Star Citizen Live: NPC Capital Ship Combat
Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment
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hello everybody and welcome to star citizen live npc capital ship combat i'm oh i appear to have a filter on yes i i appear to have a filter on um uh i'm prepared to move forward i mean i mean i'm here i'm not a cat okay oh here we go here we go hello everybody welcome to star citizen live uh we already did the intro um sorry let's just i really appreciate how
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the three of you just completely no sold that thank you thank you so much uh our our repertory cast of players here uh let's go around the court let's go around and meet them uh rich tell everybody who you are and what you do for star citizen um yeah yeah swan richard and i'm the lead designer on the vehicle experience team lead designer on the vehicle experience team you help work to to basically affect the way that players you know the ships handle all things related to the experience that players have with their spacecraft yeah um yes so basically it's balance and feel on just the way that things feel them yeah it's just the way that the player experiences the game and the ships they're not talking they're not tired of my antics jack they're just used to it
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uh luke who are you and what do you do for star citizen hi i'm luke presley i am lead designer on star citizen life i always loved saying that but um it's it's well it's been zeno fret this time that's why i'm on here this week whenever you say live to a lead designer for star citizen live i always want to be like this show the show and robbie tell folks who you are and what you do for star citizen yeah hi i'm robbie elms and i'm the senior designer on the ai feature team all right and the topic of today's show is npc capital ship combat basically in alpha 312 and then in alpha 3 12 1 that was just recently released uh we added mpc controlled capital ships in multiple
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places uh for the conclusion the long awaited conclusion to the arlington bounty mission uh as the naval response uh to people getting a five-star crime rating with a in in certain areas and then of course with the currently underway uh xeno threat uh dynamic event uh which raging right now on on persistent universe servers if you haven't had a chance to drop the drop in be sure you do that before it ends so we've got a number of different situations where players can now combat npc capital ships be they the idris or the javelin so we thought we'd take this hour out of the end of our week and discuss uh all the things that made that possible answer some questions that backers had about you know the experiences that they've already had and uh just hang around chat enjoy our friday
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so we are taking as we always do questions live from the twitch chat so you can submit your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets i do want to remind folks that the topic of this show is npc capital ship combat if your question is about player owned or player operated capital ships these are not the folks who have the answers to those questions so your your show is in another show uh and then of course we put a thread up earlier this week where we collected questions on spectrum and then took the ones that were voted up most so we're going to start in on those while the live ones come in uh first question uh the perennial one for every time capital ships show up why no interiors who wants to who wants to tackle that one i'll take that one um i have a little snippet here from john crew
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that i'll i'll read but um i just i just want to say because they weren't integral you know they're not integral to this mission and um and we are currently working on the tech to dynamically stream in these interiors and as you can imagine the interior for javelin is going to hurt your frames so like for that reason if if if nothing else we didn't include it but there are other reasons obviously um it makes it harder for you to steal the ship which is always important um yeah yeah you know it it also doesn't spoil it if someone gets in and walks around they've kind of spoiled the surprise yeah we we we've done limited tours over the years and whatever but we have been cognizant to to uh hold certain visuals and content back because we want
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people to you know to experience that for themselves whenever these things do fully come online for for players um all right let's move on what are the current loadouts for the three idrisses and javelin do the addresses differ and are you happy with the loadouts as they are at present um yeah so basically the um the um three dresses are the same at the moment but they also come with bespoke components because these are such large ships that they needed their own components and they've been tuned that way um i wouldn't say we're happy with the loadouts at the moment you know they're still subject to change and balance changes um you know and we're basically looking at additions to the loadouts based on things we've identified during the combat um you know with exina throughout just looking at how these
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ships are defending themselves so there's a good possibility that they you know that they will change in the future yeah i don't think it was important to have the idris have different loadouts this time around because what we i mean this is the first time we're proving they work right so so like let's let's do that first rather than getting back um like conflicting things from qa who are saying this one's weak and this one's not all like you know you know let's focus on getting get being happy with one right fair enough um that's my phone going and it's too far away i can't stop it uh let's see uh how do capital ships decide what weapon to shoot at what target oh yeah i'll take this one um so a capital ships like cruise targeting priority uh takes in two factors it's like the size
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and the potential threats of their opposing entity so for example we know that they move no i i switched cameras they couldn't see me running to turn my phone off you weren't supposed to acknowledge so yeah for example like you know the idris railgun is a bit of a devastating piece of equipment but it was like threading a needle trying to hit a small nimble fighter like a gladiator like even a jean scout ship so that's uh where we have the turret gunners take taking consideration the smaller entities like fighters or but then they would prioritize a torpedo or a missile and focus their target towards that because that's actually a higher threat to damage me more than a smaller fighter is it possible for i i've been watching folks you know play these encounters for a couple weeks
