10 for the Designers: Episode 03 (2015.05.11)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:06

   [Music] hi everybody welcome to another episode of 10 for the designers I'm Matt Sherman technical designer here at cig Los Angeles and I'm Pete Mackey designer from Austin Texas and so we've got another 10 questions brought to you by our subscribers and we want to thank them uh for making this possible so let's get right into the questions all right so X Phoenix asks if I'm a hauler and I have a friend escorting me to a new Mission site and I'm given a new hauler Mission from A to B will my friend also be generated an escort Mission specifically to escort me since we are in a group or will he just get some random mission to escort an NPC player from A to B well we haven't

2. 00:00:55

   worked out the exact specifics on the mechanics of how that's going to function but we definitely want to keep people together so if I'm you know if we're in the game together and you and you want to haul and I want to protect you we want to you know make sure that we have some mechanism that we uh can stay together for that but the specifics of that haven't really actually just been figured out yet yeah I mean the the Pu is going to have a lot of great features to it and the matchmaking is going to be one of the most challenging but it it the goal is to make sure that you're playing with your friends let's not artificially separate that when it makes sense that hey you're already escorting him keep that escort going right all right I'm totally going to slaughter this

3. 00:01:43

   username a am nesus sorry with regards to Hole damage on Multi crew ships if you have a hole breach on a constellation during a firefight would characters not strapped in be sucked out into the vacuum it could be a cool idea if your ship is being boarded to vent out into Intruders or blow up a chunk of the hole of the ship you're about to board to deal with any walking around crewmen so yeah uh that was actually one of the thing sort of highlighted in the uh constellation uh multi- crew demo last year that we we definitely want a whole breach to to have some you know catastrophe for the people on board uh you know if a hole gets opened in your ship yeah people are going to get vented out it's why we've also got a notion of Mag boots for a lot of guys where hey you're under attack

4. 00:02:32

   you you may want to clamp into the ground CU you never know when uh the wall may open up or buckle on you right all right so next question uh graybeard asks the whole bee having tr8s while those engines are physically smaller than the constellations trvs would be ridiculous otherwise unless All Ships are having their main engines changed to a new size system so are ships TR limited or size limited can I put tr8s from a salvage operation on my Connie if they're structurally smaller than the current trvs right so there's two aspects to that uh one is that the TR rating is not a size rating um it doesn't say anything about how big the Thruster is it just says it it describes how much thrust it can put out the

5. 00:03:20

   second part of that question is U about taking a tr8 from a salvage operation that's smaller than potentially a tr5 that may go on the constellation in the case the the specific case of that constellation I think the the thrust of a tr8 would probably Shear off the engines from the constellation which is why the engineers limited it to only TR fs and not tr8s yeah all right uh rap CID asks would it be possible to link the force of the directional thrusters to the throttle down to a minimum force so that's actually a really cool idea it's something kind of along the lines with we're exploring right now is some of the ship Thruster and acceleration uh just updates that we're doing I mean it's just a lot of you know tuning it

6. 00:04:07

   and work for it to to make sure that what that throttle point is one you know are is it easy to to access that and make sure you know that you don't have to do five different hot keys to get into that throttle um but also making sure that you get out of it quick enough and that's not a weird sticky context right yeah and we're defin exploring some methods by where your throttle is not so sensitive so you're not going from uh huge amounts of thrust with small changes to your throttle input so a good example would be in uh congested areas where you don't necessarily you know you want a little bit more fine control over your throttle so we're definitely looking at ways uh of scaling the throttle uh itself so all

7. 00:04:58

   right and jmac asks what's the fuel efficiency difference between larger versus smaller ships if you're carrying the same weight how much difference will there be how much do we need to right size our ship to Any Given mission right so that's a really good question um right now uh we are definitely in the analytics phase of that to try and figure out the total operating costs of hauling cargo uh because that is a scenario before with all the ships the non the non-c cargo hauling ships their masses uh are all relatively close together but now that we're adding the cargo ships yeah that the masses are getting you know so much the the range of mass is getting so much larger we have to really think about how uh fuel costs are going to play into that and

8. 00:05:46

   and we want to make sure that um one that it's balanced so that it's not so efficient that the big ships are the only way to make money but the reverse of that is that we don't want to penalize players and fuel cost so much that they actually make less money than if they were using a a fleet of smaller ships so we're definitely looking into to making sure that you know it both sizes of ships can be really fun to play for everybody all right uh Shifty asks will there be equally strong size one and size three weapons or will a bigger gun always perform a bigger output so yes there's definitely going to be uh a range of potency on you know all of the weapons and all their sizes uh it's one

