Star Citizen Live: All About Alpha 3.12
Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment
- 00:00:02
hi everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live all about alpha 3.12 i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we put the screws to some of our devs we just we take your questions and we send them to the developers like are you excited about the orlando show do you think donald glover is going to be in the new lando show uh how many episodes do you think the new lando show is going to be i mean we hit we hit him with all the time disco gonna be just gonna be disco in the lando show uh so to get started let's let's just go right to our uh right to our panel i guess uh every show is somebody's first show so we're gonna take a minute to tell people who you are rich introduce yourself who are you what do you do for star citizen so hello i am richard tyra i am the core gameplay director for star citizen
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uh and essentially i cover anything that is character related so fps weapons armor basically if you're not in a cockpit or kind of sometimes if you're in a cockpit um but yeah i cover all of that kind of stuff all right and todd who are you and what do you do for star citizen my name's todd pappy and i'm the star citizen live game director so basically anything that goes in the live product um that's me working with chris and tony and rich and other directors and teams to make sure that what we put out is as good of as good of a quality as possible you know for that patch and so today we are doing the show that we usually do about at the end of every quarter uh we talk about questions related to the upcoming patch
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uh this of course is patch 3.12. it's the patch that wraps up the end of this year uh we are taking questions from two places uh one we put a thread up in on spectrum earlier this week where people were able to submit their questions then vote on which ones they want to see answered most and then we of course take questions live from the chat so if you're watching live on twitch right now you can submit your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets that's going to help our community management team pull those questions and send them on over to me so let's get started right now with the questions that were sent throughout the week on spectrum um which organizations will have reputation in 312. like maybe we want to start by just explaining how reputation will work in 312. yeah so basically we have
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reputation on all of the mission givers except for one um right now we've got some issues with rudo that we're we're working out but basically with reputation and the ideas that you go there obviously if you do missions then you become in better favor if you do poorly on those missions or back out of them fail them so and so forth you lose favor with the mission giver um before for the most part you you can never really fail out of you know good favor with with them they would constantly give you missions now you can actually fail out um it will kind of return to zero or return to a point where you can actually get get in favor with them to actually do missions again
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um and then from there we do have it on some of the select um organizations um and in this case it's it's really mostly geared towards bounty hunting stuff so um like the bounty hunters guilds the blackjack bounty department and then the north rock bounty department so basically you can gain rep by completing bounty missions offered by them and then with higher reputation higher difficulty higher mission rewards you know that kind of stuff will be unlocked and of course good and then after afterwards the idea is that you know more perks and stuff like that will be unlocked for you that's literally what i was just
- 00:04:01
supposed to say and of course you know this is the first iteration of reputation and it will be built on in subsequent patches yeah exactly um we saw a lot of questions come in about the tractor beam uh the tractor beam seems to have really captured the imagination of folks rich uh so we're gonna try to spread them out throughout the show here um the first one we got is can we steal cargo from other ships and then sell that cargo in the usual place with the new tractor beam attachment so the answer is yes and no so if you blow up the ship first it will then obviously spawn all the different boxes in space and then you can steal them so if you know if you take someone out and all their cargo
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then gets ejected into space you can then go outside in eva with your tractor beam collect all of those boxes put them back into your ship and then sell those boxes uh you know on the black market um if you try and interact with them directly from the cargo grid so say for example you just went and bought a load of commodities that appeared in your cargo and then you went and tried to use the tractor beam because the the boxes there are not physicalized they're not rigid entities essentially so what it means is that the tractor beam doesn't really interact with them so that's going to be undergoing um a cargo refactor so we'll be coming in a future update that you'll be able to manipulate them directly from the cargo grid so that's why i was saying yes or no so yes if you blow them up first but no if you just basically you know you just walk into somebody's and try to
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take them off gotcha um that essentially covers it uh there uh watching the testing for the uh through evocati has been one of the uh great joys of 2020 watching the way that they uh uh the exploits that we knew people were going to find very quickly and then even some of the new cleverness that uh maybe what was a bit unexpected um one of the big additions in 312 is gas clouds and one of the questions we got from the chat is can we hide in gas clouds uh the plan is too yes that you can uh we can't do it right now so um basically what we're doing is is currently at the vehicle tech team is working on kind of a rebalance of basically em and
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ir and also the addition of ambience ambient signatures so when that comes online which i i think is soon then we will go through and basically rebalance the em and ir signatures uh across the ships but then we'll also implement it into stations and gas clouds in the sun and and planets so on and so forth so then the system will actually work properly and um depending on where you're at in the gas cloud either you will be shielded you know by just being naturally there um based off of the the background of the gas cloud or you will have to go you know run low emissions or stealth you know in order to be hidden
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and to just touch on that so we're also going to be working on because that's something that's been under my purview is that we're also going to be working on adding cross-section as in a signature so for on the ships it will be emir and cs so the cross-section essentially is uh or it's kind of like the your visual uh representation of a signature um so when you're inside a glass cloud that gas cloud will obscure some of your visuals and we actually um we actually got it working already where in terms of we generate this like almost like this physics proxy around the ship and it does take into account the orientation of the ship so if you're looking at it like nose on it's got a sleeker profile then if you're looking at it from a broadside so when you're thinking about like partial obscurity or hiding behind an asteroid or anything like that
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um it will lower your cross-section signature and from a point of view of em and ir currently in the game right now em and ir is a kind of like a binary decision so it's like if the ambient value of that am if that signature is higher than your signature you're basically hidden and that's not necessarily what we want it to be and so what we want it to be is that these things are a bit more nuanced so that if you have a high ambient signature such as in a gas cloud it dampens the signature of which you are emitting and that what that means is that you're never just permanently stealth there's always an opportunity like oh you're trying to reduce the signatures and in the new hud which we're also implementing we'll we'll be showing your signature missions on you so you'll be able to and that'll be both on fps and on
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um ship side of things so you'll be able to tweak uh you know different systems to basically lower your emissions and you'll see those emissions be affected in real time when you go into something like a gas cloud so you'll see them be dampened and this gives us like really awesome capabilities for like if you're let's say you your org has got a giant fleet and you have a large capital class ship uh you can have smaller fighter class ships um within the shadow of the larger capital ship which then gives us you know this really cool oh maybe gamepl pulled the gun too early so yeah there's there's lots coming on
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radio and scanning and i know i say that a lot there's lots coming but uh that actually that stuff's actually working right now i've seen it working it will be coming in the future updates i was just talking with kirk tome the other day he was showing me it's like it's cool stuff like uh maybe next season on ise just just gotta just gotta get a little further ahead before it's ready to show folks um have we found the cause of the refuel restock not loading bug uh we have um and basically one of our guys is is currently working on it and um the plan is for the fix to go into 312 and if it doesn't then uh it's because there is some sort of hiccup with it but right now the plan is for 312. okay uh can party members pick up the refined
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ore that you or another party member has deposited into a refinery no it's it's you and only you so um i think dan dan and i would need to discuss it if we want to change that but right now um you know it's basically like your order your signature you pick it up okay um what there's a question about weapon zeroing uh what's the current what is currently the max range to shoot a target at in so it's it's a complex question to answer um because the way the weapons work and well the way the planets work for example depends on what certain things are loaded in
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so if you've been to like a section of the planet that is already loaded and then you move away from there you'll then obviously be able to have all the entities that are loaded in um the max probably more reliable the most reliable um value that i'm talking about is probably about 1500 meters um i'm gonna have to let the cat out one second it's meowing the cat is meowing the cats are the only reason i'm asking you the questions so i can put you on full screen yes so um yeah 1500 meters is reliable it works um longer than that um upwards of two kilometers i've seen some really good shots but it depends on how you know where you've been if you're looking back to somewhere where it's previously loaded if it isn't loaded so it's not like oh 100 of
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how it works we can obviously be improving that in the future but right now between one point one kilometer and one and a half kilometers okay but you can zero i think the scope allows you to zero up to a maximum of two kilometers uh so you can't zero beyond that two kilometers is like the max zeroing then you have to kind of uh judge the shot yourself uh from the chat uh can you let the cat back in the cat was meowing the cat needs the cat needs to eat eating and drinking all right how about a tractor in question can the tractor beam flip ground vehicles so the multi-tool tractor beam which is what we're releasing in 312 the short answer is no um the tractor beam has a force and it's actually all based around force
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so i know jj in one of the ics called out that it has a weight limit of 250 kilos technically that's true but it's actually a force limit so 250 kilos is different in earth gravity than it is in space than it is in on the moon so the tractor beam has a forced limit of two and a half thousand newtons um essentially you can't a rock is way heavier than that so uh you can't lift it can tractor beam technology in a larger capacity than the multi-tool tractor beam you know lift a you know turn a rocker over absolutely yes um but for the multi-tool tractor being that releasing in 312 it's a no yeah i think it's important to remember that the the multi-beam tractor the multi-tool tractor beam is like our first little baby step into tractor beam
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stuff and there are ships that are supposed to have tractor beams uh there are well i mean fundamentally the way we delivered tractor beam and this was always right from the get-go was that track to beam is a technology that we have developed we are you the main use case right now is from the multi-tool but if i gave that multi tool i could get that's one number i could go and change that number to be 300 000 newtons i could change it to be 300 million newtons and you know i could lift anything so as long as that entity in the world is a rigid body so a rigid body for somebody who's not familiar with what it is it's basically a physicalized entity so a lot of the brushes in the world which are like decorative items where you can't really interact with them um they're not physicalized so for
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example if a grenade went off nearby them they would they wouldn't react to the grenade uh but when you see something be reactor grenade say a ragdoll of a dead body or you know other things that you see whether it's um you know a wamas bar or whatever those are the things that you can interact with so we will be going through um you know i think it's a you know star citizen the live environment's a large place to play um we have been working closely with the environment team that they will be going through throughout the universe and updating all of these things that are non-physicalized to become physicalized uh so that you'll be able to have more interactivity with the world both from a hands carrying point of view and from a using the multi-tool point of view um but yeah the multitool is just the first foray we'll be adding other um dedicated tools that