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now uh and it it's is it possible to overwhelm the targeting it seems like sometimes the targeting is like like doing pretty good it's really rewarding to watch them you know shoot down the torpedoes and everything and then other times it seems like there are enough people around and enough people doing crazy things enough people doing you know bombing runs or or diving runs with their prospectors using the mining lasers it's like that that it it seems like that that the ai might be flummoxed is is that is am i yeah that's the thing am i projecting or is that a real thing it's it's a real thing at the moment because we've not balanced every single potential threat we're not taking a perspective it's a consideration it's over a big naval battle but that's one thing we're working on yeah now it's it's a it i i saw i saw some very
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some very uh uh creative create create creative uses of the prospector going forward it's like that's the stuff that's close to my heart you know i'm gonna run a reclaimer racing league someday so i really like seeing that kind of stuff um uh here's a real popular question uh is it supposed to be easy to or this easy to kill an idris uh how do you balance this when you don't know if it's fighting 10 players or 50 players and take your time with this one rich yeah so so it has been really tricky balancing this because you know it because um you know it isn't just a number of ships it's the type of ships as well that people bring and it's also the way they use their ships the tactics they use the timings they use there's so many variables and it comes down to how well they can defend themselves
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as well you know so we did have a really good idea of the baseline strengths of these big ships and we feel we've kind of hit roughly in the right place for the baseline strength but we don't feel they're fully able to defend themselves yet and there's lots of factors involved with that but you know we are kind of working on this and and you know we're basically looking back at how players have attacked these big ships and we're learning weaknesses that these ships have you know the certain times when the players can outgun the turrets and it's basically because the ship can't keep up with the movement and the turrets cat keeper and they're able to find a hole where the cat gets shot you know and they can move in that and it's really hard for those big ships to react to that so we're looking at its weaknesses and we're looking at how well the big ships can defend against torpedoes
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because that's what does the real damage to these ships is the top he does and that so you know we do see sometimes where these big ships can use count measures really effectively that's really cool and they can also shoot some of the big torpedoes it's just getting that bounce rate between we want these big top heaters that are basically small nuclear devices to to do damage to these ships but at the same time we want the big ships to be able to defend themselves at the same time and hitting that balance when you have as many variations possible as we have currently is you know is really tricky but we're going to look back at these events and we're going to you know and we are going to improve it from both the balance side and in the outside as well and there is the elephant in the room which is obviously the servers for you know struggling right now um because
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like if you're talking about is it should it be this easy to kill an address and and all you say is like you know it only takes nine size nine torpedoes to blow it up that seems like too little i i think actually no that that makes some kind of sense as rich as saying the issue is that they're not shooting them out of the sky or you know doing that and and on our local service kind of thing that works it works really well like you know it's balanced to the point where these guys i mean you bring in you know a whole group of retaliators and you organize them and you know you will easily you know take down an idris because that's what the retaliators they're designed for right otherwise it would be overpowered now for capital ships and of course as
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more capital ship systems come online uh there will be more opportunities to for the ships to defend themselves like i know the idris aren't using their missiles and stuff like that but you know sometimes you know a good defense is a better offense you know so as so as as more capable as more of their capabilities come online it will change that that experience uh in fact we have a question about that coming up so i'm gonna stop talking about it uh it seems like neither the javelin or idris fire all of their turrets at one time to use their firepower to overwhelm us it seems like a full broadside from the javelin should shred most ships why doesn't the npc crew focus fire on one enemy at a time to destroy them is this an ai server limitation or a pre-planned thing to keep the fights
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more balanced the latter um because originally like without doing any work they did focus all on one thing and then move to the next thing and then move to the next thing and it was not fun to be in a fight for like a few seconds and then obliterated also um it just made the ship look like it was controlled by an ai you know robotic like these are manned turrets so you know i've mined on it yeah exactly like like everyone everyone has their own focus everyone knows what they can shoot at at any one point um like you know because we only have we can only cover so much of an arc um so so yeah it it looked bad it felt really bad and we actually put a lot of effort into getting these
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the individual turrets to prioritize their own um like as robbie was saying they they shoot at different size ships like the difference for the larger turret shoot larger ships because otherwise they'd miss all the time um because the ships move too fast so yeah um it's you know it's a conscious decision to make it it work like that there's still work to do yeah i i i feel like there have been uh depending on the situation and this is just me speaking anecdotally from the hours of streams and videos that i've been watching for the last week uh it seems like a bomber without proper cover sometimes seems to draw that can can draw all the turrets to them and it's pretty magnificent when you when you see it happen when you see all
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the turrets just converge on one and go and just decide to eat somebody you know into a different game uh so it's the same as a railgun like the railgun it it only chooses to shoot at certain things because otherwise it would just miss all the time so i mean we had plenty of um you know tests where people brought a hammerhead along fully crewed thought they were gonna you know own this thing and just got one shot there in the sky yeah it was gonna be one of the players that happened to be one of the players yeah you know it was it was you know it was basically flynn as a team and then it just pointed towards us it missed the first time and we thought we invaded it but then it came back and it just one shot there so we're like oh no well that yeah i i i think i think it's as cookie monster would say it's a sometimes treat it
