse tomorrow for for a
00:58:29
whole wealth of Buccaneer information and then we'll be right back here on Friday for our regular weekly edition of reverse the verse so thanks for watching and I don't know what camera we're on but uh see you in the verse cheers

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.