Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - A Wilmslow Odyssey

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hey everybody welcome to another edition of calling all devs our weekly Q&A

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   series where I take questions from you the star citizen backer and post them directly to the developer usually over Skype I am in Winslow United Kingdom Here I am sequestered on the second floor the second floor is currently under renovation as a foundry 42 UK continues to expand and add more developers to the cause Aaron was kind enough to greet me when I got here and sand showed me to these sequestered put away floor where I wouldn't infect anybody in the weeks leading up to citizen gun sorry they're showing off right we are going to any Hilditch from the environment team got a big one for you Eddie how you doing yeah hey I'm good how are you basically last time we did this you were sick and I was

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   yeah well I've got a plethora of things going oh I just dropped I'll clean up alright just get right to it this is a big question and I just want to preface that's that you know these questions are submitted by backers and they're voted on by backers that doesn't always mean that we have an answer ready for you sometimes the answer is we don't have an answer so um that's my preface before we get to this question yeah your question today Eddie is how are we going to make earth work and look correct with planets at only a quarter of the scale for instance how will mountains look right with sea level without looking wildly oversized in relation to planets and stuff like that there's construction going on there is construction going in yes we persevere can we go with plow through right path room and where do you

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   go okay so yeah I was like it's a very good question very big question and I think it goes beyond just a scale obviously was something like Earth earth is a planet that everyone is familiar with everything hopefully so doing a planet as complicated as Earth in terms of the mouth biomes and the amount of variety within a single planet we can't do with that tech right now there's too many different variables in one planet if we go from like the deserts of the Sahara to Antarctica to vast urban landscapes to sort of fields and farms like jungles everything about the floor we think about the variety of

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   biomes we think about the urbanization of Earth and the sort of human-made infrastructure on top we think about the number of animals I think like there's a huge amount of things that could keep us going for a very long time so we are not where we need to be to create something as complex as Earth with the tech yet that being said every improvement we make to the tech gets us closer to that and it's about at some point being able to have the tech to be able to do something as complex as Earth to do it justice right right I think it's safe to say that that the every moon that we work on every planet that we introduce and all the new biomes that are created for each and every one Hurston is adding oceans for instance each of those that we do is another step closer to the tech

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   that we'll need to make Earth a reality in the star city exactly and and Hurston's also where we're sort of making our first tentative steps towards huge cities integrated onto the planet surface and things like that yeah exactly everything we do adds complexity and diversity to the planets if you if we take person where it is now it's much more than say the current moons are in terms of variety of things that you will see on the surface and it's also a much bigger planet and the current moons so we are getting there we are not where we need to be yet to be able to do something that is a step more complex and somewhere light Hurston but that is the it's the dream for sure and it's something we are working towards the

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   best transfer I can give at a moment is that we don't know yet but we are working towards it absolutely anything to add it perfect thank you yeah it's one of those ones that comes up you know it's we've discussed it something we talked about a lot and yeah it's it's an end goal at the moment but a distant on it let's say that fair enough the one that we're the closest to us is the most far away yeah yeah there's there's some philosophical meaning or that might just be the good I've just be the cold medicine all right man I'll let you get back to work thanks take care thank you I thank you so much Eddie moving right along down the hall to our own Johnny to savea's designer no stranger to calling all devs Johnny how

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   you doing man I'm great jarred how are you I'm sick man that's how rude is that to ask enjoying the British summer well enjoying the this is the aftermath of four consecutive vara citizen events at Gamescom taking pictures this happens every year I will admit it doesn't usually last this long we've got two questions for you at this time voted on by the backers I'm gonna start with one that we've talked about before but that's the virtue of this process because the backers get to submit questions and you guys get to vote on which questions get addressed every month the fact that this question got voted up again means there's enough new citizens out there who are still curious about this answer or existing citizens who weren't happy with the answer I don't whichever one