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it's it's when it can happen intermittently or something and and when it does happen your players may want to ask themselves you know who were you surrounded with were you were you trying to solo this thing and you know you just gave it one target or did you properly have the you know the correct screen and stuff like that um at present do the xeno threat fleet uh work together uh with the capitals to to focus on on threats to the edges first uh such as ontario is like how much how much communication we just said in the last meeting that sometimes they work individually it's like that uh how much do they work together as as a fleet uh at the moment so i think they have a very base level fleet behavior and set in this mind of defenders target
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and that target is their idris essentially so all the fighters and all their retinue will be there to defend the idris but in the future we're looking to expand on this with some actual awareness of a captain of a battle group and they can like dictate orders to their retinue and go okay right focus this target and then you start to like all the fighters will pull over to harass the javelin to take it um i away from the address and stuff like that so will it work and to further iterate group defined behaviors rather than just a singular ai i hear you uh cap let's see here's another very common question that came up in both the thread and the live chat quite a bit uh capital ships seem like they turn perhaps too fast for how big they are uh
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they can sometimes seem like they're a little more than just enormous fighters uh is this how we intend it to be um yes yeah so basically there's definitely a bias at the moment to making these ships flyable by the ai systems before they get into place hands and we we've basically balanced it so that it feels right now um so it basically works in sync with how well the turrets work and how well the ship can aim so we have probably compromised some of the ai kind of tuning for this but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be that way once it gets in the place hands and once we've made improvements to the eye you know and these ships can target better um so we definitely compromise it a little bit so the speeds will probably come down and also we have some perception issues with some of the sync issues that we've had and it's pretty fair to say that you know there is times where it looks like it's moving probably quicker than what it is as well but yeah it's probably a bit of buff
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okay uh are the idris and javelin we are seeing in the pu currently the uee military versions from squadron 42 or are they the eventual player owned versions for the persistent universe oh this is a jump crew crew right i'll read from my statement um they are the full military versions from the current time period the ones in squadron 42 may have slightly different exterior arrangements given their age and some definitely have different interior modifications thank you john crew thank you john some of these answers were obviously for john cruz so thank you luke for it's like being picked in class to
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read next so that was always me in grade school uh how much of an impact in performance do you see between oh okay luke we touched on this already but we'll touch on it again how much of an impact and performance do you see between internal testing environments offline local single-player versus the live servers are we getting the full npc capital ship combat experience or is much still dependent on other systems like meshing and icash to get things where we want it to be so um like the battles we get locally are the ones you see on videos you know um and the gap between what you see and like what you see on those videos and what you're
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actually playing is it i guess it depends on how how what's loaded on the server right because when we do play tests we all head to the battle so we're not all in different landing zones with those streamed in using up memory there you know um we all tend to spawn at microtech and go as quickly as possible to the location so that versus the reality of you know what a a server what players are doing on a server is going to be the difference yeah uh some of the footage that we saw during the npc uh capture ship combat segment that aired last week on isc was done from internal play testing and uh we even i i even released some of the raw video on social media where you can see you
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know many idris is fighting each other and stuff and the performance was was uh stellar uh i got honestly it was a good example of where we're trying to be with all of the work that we're doing behind the scenes on the platform and networking and eye cash and all that stuff so so that is that is certainly the target uh and it will be an exciting day when we get there to be certain following up on that uh how do you account for known performance issues and desync when you're developing experiences like this do you balance and tune for the ideal experience that we're working on internally or do you adjust for the current realities uh knowing that you're going to have to adjust again later on yeah that's really good question so we balance
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it really far like where we think it's going to be so the ideal circumstances and then we look at what's going right or wrong with that and we'll make compromises along the way but then we'll try and so basically as things get better when we understand the problems and we're able to improve some of the frame rate on the server we'll like we'll basically we'll basically be able to move back to where our original goal was as we go but you know there's always compromise with that and you know as we said it you know it just kind of vary as well where people are on the server and stuff like that so we've got lots of server you know kind of things to deal with where it creates a lot of variance in the testing um and that does make the balance tricky because it does make it hard sometimes to understand where the balance currently is but we're always aiming for where it should be and then we'll kind of bring
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it back to make sure it's delivering the best experience at that time this next question is i think this is a john crew question uh while fighting the idris there are many support ships helping it they can sometimes have very strange behavior they don't they don't say what the strange behavior is but i've seen some of it uh is it normal that these support ships are able to change direction randomly and start spinning around i think we probably know that i could jump on this one but yeah it's definitely not a quote from john here no yeah but it's certainly a bug we're looking into from the ai side as well so so death blossom is not a feature of nbc right no we don't have alts yet consider it though