9. 00:06:34

   of the big things that we want to have as sort of the long-term tuning choices that you have where you you can really fiddle with a size one to to make it your own and to really specialize what can do some of the other parts of that question that Shifty had uh in his post though was also dealing with the the current Sledge 2 and how it's really really powerful uh conceptually for a master driver and so one of the big things that we're looking forward to with our upcoming physically based damage system is actually a big overhaul on all of these weapons so really redefining hey this is what a mass driver's behavior is this is what kind of damage it's going to be doing this is the cost benefit for running that weapon because yeah the Sledge 2 was pretty

10. 00:07:22

    much just free damage no penalty and it it helped us actually find out hey that that's probably not the best situation right so Draco Houston asks common complaint about Arena Commander is that for better or worse the only way to reload missiles bullets and get repaired is to eject will we ever be able to escape from a fight with Quantum travel or you know go to a far off point without having to respawn or do a pit stop so this is definitely something that's you know your wheelhouse here in La uh but I have seen some talk about some upcoming changes to Arena Commander do you have any input on that or Insight yeah I mean absolutely uh refitting and repairing your ship it's it's going to be a core component of the game in the grand scheme of things and so Arena

11. 00:08:12

    Commander is our our big test bed for all of these features so at some point we're definitely going to have a system of re-equipping your ship in uh what form that's going to take we still have to to figure that out um and make sure that it it's also what you would be experiencing in the persistent Universe right so it will be something like a little nugget of what it will really be like in the full game exactly cool BOS asks in space will ships have the same optimal speed but with a different acceleration or simply different speed now this is something that we've been working on now for a couple weeks now uh just and sort of with the throttle work that we mentioned a few questions ago so we're definitely looking at that and you you've actually been doing a lot more with what these masses are now right

12. 00:09:01

    yeah so there's a lot of work that's going on right now with uh thrusters in general and ship movement and one of the things that we've been experimenting with um internally is a method of setting uh your maximum uh it's not really your maximum speed because you can't exceed it but your your normal combat speed uh dynamically based on a lot of different variables um and part of that is the uh acceleration of your ship does play a part into what uh speed you can reach so the goal is to give something that's really interesting and dynamic and it's not just oh well you have a hornet your top speed is always 200 um but not using just an arbitrary method of coming up with you know a a new top speed um

13. 00:09:50

    really having that top speed figured out by not just your main engines but the ability of the other thrusters on your ship to contribute to your handling yeah the the total package of how your moves really should be determining it right exactly yep all right so shoden incarnate asks how will cargo be handled when having a cargo box isn't too feasible or even possible with small ships like the Aurora civilian Hornet right so with the those ships um what will happen is that your items will go into those those cargo holds but there's no way to actually access that while you're in Flight right you'll have to land uh at that point but you can't it's not going to be an issue where you're ever going

14. 00:10:38

    to need to look at it while you're flying around yeah so smaller ships so yeah Aurora The Hornet probably the 300 series and anything where that cargo box may have to be attached on the outside or accessed from the outside you'd be able to open it up and see what's in there but you won't really be manipulating that from your from the pilot seat or uh really able to look at a cargo manifest like you would if you had a big hauler ship uh like a hall series or even you know any of our other cargo ships like a merchant man or a starf far all right all right and Basher asks would it be possible to design the redeemer's lower modular section as a fully capable theaterwide C3 iar Suite to include

15. 00:11:26

    decoys jamming and Intel collection probably not theaterwide because I mean that sort of implies a lot of systems and and a massive Fleet that you're coordinating um and while we can't say for sure it'll be its own modular room uh you'll definitely be able to outfit really any ship and not just a redeemer by tuning you know what equipment you use for these kinds of communications uh electronic warfare uh info running type type game play where you could trade out some weapons for some additional Comm gear you can uh tune your avionics in your ship to either defend against or you know make you a better info Runner or Jammer and it won't really

16. 00:12:15

    be you know locked to one ship it'll be more a style of gameplay and a set of components that support that gameplay that sounds really cool yeah so that was our 10 questions for the this week again we want to thank the subscribers for uh providing these questions and making this kind of content possible and also to thank all the backers just for making Star Citizen possible all right thanks guys hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here

17. 00:13:03

    and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes of around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse