Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Refuel and Repair
Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment
- 00:00:08
hello everybody welcome to another episode of calling all devs our q a series where we take questions from you the star citizen background put them directly to our developers usually over teleconferencing we were doing it long before the world was you know way to catch up world joining us on the show this week we are talk we are talking to dan treffin and johnny josephius about refuel and repair so to get us started we're going to go ahead and put a call in to dan truffin from our frankfurt studio dan how you doing man hey jared all good here how are you uh yeah getting by getting by um we are talking refuel and repair uh this episode uh so my understanding is that you are you and your team are in the early days in the early trenches of actually finalizing the design for for
- 00:00:56
refueling that we'll be pursuing for the persistent universe so wanted to see if we can pick your brain see where we're at see what the current implementation is because we've heard a lot of things over the years um what do you got for us so yeah you're right we're in the early early stages of this um we have a general high level idea and at this point one of our senior designers is heavy at work on pretty much ironing out every little detail that's gonna come come into play for uh for refueling from how does the ui look how does the flow of the ui how where is the ui positioned in the ship where how exactly does the starfarer boom arm function for refueling stop is so i'll i'll try to take you through a bit how this works
- 00:01:45
um players will be able to go to a station and using the refuel rearm stock ui that will need to get redone for this because it was very simplistic as they only doing little things they'll be able to fill up their starfarer with uh either hydrogen fuel or quantum fuel they'll be able to also equip their starfarer with various uh tanks that are made purpose they're purposely made for quantum fuel or hydrogen uh fuel and then they'll have a ui to select how much they want in tank five how much they want in tank three which type of fuel stuff like this uh once that part gets done they uh they'll pretty much have to fly and uh find find a guy in need find a guy that has run out of fuel didn't check his
- 00:02:31
fuel meter and made the made a bit of a mistake um we're foreseeing this would be much more of a problem once pyro kicks in because refueling opportunities there at the station are really minimal so this will come into play a lot more so for tier zero we're kind of looking right now at the players using chat google chat and going like dude i run out of fuel is anyone with a starfarer here that can help me or hey i have a lot of fuel anyone needs it and you guys meet the former group he means that that the old-fashioned way in the future we're thinking of uh using the beacon system to actually create the beacon hey guys i mean fuel uh we could do this at the beginning but it will just take us longer to release and it could be a separate part that comes in later so we thought
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we'd rather get fuel out to the to the players refueling out to the players as far as fast as possible and then we're we're gonna do the part where you actually have a have a way to contract fuel being brought to you or i'm selling i need buyers basically so once you reach that person we're gonna leverage the the existing docking stuff that's coming online now uh to uh you'll be using the same ui to dock basically your starfarers boom fuel arm with the the ship that's out of fuel the ship that's out of fuel obviously has a fuel intake port that you'll have to pretty much it's a spinning the the tail on the donkey type of thing it's a very precise maneuvering thing if you mess it up you either break your boom arm
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or you break the guy's ship so there'll be a lot of challenge in doing that docking basically you're flying tons and tons of metal and fuel into trying to very precisely uh insert that nozzle in there uh once you manage to do this and if the ships are pretty much connected similar to how the docking operation works you will have a fuel transfer ui where you'll be able to uh set a price which type of fuel which type of tank do you want to transfer uh from the the uh the receiving guy will be able to say well i only want half a tank because i'm long cash or something like this there's a pretty much a trade interface where you have a bit of management of what you want how much do you want and from the starfarer side where do you want to deliver from because you might have a tank that's
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completely full time that's completely empty we're looking into gameplay here of how the pressure in those tanks actually speeds up the the delivery of fuel so there will be we want to insert a bit of gameplay here where you can if you know what you're doing you're going to be doing this fast and you might be in a few seconds like a like a pit stop formula one thing and if you're just an average player who first has a starfarer and doesn't want to be bothered you will still do it in about 30 seconds or one minute depending what you're refueling might be a few minutes if you're refueling i don't know nitrous uh that might take a few starfares but you'll still be able to do it but you'll just do it slower at this point both of you guys are sitting in space so if someone finds you you're you're in a lot of trouble uh if they're a pirate