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consider it my last starfighter uh is the current intelligence of the npc crew where we want it to be i'll take this one so yep not at the moment but what we've got now is a great foundation to build upon and as we're going at the moment we want to expand further on the multi crew and especially the bridge roles as this is both in pu live and in squadron 42. the team have been working on an implementation system of traits so we can apply specific traits to specific actors and ai and this would essentially affect specific specific values in their behavior so like no crew member will be the same in a combat scenario or in a non-combat scenario all right uh i like how you're like i'll take that one as the ai pro
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as the ai designer here like look you should no i'll take that i'll take that i'm an ai designer this question was actually one i inserted in if we're being completely honest uh how do you account for collisions in developing capital ship gameplay should we be able to push ships around like we do and should ramming be an effective topic or a tactic rather um so there's nothing we can do to stop players from flying where they want to go and if there's a ship in the way um there's nothing we can do to stop that from happening but we can improve what happens when that collision occurs and it's how the physics distribute the damage um you know so that'll come with improved damage modeling
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um you know and also the way that servers resolve collisions like that because these are massive ships clouding each other and it's a lot of force like which you know it's massive so so there's a lot to calculate when that happens um so there's nothing we could just stop it but we will be improving the collisions um you know and also what happens to you when you do it so if you choose to ram you know it's basically what happens to you as well you know it it's it's i i have expected to see like like test squadron with a with a flock of auroras trying to push or you know trying to push idrisses you know along the way uh we saw some things like that during fleet week um as a follow-up uh should capital ship ai ever leverage ramming tactics of their
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own could there be a situation where where an interest pilot or a javelin pilot pilot just decides to take out as many screw it as many people as they can when they know they're going down definitely that's the thing with some like the trait stuff hinted on early might have a reckless pilot and they go okay right i'm a sitting duck or i'm going to die so i might as well go out in a blazer glory i i wish to see that npc um let's see uh let's look to the live chat um are there any plans to provide more capital ship game player missions in the pu outside of the larger events yes yeah um nothing i can go into but i would say that destroying capital ships will not be
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commonplace in missions like you know for kind of missions you do over and over um but like them appearing in the mission support or you know in distress those kind of things yeah i think you'll be seeing more of those okay um let's see uh what is the range on size 7 weapons on the size 7 weapons of the javelin and why do they not seem to fire as much compared to the size 4 weapons that are on top of them yeah sure so basically it comes down to the speed at which the um the database can move so um so we've got the sas fours on top and the size seven at the bottom and the size four's moving much quicker so they could track targets much easier so they're choosing to fire at that point it's more difficult for the south
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sevens to do that um so that's kind of why you're seeing the size sevens probably not fire as much but that's something we are working on with the eye as well to be more selective about what their target and when their fire so you know in the future they will be firing more the targets that those weapons are specifically aimed to fire out as well you know so this has four are more defense against light fighters whereas the sevens are more defense against larger ships so it's a case of picking those right ships that's something we don't quite have right yet i know uh interesting question from the live chat uh are the nbc capital ships scaled down or are they the actual size i don't know why this br i um did do we select all and scale to 75 for i guess that's what they're asking definitely the right size we didn't
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we didn't create special ships that reduced scale for the event nope okay maybe there's some conspiracy theory i wasn't aware of but tyler sent it on so uh will there be any in atmosphere capital ship battles in the future can we consider it um yes i'd have thought so right i mean why not it'd look amazing you know seeing that the you know smoldering wrecks tumbling to the ground it's always better than just floating there yeah um i i i imagine so but rich do they are they happy to fly in atmosphere so they're happy to fly an atmosphere they may have some difficulty in the larger planets with a much more
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dense atmosphere and but they'll have to switch the veto mode you know to do that and the ship does have three tomorrow so it can do that but it will obviously be able to move as much so it'll be much more vulnerable to the ships that cannot maneuver it you know in atmosphere so it definitely changes the dynamic if it happened yeah it would be an interesting challenge to be certain because the interest lands can the javelin land i don't remember no i don't i think it can yeah well maybe not at the moment yeah let's just just say that you know we haven't looked at the original concept art in the original pitch for the javelin sometimes so so we're gonna leave that as maybe and then leave it there just for safety are capital ships big or are we small all right live chat's having some fun
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let's go back to the spectrum thread currently the npc capital ships tend to vanish into thin air when they jump away are there any plans to make quantum travel effects on large ships massively more visible to players yes yep so basically at the moment it looks like that it looks like there's a they're kind of vanishing because they do accelerate very quickly but also it's a server as well so it's that time in that initial phase where they accelerate but we do plan to communicate more the spooling phase and reduce that initial acceleration so you can visually see them go out and you can see the lines come off the ship as it accelerates that's definitely something we're going to work on because you know it does look a bit strange at the moment sometimes when it's not communicated you know suddenly the ship just vanishes i can confirm they do actually quantum troll that that's how
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sometimes you find them ending up at the wreck site or some random rest stop um when they shouldn't but um yeah when we when we got that in we were a little disappointed to see that that's how it looks like i i kind of expected some kind of effect on the spool that would signal that but i i mean if you if you squint you can see that there's a few frames of movement like before it's vanished i'm sure i'm sure it's something mike snowden and team uh will look at you know it's maybe benefit from one of those like star trek next generation you know warp things you know the big flash when it enters or something once a ship gets to a certain size or something i i'm just creating work for mike snowden hi hi gushing them checks uh fighting capital ships uh can seem
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similar to fighting open world bosses in other traditional mmos how will star citizen reward players for taking out these incredibly difficult enemies with uec just say we haven't gotten there yet luke we haven't gotten there yet i mean obviously we're looking now into all the ways we can reward players like physical items um perks you know reputation what does rep you know with perks that reputation gives you um salvage opportunities i mean yeah i mean obviously scavenging from from their um freedom in that you may you know they may have been locking down a location and now everyone can
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can rush in uh yeah lots of things on the table nothing definitively said okay correct all right uh let's see um uh this is sort of this is similar to a question we asked earlier but i'm going to ask it again robbie uh does the npc ai work together as a fleet or are they all essentially solo fighters that just happened to be around each other so yeah uh yeah we did touch a little bit early but they are not solo fighters they're like they are part of the fleet but they've got a very base behavior just to defend their capital ship essentially but that's something we're working on in the future okay uh let's see uh do you think you uh do you think you
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will look at the tolerance level for friendly for for accidental friendly fire during big events like xeno threat yes definitely and we are now um i think uh mark my code is actually working on it um it's obviously difficult to know if it's really accidental like figuring out the intent of a player is never going to be possible to 100 but we can um like i i don't know if i want to tell like everyone the things we do because because then people find the edge case and use it against us you know um so yes we're working on that um and maybe no no dates it'll be soon
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it's it's fairly it's fairly straightforward but um i don't think it will fix everything i mean it's never gonna fix that one case where you know you got unlucky or you were trying to cause it um so you know that's it's really difficult like how do you create a law system when you don't have like judges and you know and stuff like that um the law system as well like i mean we kind of overlook the fact that there is no death right now in the game so so like you said the law system can only kind of cope with what you know if someone smashes into you well they're dead but oh no they've respawned and they're coming back
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you know it's it's difficult difficult to make a law system first for a world that doesn't exist right yeah the situations that will be fixed in the future the challenge of running a live environment in the in the middle of our uh game development uh also according to chat there there will be there will be an organization dedicated to the judge advocate general within the next hour looking at chat and then a whole set of people role-playing as judges i can already see it happening in the chat right now so i am the law there's a bunch of young people who have no idea what i just did uh what strategies would you give to players fighting in idris and javelin let's go around the room don't give them cheat codes but what
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strategies would you give to people left up time yeah does the konami code work in star citizen if not it should i'm gonna talk to richard tyrer uh what strategies would you give to players to for fighting an idris or a javelin um so yeah so i'd say bring your friends and take out as much of the turrets as possible to open up gaps and then make sure you've brought other friends with you that have some sadness or peters and they can exploit those gaps and good luck who am i my advice i'd say use up the ship's counter measures with cheap missiles uh that is attractive missiles offer it because it has fight but this is the thing about this game like that for designers is a real
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headache but for players is quite interesting they do have finite everything so they will run out of ballistics or they will you know and that might end up looking like a bug but actually no it's real it's realistic so they will run out of uh countermeasures if you fire enough cheap missiles at them and then just save your size nines for later when when they've stopped popping those okay which you got robbie yeah i was going to echo the exact same thing but try and stay on the rear of the address and not get near that railgun uh or take the railgun off [Music] we already know that various ai fighter
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pilots will have varying expertise levels we've talked about that several times but how will this work with capital ships for example how exactly will a naval idris crew compare to a pirate crew or a threat crew in the future as opposed to how they do today sure so yeah we've incorporated the skill levels and the expertise levels that you've mentioned so like the helmsman of a capital ship they would uh take their piloting skill across and it'll be impacting their like their turn circles like broadsiding or coming up to um maneuver in a battle as well as like rolling it's like if they're getting pelted on the underbelly they would be reactive enough with their python skill to tilt their turrets to take full capitalization on that um but also like
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as you say from a navy and a pirate uh faction you could go oh right one's military trained one isn't and therefore like maybe their turret gunners have better trigger discipline from the military side they'll know when to shoot and work as a unit go okay starboard side are going to focus this thing here all turrets on that whereas a pirate like fleet there'll be all gong oh there's a guy over there there's a guy over there and they won't work together just go for maximum kaboom for a little personal gain and glory um maximum kaboom was my maximum kaboom um but then like as i've hinted on before with like the trait system we would like apply that to the captain role for example but you could have a captain who's indecisive like a negative trait and it would take him