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   you might be we're gonna do it again what are your current plans for non-lethal weaponry things like tasers and tranquilizer right specifically okay so there are probably two sides to normally for weaponry at the moment at least that we've got planned we've got things that still do damage like two systems so like distortion weaponry and all that good stuff so we've got some examples of that gave me think in the game at the moment on the ships so we've got like those distortion scatter guns that are in live at the moment so they take down shields staple ship systems we've also got the lowly MP burst things soever examples of that we want to bring that over to the FPS at some point the FPS game the side of the game at some point as well so when we kind of get more robust systems in the suits and everything we want obviously

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    that to kind of tie in the same way it does the ship so you can turn people's like visors off and kind of all the important information that they want to view so that's a Canada and I guess we would call a non-lethal way of disrupting someone's gameplay and then the other side like you've mentioned tasers and tranquilizer rifles we don't necessarily have plans to do those very specific things and but we know bounty hunting is something that we are going to want to do down the line so we are gonna need weaponry that you know enables you to do that without killing people so we quite robustly built up our actors data system which allows us to tap into back constantly I mean you've seen people passing out from lack of oxygen that's just an example of one of the things that we do with the outstate

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    system and so it's not completely out the question that we would have tranquilizers or tasers that can knock people out and yeah even the tranquilizer rifles we we even have consumables so med pen at the moment is a consumable and you can put I mean down the line we can percieve putting all sorts of things and in something like that to give you different effects so yeah our options are very open yeah alright that's a pretty good job I had nothing to add to that next question this one's a little more interesting than the last one I think what are the current thoughts on adding navigation to ground-based gameplay things like compasses or mini maps or long grid coordinates that you'll find in lots of other terrestrial based FPS games so yeah this is something we've

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    not fully locked down yet we've talked briefly but yeah our priorities like kind of more on focusing on the core gameplay like the FPS movement and all the the weapon handling everything so we kind of want to get those core mechanics down and locked into a point where we're super super happy with them so this is kind of one of those systems is not so much on the back burner but it's kind of it's on the list of things to talk about so we're quite open to what we can do here like we can have a completely separate gadget for helping you navigate your way around planets because my god like our planets are huge you're really really gonna need something to help you out there so hey you can use a separate gadget we could integrate something into the mobi glass we could even integrate something into your tactical advisor and

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    your scanner so there are our options are basically endless here so we just kind of need to talk further down the line and lock down and kind of hone in on what we want to do that that's is that there's definitely going to be something we're not going to just leave clear players out in the cold without simple functionality that exists today on my phone I can bring Google Maps up on my phone right now so you know it's it's we know it's something that we need it's not it's something that's definitely going to make its way into the game it's just the manner in which it manifests is still open to discussion and debate yep exactly all right man that's it that's all I got for you I'll let you get back to work thank you very much take it easy all right thank you so much Ryan to Sevilla sand now last but certainly not least boy the Sun is coming through here now I thought they told me it was cloudy we

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    are going to John crew vehicle pipeline director John how you doing man good thanks for enjoying a one day of summer what is this it's like it started coming on in the middle of Johnny's call and I was like wow that's gonna be rainy in a second so maybe any whatever vitamin isn't Sun to get over this thing I don't know it's vitamin there in the Sun alright I got a question for you it's a it's a it's a it's a flip on a current on a common question we get about ship customization this person wants to know and so does everybody who voted for the question will there be deeper customization of player ships interiors other than just the dashboard style decorations and hanger flare stuff that we've talked about like the trophies that are available now or one of the stretch goals was a bobble heads will they will we see things like alternate

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    wall roof or floor panels interior color schemes furnitures other decorations maybe changes to interior lights how about our own smoke and dirt and we're okay that's that's a very long multi-part question first off let's take a question so to talk about interior customization so I've had to touch on exterior customize necessary talked about how you'll be able to do like multiple colors so we'll provide the ship and its default state and you'll be able to customize a couple of colors or a couple of areas with colors on it to do it how you want so they includes the glass so the glass will actually impact the inside we can do that on the exterior to an extent because it's just one material but the interiors of the ships are made