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so there's uh there's a we always want to do the swiss reward thing in our gameplay we just don't want to get you guys to go there you push a button and then you wait for everything to refuel that being said refueling will take time refueling at the station is going to take a lot longer than it does right now refueling between two ships it's going to take time it's not just going to be you push the button and you fly up no it just takes time so only an operator that's the the big picture of how how this works and uh hopefully we'll get to release it soon tm uh let's see it's still early it's still early but we're we're getting but it is still now i want to clear that that statement up it is still early we have been talking about refuel and repair and many of these systems throughout star citizen development
- 00:06:26
for several years now uh when we say it's early days in spain that means active development on this feature is now begun the schedule the scheduling is done for it we we are just ironing out the details in the design we already talked with a lot of the dependency teams all the guys that need to provide the art the change the boom arm for refueling uh how would we do the fuel ports there's already people there's there's gears are emotions motion for this this pretty much needs to come with pyro because if it doesn't then a lot of people are gonna get stranded in viral and there's gonna be no solution for them so uh yeah it needs to get there well that answers my one question that without me having to ask it so thank you um all right and i get i gotta imagine uh you and your team have done so much
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work on mining at this point i have to imagine there have been some lessons learned working on mining that you're going that you're applying to refueling can you can you can you speak to any of that right now um i think the it's maybe not the lessons but there's also lessons uh but mainly uh i kind of like it how the team started doing a lot more than just uh uh programming or designing that we started to having our guys know how to build uis from scratch and uh that helps us for example now with the refueling ui we just can build our own uh ui art is just gonna come at the end and make it pretty but we can build it completely functional get all the gameplay done without having to depend on external teams and kind of waiting for them to finish
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all of these external teams have like a backlog of tasks till the next year at least and if you have to wait for them to slow so we kind of streamlined and we learned a few tricks that we didn't know before so now we are we're a lot faster in iterating we did the mining ui we did the refining ui uh so now we're we're pretty much where uh we can just get the ball rolling as soon as we we have anything with ui that needs to get done other than that um staff from mining that will apply here lessons we've learned um we'll have to see how we deal with economy mining has had a lot of ups and downs with economy and we'll have to see how we do this without getting the players in a status where basically refueling this patch is is profitable next patch is not so profitable
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and they get they stop playing the refueling type gameplay just because it's not a profit thing so this is something that's probably going to be a bigger bigger thing that we have to do throughout the game that economy needs to go every quarter we release and it needs to be good for all of the all the types of gameplay not just the new one we released but yeah it's a work in progress we're still learning here all right uh last question again about the relationship between mining and this mining famously can be done poorly uh to catastrophic results humorous but catastrophic results uh are we thinking anything along those lines for refueling is there is there going to be a way to mess up refueling so bad there's two ways you can mess up
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refueling first of all if your pilot is crap he will collide with the ship he's trying to refueling he will hit it with the up the the arm he there's so many things that can go here he'll either damage the arm or damage the ship or damage the starfarer um the other part where you can go wrong if you're trying to do it faster as they speed up the process of once the ships are connected and you don't know what you're doing you either that that nozzle can either burst it can eject fuel into space it can ignite it can cause a lot of problems we're also looking now as a higher tier of how to store more fuel so you might actually want to um you might not want to fill up your tanks all the way to the max
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and high pressure especially if you're going into hot areas unless you have a tank that is made for those high temperatures so there will be certain conditions in which if you have a highly pressurized tank yeah you will refuel faster but if you enter a hot zone that fuel is going to start to it's if the pressure starts increase increasing that fuel becomes unstable you might you might blow your ship up so we're looking in in this direction too but probably not for the first release first we want to do the basic stuff and then same as with mining we keep building and building them so that being said with mining mining and refueling while not directly connecting connected the idea was always that you mine you refine and then you can use whatever you find to refuel so that is kind of the entire chain but that will be coming also
- 00:11:16
a bit later so so so custom tanks multiple fuel types uh uh variable pressure uh so that so there's an actual uh game plan skill element to it and i'm gonna guess knowing mike snowden that have fully fueled up uh starfarer uh will make a big big boom oh yeah oh yeah i'm looking forward to the video it'll be the fuller it is the big the bigger the bang and it's also the fuller it is the harder to be to do anything with it uh uh chris was very adamant on this thing where like if you fill your ship up with a lot of fuel it will move like a slow boat and you know in mud basically so there will be choices to be made there do i fill it up all the way or do i just feel one tank