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longer to relay like give an order to the crew because he wasn't sure what to do in this situation so the turret gunners would be waiting to fire on a higher priority target for example it's an interesting challenge that exists in ai for all games it's it's it's the difference between making an ai that is just you know uh s tier and can and always hits their targets and always knows when to shoot and when not and it's just this perfect you know terminator killing machine and then wanting to have ai that are for lack of a better term me and just bad and terrible and don't really know what they're doing in a game exactly it's like sometimes perfect ai isn't fun and it's like balance of course we try to get the best experience
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i do uh let's see what else um will you release a post-mortem uh for xeno threat um i'll go ahead and answer that one uh yes uh that is the new standard for our major patch releases and stuff you've seen it post warning for previous patches you will continue to see postmortems those are run by the community team and stuff and they are fantastic and i think one of the better additions that have been added to the star student experience in the last year so you can definitely expect a post mortem uh for xeno threat and that's my way of giving props to to tyler and ulf and and uh christian and jake and all those folks on the community team because i ain't got nothing to do with it they're better writers than i am uh what else do we got here the xeno idris tends to stay very
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stationary uh why isn't the ship moving around more to evade incoming fire um i'm not sure if this is like particularly aimed at maybe phase two um of the xenophon mission maybe i i'm not sure like in phase two we tell it to do a very specific thing which is to fire up the javelin um so it uh it has to keep its nose on the javelin it has to stay out of the range of the javelin and the security station so uh if it's that then that's probably why um otherwise i'm they're told to like in phase three and in all the other missions they're told to move freely so it can be quite like difficult to perceive it moving because it moves so
- 00:39:26
slow compared with you um but they do move like if you were to track it you know through that gas cloud you you know i've seen it passing through into the depths of to the merck of it and coming out the other side of the gas cloud so and those things are huge those gas leads so they don't they don't hang about there there have been some moments i've watched where it seems like they just can't quite find the javelin sometimes it it seems to be just just like swimming swimming around like like a shark looking for something to find but when it does it's real it's it's it's just it's really cool if for people who have if i'm allowed to take off my cig hat and go back to when i was a fan seven years ago it's just one of those things that we've
- 00:40:13
been waiting for for so long to see to see the idris you know draw a beat on something that you know the the size of a javelin you know the thing that those railguns were made for and just watch it you know unleash hell it's it's just it's really cool i i've i haven't enjoyed watching streams uh as much as i have the last week uh in a long time so i know i i just wish i wish players could see that rail gun a little more like fire a little more often because um i remember we were in a freelancer um and it shot and fired at i don't even think it was aiming at us but it took our wing off completely it was just gone in an instant and it and it rocks the screen and the sound effects are incredible it's just an amazing feeling to to just be missed and survive i was gonna say you only
- 00:41:04
lost a wing and a freelancer from a from a railgun considering yeah yeah that's fantastic yeah let's change a pilot suit afterwards we'll talk to the actor status team about it just a [ __ ] your pants status that's that's my one uh okay uh is the targeting and destroying of incoming torpedoes where you want it uh sometimes it seems like it works other times not so much yeah so i think it's fair to say we've got the base system in place where the ships can detect incoming um so you know side now torpedoes or any kind of missiles you know and you know we've got a tourist detects them so the turrets can shoot them they're feeling that it might not be like that all the time is if it was like it all the time would end up with a very
- 00:41:51
linear result that either the missiles get shot all the time or they've missed all the time and we'll and basically basically you know what we're trying to do is we're trying to get variance that yes you can fire your count measures but but that isn't a guaranteed result that those counter measures will deflect that sas nan tarpita um you know and it's also not a guaranteed result that a turret would be able to shoot a you know incoming missile or torpedo so we've tried to create a variance in there which might seem from an outside the system is changing but it's just variance in the system based upon the mechanics we have in the game and that makes it really interesting because it creates this view that you're taking a big risk firing your size now top either and you've got to really get in the right place to fire it that you increase your chances of that um hitting the ship you know because
- 00:42:38
they do cause a lot of damage and that's when they do hit they take off a huge chunk of damage of those ships so we have to make it like that so there's a skill element to it as well and i imagine as uh more systems that are currently in development like the like the the the various power systems and and the uh and the physicalized damage comes online and you'll be able to you know damage these subsystems on these ships more it will affect how quickly they can track it'll affect how how often they can shoot and stuff so at least it lends itself to a lot of variants as you said that can be perceived as bugs or perceived as you know some kind of issue and it's really just the effect that you have had on that ship over the course of the battle yeah yeah exactly uh will the ai will the ai eventually fly
- 00:43:30
more cinematically in the future as opposed to the mathematically perfect angles they can sometimes run right now yeah definitely because this is something like a when we want something that we want to improve upon as it's a huge balancing act between realism and cinematic flair and we see this a lot star citizen live and in squadron 42 and like i was saying earlier perfect angles and turns and what the perfect ai isn't always the most fun ai um was this uh the uh for for a 000 that came out we reduced the player cap to 40 players on the servers is this a permanent thing or is this just for the event i don't know it's just for the event it's just the question was it then
- 00:44:20
people were asking i just i wouldn't say um the the the the the the secret of these shows is that i know all the answers ahead of time uh what is the general methodology for working on capital ship and fleet combat ai uh how much telemetry from battles that take place on the servers do we record and analyze for the effectiveness of ai behaviors or let's just go let's just go with that one right there and there's a follow-up yeah so well with what i'm aware of it's primarily just internal threads and video reviews of play-throughs and whatnot we look at that and we review that see what we can expand upon but something we'd love to work on in the future when we start building fleet battles more and more like the battle groups i mentioned previously we would create a simulated test bed for it all so we can okay yeah