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    of multiple materials so it becomes technically a lot harder to do not saying that we're never going to do it it's just it's not on our initial plans for doing it so stage one will be exterior customization getting your name on the ship and changing the numbers on the ship or all the stuff like that interior wise it's the lights as well so not again not planning on letting people customize every single lights color purely because they are again tied to the interior materials and they had done together to create the final effect but what we do want to do is let people choose the different light States so at the moment I've got a coffin a minute I

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    think there's multiple life states you don't systemically happen so you've got exactly when you've got when ships spawned but not turned on you've got your normal power you've got your emergency those react to game states at the moment we want to essentially have a controller or a light state or light switch that you can go oh I've jumped into a dangerous area and go turn the emergency lighting on now everyone in the ship knows that it's a dangerous bit and because it's you're not getting in most of the effects so atom emergency the effects and lighting come on together see it the - you wouldn't - turn that VFX on all the time thanks right but having the red warning based on gives you that stage so we're going to provide base station let you choose what light state you want your ship in red alert yellow yes yeah that sort of stuff dirt and we're so at the moment

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    those are two different things in fact they're two different things so dirty is cosmetic essentially you can have an or percent dirty ship and a hundred percent a ship there's no game play consequence it just is just visual that's set at a predefined level that doesn't change currently where is what degrades the functionality of the items and the ships performance obviously that does impact gameplay so and to reverse that you need to repair your ship where is something we have on items at the moment where we don't have it on ships and dirt is something that isn't driven by anything in game at the moment that's why all the ships look a certain way they stay that way to the end of time when they get hooked up to their systems everything will start Christine or clean 100% or percent that not percent where and those

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    two values can be completely independently change you could have a hundred percent thirteen ops and worn ship or the vice versa you could have a hundred percent warship at a but it looks clean but it under the skin it's completely worn out and that's really up to you like where you want where you want to leave it as dirt wise and where wise furniture furniture like able to change the sheets on the bed in the Phoenix or something like that it's stuff like that we do plan on allowing customization of certain aspects of the of the ship like the the Phoenix has a conference table but also there was a piano option and stuffing like the eight ninety where we perhaps gonna have a certain set of tables and chairs but you

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    may not want that set so we might provide an alternative set that's a different luxurious styling they there's different ways to skin a cat in terms of luxury styling and down the line we'll provide options and that extends that like bed sheets I know everyone loves the star ferry's captain bed sheet with all the cartoony space stuff on it and there's no reason to not let people equip their beds how they want yeah that's about it so basically let's just set your own light States but maybe not necessarily tweak the color tints and everything but some minor furniture customization options somewhere down the road being able to affect your own dirt levels certainly by cleaning your ship not cleaning your ship where is something systemic entirely separate

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    from that and yeah as far as internal paint stuff a little more difficult than doing the exterior but not something we're gonna rule out while knots that we have currently in the plans they did the exterior stuff is yeah the exterior stuff is where we see like most people investing their time in customizing they ship because you see in third person up close other people see it up close so that's like that's where the big returns out on you spending the time making garish color schemes for your ships well yeah I think that's it I'm sorry I came all the way to UK and we can't do this like in person what I want its but they've again they've locked me yes of

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    quarantine there's the word for it yeah alright man I'll let you go thank you so much my problem I take a bite well that about wraps up this week's show especially thanks to Eddie Hilditch and John Aegis epheus and John crew for taking the time to be here on the show with us this week I came all the way to UK but I you know I'm here in this blinding Sun box they told me the UK was cloudy remember you can submit your questions for consideration each and every week up in the thread up on spectrum and don't forget to vote that's the two-prong plan you guys submit your questions you gotta burn your questions then I do my best to take those questions a pair them with a developer and find an answer that's as current and accurate as possible even if it doesn't have all the answers you're looking for in any given week we do our best this is game development so for calling all devs I'm Content Manager for global video production Jared Huckaby we'll see you

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    next week everybody you thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen a squadron 42 you can subscribe to our channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library