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for each tank here ten percent or something like this very cool all right dan i think we got it thank you so much we're going to throw it over to johnny jesebious now and and see where we're at with repair so i can let you go take care bye bye all right thank you so much dan uh moving on to the second half of our show we are calling lead fps systems designer mr johnny josephius man with the coolest name in all of cig johnny how you doing man hey i'm not bad how are you i'm all right uh i couldn't get my hair to match because i recorded the first half one day and i recorded the second half another day so i'm just wearing a hat so people nobody will notice nobody will notice nobody will notice that these aren't all recorded on the exact same day at the exact same time all right johnny we are talking about
- 00:12:51
repair we just got done talking to dan uh dan and his team uh they've they finished the majority of their technical design they've they've got sign off from cr and they're beginning their work in earnest to get repair refueling going uh in line with the release of pyro hopefully fingers crossed no promises that's just our target you and your team are working on repair as a counterpoint to salvage it's not quite where dan's team is it's a little early earlier in the process so want to talk uh why don't you go ahead and tell us where it is where we're going what considerations you guys are currently investigating uh right now and just uh just give us what you got about repair nothing so yeah like you say we're in earlier stages at the moment we're still firming up on the design so you
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know everything i say here might not make it to you know when it actually arrives in the pu um but yeah essentially salvage and repair it's the kind of like the first version of salvage that we're actually doing so what we're calling it internally is it's more like hole stripping so you're actually going up to ship some vehicles and you're either stripping away parts of the hole which lowers its health it's like its integrity essentially uh visually as well because it uses the v2 damage map or that's what we're intending to do um basically burns it away takes that material away and stores it in the canister even if that's on the you know the multi-tool has a material canister and the larger salvage dedicated salvage tool that we're going to be doing has an even bigger one so you can store even more of that stuff and basically yeah you can either strip away from the hull or you can use that material or you can buy full canisters
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of material to come and use that as a repair resource as well so if your ship takes a few hits in combat you'll be able to pop out cockpit eva over to it get your repair tool out and kind of fill it in if you come across the idea is at least if you come across something like a derelict and your ship's damaged and you don't have any repair resource you could strip away some of that ship and spray it onto yours um so it's not going to be 100 like oh i've just you know sprayed this magical you know metal substance into the ship again and it looks like it's brand new it's going to look a little bit more battle scarred and the idea is we want to use a different material on that to show like look you've patched this up yourself it doesn't look like a pristine ship anymore if you want it to get back to its pristine state and you know 100 health again then you can have to take it back to a
- 00:15:14
shop to get someone to properly repair it for you interesting so a little bit to unpack there so repair is intrinsically tied with salvage it is basically salvages one mode and then you flip the darn thing into reverse and you're in repair in the other mode but you said something interesting that when you when you repair your ship when you run your your salvage beam either from the multi-tool or from the dedicated tool and we showed some of the dedicated tools recently on isc you were there um when you run it when you run it past it doesn't restore your your paint job and everything it's going to be some like third transient state because we got our pristine ship with its paint and tack and then we've got the damaged ship you know you know as it degrades wears
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and tears whatever whatever happens to the ship it takes it to the stress point up to when it's about to explode but then salvage can bring it back or not salvage repair can bring it back not just to where it was originally but to some other third state where it's kind of like unpainted metal or so that's part of what we're exploring right now yeah yeah so there's a lot of technical considerations that i don't want to write checks for at the moment because we have to do some we have to talk with the graphics team we have to start with a bunch of different people to make sure that that system will work but that is what we want to do from design side if we can because it does give you that nice visual feedback of like you know i've been through a few battles i've had a few scrapes and i've patched up myself because i want to keep going while i'm out i don't want to go back to a landing zone or anything to get fixed up so um yeah it does give you those like
- 00:16:50