- 00:45:09
drop the navy here drop the zombie threat here or whichever fleet here they're going to go against and see how they do get out and record the results uh so so what so what do you use mostly for for feedback how are you collecting data then on this we used qa and um play tests and i made a um like a series of a questionnaire um and kind of watch the videos back we spot spotted the elements that were causing frustration or um like they didn't score well on the the questionnaire and so many times like we went back and forth between like the idris is too easy if it was just too difficult beatrice is too easy like because because what we'd be doing
- 00:45:58
is identifying that okay why is it too difficult it's because it's firing all of its turrets at one finger once and just blowing it up okay fix that now it's too easy great okay so no what do we need to do um well let's up it shields okay now it's too difficult okay what do we need to do oh we need to make torpedoes um like do more damage okay now it's too easy right we need to slow torpedoes down now it's to you know back and forth until finally you end up with something everyone's happy with and and by by that point you've got you know you've got all that stuff i said ai firing at turrets ai um much more intelligently or maybe less intelligently using their countermeasures you know because too intelligent just
- 00:46:46
felt cheap you know if every time i fire a size nine it just fires off its counter measures it's it's really frustrating so um like that's why we were saying you know fire a small missile make it fire its it has a little bit of a cool down before it can you can sneak in the size night missiles while those flares are dying down but before it will fire another one and that's just it's it was just satisfying that way otherwise it's frustrating and i know uh besides the internal qa and stuff i i know that you're a prolific uh you're not prolific but you're you're a continual watcher of streams it's like that i've seen you i've seen you in various twitch streams you know watching you know how how these events you know actually play out you know in
- 00:47:34
the players hands after prisons came out you know it seemed like every stream i went to there was luke presley you know what you're watching and getting that that uh that raw feedback directly from our you know if you didn't see me i was looking yeah all right um we slowed torpedoes down a bit and left countermeasures effective against them uh are we happy with the current performance of either system um so it's definitely something we tried with xena threats so we've made quite a wide ranging sweep to the weapons on um those ships to basically it's slower powerful and so these big ships you have these kind of slower projectiles but they're much more powerful
- 00:48:21
so it creates that variance i said earlier where sometimes it can be effective against count measures and sometimes they're not and it's up to us to understand this as you know kind of early is you know we look at the results of this and go actually if a person fired 20 you know sazhnans at this ship how effective would the 20 be would you know is it split 50 50 down the middle consistently does it vary between 5 and 15 and we're looking at all these things to make sure that it's working as we you know intend it to be but we are happy with the overall iron system but it does need improvements on the balance side and just how the different systems come together to you know to actually count measure against these you know southern top leaders and also how you can intercept them as well because that's been an important part is the fact we slowed them down means people can intercept and we have
- 00:49:08
seen various things where people have grabbed um these top eaters as well so you know there's been lots of interesting gameplay coming from that it's a so basically you're just blaming the active feature team then no i'm just kidding i'm just trying to i'm just trying to cause [ __ ] uh uh oh that was my second one um pg-13 yeah i i just used up richards once where he doesn't get one this this show still got mine yeah you still got yours he's talking about excellent uh do you do you all take any inspiration uh from capital ship battles in movies or tv shows or uh whatever uh comic books to figure out what's cool like where do you get your inspirations
- 00:49:55
i guess oh that's a good one so today so definitely i think we're all kind of like really you know because i'm into sapphire massively so i watch all these tv shows and all the films and stuff and we definitely take inspiration the feelings that each show generates he's t you know film generates because each one does it in slightly different ways that creates it unique to that particular tv series or you know unique that particular film and it comes from the vfx it comes from the earlier you know so we do take influence but we also try and create our own identity within that you know so yeah you know i spent a lot of my spare time especially now we're locked down just watching tv shows basically movies i know anybody else yeah i was going to say bingeing battle star and expanse yeah
- 00:50:44
exactly those two and one thing that like you take away from that is what like like the expanse right it doesn't have fighters like i didn't realize that until very late on it does not have fighter ships because the missile they've choked make that decision that them it's the missiles that are gonna if they fly faster more maneuverable than any person could ever and then they have the the guns on the actual ships to to take them you know take missiles out so i just think that's a really interesting like decision they made there like when we we've gone kind of a star wars way right where fighters are much more important so like it's just really cool all the different uh choices you can make in sci-fi they're
- 00:51:32
so different i know um i'm getting messages from from internal folks uh i'm gonna go ahead and say if if if if i if i if i swear again i will i will wear a hawaiian shirt on the next show that that'll that'll be my motivation people can do that i can do this i've only got nine minutes left in the show i can make it nine minutes obviously i'm in a mood today uh let's see nine minutes about star wars nine minutes nine minutes to avoid a hawaiian shirt next show all right uh can you see a way to have david versus goliath moments where one small fighter can take out a massive javelin on its own uh so if it's like the down to the last ship in the battle the javelin's been beaten and it's on its last legs we can
- 00:52:19
definitely see like a movie scene where the pilot takes his jet fire and flies into the middle of the ship and exploits it we can definitely see scenes like that happening um yeah but it's very unlikely you'll be able to take like an aurora and take a traveling on it's just this is not going to work unlikely does not mean impossible there's a video on reddit right now though of just someone flying straight into the the railgun of idris and taking it out so while the you know he didn't win the battle he has he's definitely done more than he could have if he'd just been shooting uh all right so so so we're wrapping up here we're in our end game let's let's see if we can get some questions
- 00:53:07
uh more geared towards the future stuff um what will it take uh for the idris missile room and the javelin torpedoes to be implemented for ai cruise and verse uh to employ them against players uh we want that and speaking of influences we want that anime salvo of missiles here oh john crew to the rescue um so capital ships using their missiles and torpedoes is one of the next improvements we want to make for capital alongside using missiles base missile based turrets to defend against more agile close in ships thank you i hope that made sense because those were just words to me it it's it's like i just i can't see i can hear your voice and see your face but it was like john crew just
- 00:53:54
speaking right through you um here's a here's a big philosophy a philosophical one what's going to prevent capital ships from eventually just dominating all of ship combat it comes down to balance right so it basically comes down to we so we want so we want these ships to be feared we want these these are massive with massive artillery massive access to weapons but it comes down to the bounce it comes down to the other ships in the game you know so and basically it looks early now we've got the eclipse we've got the retaliator and these ships are designed to bring down those ships and it's how we strike the right balance down between this big ship and these other kind of smaller ships but with much more powerful weapons and it's just how those things come together will define
- 00:54:43
how dominant the capital ships are in the game yeah and they're expensive and they take a long time to get back and repair you know uh so if you think you've got carte blanche to just you know roam around being a bully or you know you think you're gonna take out every pirate you're not because like there are systems in place that will prevent that too if you start becoming um like too too famous or too infamous then you know we can create systems that send bounty hunters after you i'm sure there will be players out there player bounty hunters player assassins who like whose sole role is to take out capital ships so you know and the stations are going to have like i'm i'm sure we'll see station mounted rail guns and stuff like that in the future
- 00:55:31
you won't just be able to waltz in anywhere and just because you've got a big ship right uh i'm getting messages billy williams sucks i always hate it i'm in star trek [Laughter] somebody's trying to somebody's trying to get me to swear on camera somebody who really likes hawaiian shirts you will wear a hawaiian shirt on stream soon 90 day tops based on what you guys have seen so far and the feedback you have received from the event are there any changes you guys uh already plan to make that you can talk about um so from a vehicle experience kind of side of things we're looking at the effective the effectiveness of the
- 00:56:19
weapon changes we made for um big ships and how we can move that down between all the other ships um so as i said slower but more powerful and how we move you know those kind of balance numbers down throughout the whole ship range and you know weapon range and that's been something we've learned because we it because we're generally really happy with how these big slow weapons feel you know from a balancer from a visual effects are from an earlier side you like you know you know when that sazhnan javelin turret fires it sounds amazing so it's basically bringing that down to the other ships and the other weapons in the game that's kind of where we're moving forward with that now yeah and we've learnt obviously a lot on the mission side um always room for improvement but lots of positives
- 00:57:07
um i'd say we have already talked about the edge cases of the law um one of the other things was uh kind of splash damage like causing like splash damage on top targeted missiles should not cause like friendly fire as it were it should not cause crimes to happen like when it comes to done fire missiles that we'll have in the future then that's i think that's gonna have to do it because players can fire those anyway but if we know that you tried to hit something and it did hit that and you also just hurt someone else nearby then but that's going to be fine um all right last question of the show uh what what are the next mpc capital ship systems you hope to flesh out or bring
- 00:57:55
online um things like the idris launching or the javelin firing torpedoes destructible turrets what's next what's this where do we go from here yeah so from us i'm excited about all of the above um you know so as far as those things coming next you know we you know we're looking at the defense of the big ships and does you know and that doesn't mean there's those big ships having small fighters coming out um it just means firing torpedoes and also the way that the current damage works on the turrets you know so we're kind of moving all these things together as we evaluate what happened um in xeno threat and just how it felt and came together and then also the additions on top you know so just improving the defenses we talked about earlier with the capital ships
- 00:58:42
it's like it's basically having bespoke weapons on the capital ships that are specifically designed to defend against the weaknesses that are identified um so that's something we're really you know we're really excited about having how are you um robbie i'm i'm just really interested in building uh like a living bridge crew essentially so with the captain giving orders to his weapons officer who then send that onto his turret gunners or then send it to the comms officer to tell the other people to surrender and also getting the like fighters launching from capital ships outside of squadron 42. it's gonna be awesome and you look i think they covered it all well done guys you know bombshell i love luke presley i love luke presley um that's it guys
- 00:59:31
thank you so much for taking the time out of here at the end of your week to uh to be here on the show i know i know you've got additional meetings to go to go to your but your day's not done yet especially you rich uh good luck godspeed thank you in your endeavors um for everybody else uh thanks for watching star citizen live npc kappa ship combat remember to if you haven't get into game experience xeno threat our very first dynamic event uh who knows if it's ever going to come back again we we literally don't know this could be the only time you get to experience this event in the history of star citizen development so it's distinct possibility i'm not laying odds on it so be sure you get in there and have you get your chance to experience it now uh the only guaranteed time we have so uh for luke for robbie for richard
- 01:00:21
and uh for for for tyler weeks not months whitkin trying to throw me in the chat uh i'll swear at you off camera thanks take it easy everybody we'll see you next week bye you
Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.