it feels cool right like you've been flying around for a while like i've taken a few hits but i've scraped through and i'm patching up myself it looks uh i think it'll make a few ships look you know battle scarred and awesome and it also kind of ties into the fact that you might not necessarily be able to restore that part back to its full health again unless you go and either get a replacement for it or you go and get the proper repairs for it as well so it gives you visual feedback on both sides like i've been out and about and had some scrapes and also this is a little bit weaker than it was to start with so what makes now the time to to get into this because because we've talked about repair i mean since the beginning of the of the project um and and we we carry a lot of ideas forth with us throughout the years you can go back through wingmen's hangars and old atvs and see many of chris's comments on it
- 00:17:38
throughout the years but what makes now the time to actually buckle down and start you know you know putting things on paper and start actually pushing the process forward well to be honest it's been a long time coming and it's a system that's basically been needed and the more persistence that we get inside the pu and the more we want you to be kind of well we've got the health system coming in for starters soon which obviously makes you care about everything you've got and taking care of all of your items you know a lot more important uh because it's all persistent so um if you do get into a few scrapes in the p you're not gonna just wanna you know abandon your ship and you know die on a planet somewhere you're going to want to have an option to be able to repair it and you know fly out of there so um i think it all just ties into all the other systems that come into the game at the moment and the fact that it's a system that's been looming for a
- 00:18:24
long time and this is the starting point for it obviously it expands out when we start looking at ship salvage there'll be similar systems there where you might be able to use you know whole scraping lasers to take that stuff off but then there's things like the reclaimer with the claw and you just kind of progress from what we're doing down here all the way up to so yeah this is a really good starting point you know for us to start you know noodling around with playing with seeing what works what doesn't and then you know go from there basically i have to imagine you're also in a similar situation to refueling in that the pyro system is coming and there are fewer rest stops fewer repair stations along the way and uh you need you're gonna need more options to to uh maintain your own ship because you're not gonna have an easy stop-off point to to instigate repairs like like you like it like you
- 00:19:12
have in the uh the stand system yeah absolutely it's a lot more remote and barren isn't it and you know you're gonna want to be able to be a bit more self-sufficient than you can be at the moment so uh yeah and i think it even ties into a few things that we want to do down the line too so we've not even mentioned where we want to take this beyond the whole stripping is that eventually we want to be able to when we get the physicalized ship items inside the ships too we want this to be able to time with that as well so if someone does target your power plant or whatever and take it out and you end up just about managing to land your ship somewhere you want to be able to repair that power plant back up rather than you know being completely stranded because you've got no power plant left so eventually that's to come later that's probably not going to be an artesia release but later down the line that's certainly something we want to do too and it does tie into that whole self-sufficiency thing so so where so where so where do you go from here uh
- 00:20:02
it's i obviously don't give us like don't put like a date yeah we're gonna have repair on december whatever but but but what's the what's the process like from here uh from here forward so where we're in terms of uh from a design point of view yeah like like in the overall pipeline and if you imagine the overall getting repair into the game pipeline where are we at in this pipeline what's what's still left to do um so we're still early we've got the design stubbed out on paper which we've been going through with um game directors like rich rich tyra um so we've been working on that with him uh we've been trying to come up with a what we call a functional design as well which is essentially a fancy name for basically working out the numbers in excel for a first you know bounce pass on you know the you know the stripping rates and stuff and how it degrades the health on chips and everything so we're just working all the details out at the
- 00:20:49
moment and there are other teams that we're obviously very dependent on to get this working so we've been talking to the graphics team network teams obviously if i've like drilled a hole in my ship with my salvage tool we want that shown over the network and that comes with its own problems uh so there are a lot of things to factor in and then it also comes down to things like the we've been in contact with the vfx team uh at some point we're gonna need to see what the salvage beam actually looks like in situ with what it looks like when we're burning away the ev2's on the ship too so it is very early stages investigation like tech investigation being done by several teams that link into this and then also very similarly to what we do with a lot of our design workers we're in kind of working with the teams that you know work on the concept of the visuals to see what this looks like whether it
- 00:21:37
be ui or vfx or anything like that so well i imagine we'll be following along with it as it develops just as we will with refuel and just as we have are currently with like the colonialism outposts and everything uh be sure to stay tuned to inside star citizen to see this feature as it progresses throughout the remainder of this year johnny that's it thank you so much i can let you go no it's been fun all right take care bye that's it paid the bills i'm jared huckabee we'll see you all next time everybody take care
Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.