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are um extensions of the multi-tool functionality because the models were supposed to just be like what it is it says what it says in the name it's basically a little pen knife that has a knife or a toothpick or a screwdriver or whatever we will be offering dedicated tools that you know dedicated mining tool or dedicated tractor beam tool or that offer and and that those are absolutely planned down the road in terms of the progression and so that you can specialize into that kind of field so if you want to be you know a dedicated cargo hauler a dedicated um salvager you know tractor beams going to be up then you maybe want a more beefier version that allows you to lift larger things um but yeah so right now the short answer is no but you know the future is bright all right um will refineries be able to store the product of multiple jobs
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or will we need to withdraw the refined material after each run before starting another they will think of it like a dry cleaner like you can you can do multiple shirts or multiple pants there multiple jobs and then from there you know you can you can just pull one out or you can pull all of them out it will really depend on the size of your ship that you're moving those jobs to okay um is there any fix in 312 about the party name plates not working right now no um basically the unfortunately the guys have had bigger bigger things to work on um for 312 bugs as well as um doing uh star map rework so that's the
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that's been their focus and and unfortunately this is the is that coming future i should get a catchphrase um we actually have just converted those party name plates into using um building blocks and we're going to be integrating them into the radar and scanning functionality so that you haven't got this weird um you know party name you know name and then the name underneath the ship and then this you know it's all this ui kind of combining together to kind of create this hodgepodge of multiple systems that are doing different thing and so where you we've unified all of that um so that it will be coming in in a future patch that and that will more than likely fix that bug um but yes well i mean either we'll get to it
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before then or or this will yeah yeah i mean it really just depends on the the bugs that that the team has on their plates um just because this is a very specific one it it needs to go through um two or three people that it's it's very very specialized and it's been a pain to track down all right um so we got uh why did we rename chaff and flare rich do you want to take this one or do you want me i'll go no i'll go for it so essentially uh chaff and flair the the real world equivalence of traffic flair is not necessarily how they're being used in star citizen because star citizen has uh you know these all these different signatures so um this is something that's been you know
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that's been driven by yogi has you know a fan favorite and and he was very passionate about kind of changing them to be more representative of what they do in star citizen so the flare has been renamed to decoy so basically the decoy is basically creating a strong signal source for all like seeker heads so first csir em and then the chaff is being renamed to the noise field so the noise field is kind of creating this sensor dampening and that's kind of what i was talking about um before because that's actually was an extension of radon scanning which was with the core functionality of radar and actually yogi tied into that from what we were doing from the vehicle side so um that's kind of going in line with signature signature being dispersed into the ambient that is dampening other signatures around it so that's why it's being
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called this you know a noise field so it's kind of allowing people to hide inside almost a mini gas cloud so that's kind of it's about reducing confusion towards what people have an expectation of happens in real life versus you know the star citizen universe and how we're using it because i mean you know we use a lot of terms in from a design point of view and this goes across multiple different games where you you pull a term and you're like okay we're going to use this term to represent this thing that is based off reality but a lot of the times how you implement it or how you're using it in that particular use case in a game can slightly change the direct determination of what that actual term is being used for uh and i think in this case uh it was
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about kind of clearing up the confusion now obviously in the short term people are going to be going well hold on i've already learned a lot of this but you know we've got to remember that we're still in um pre-alpha or so this is about getting the right terminology and the right systems and the right underpinning in there so that when new players or old players alike are trying to explain it to new players that you know it has a consistency across um what the real world is doing versus what's happening in game uh let's see what do we have from the chat here um with the idris being added as station security uh can we expect the size 10 railgun to be functional yes um it's that it'll depend on
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basically the the ship that's going against so it it's we we've worked on the ai to make sure that um basically it will prioritize certain targets with the railgun and so it won't be shooting at a gladius or anything like that with the railgun uh although what would it look like if it did awesome it would go boom it would probably miss but yeah okay uh i did have a really cool um demo of the the railgun the fox yeah the effects and it looks pretty sweet and and and for for players that may not know uh that one referred to the idris uh security response uh which is one scenario where the
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address is going to be in three of but there will also be another scenario which is the the finale to the arlington family mission uh where so so there's an interesting counter for both uh good guys and bad guys in 312. so you don't have to be a criminal to fight the interest if you don't want uh let's see let's find some more attractive questions um can we combine two tractor beams to lift heavier objects than the force limit that you spoke of before before not in this tier so in 312 it's a no but it is a planned feature and has always been a planned feature from the start so that'll be something that we add in to the next tier um as you're probably aware you know if you've played half life or
- 00:22:37
gary's mod you know tractor beam allows you to do a lot of fun things in a game uh it unlocks a lot of possibilities for uh cargo hauling it unlocks a lot of possibilities for designers to create missions where you're able to manipulate physical objects in places that you can't necessarily get to yourself so it allows us it gives us a lot of scope it's a really good ingredient to add lots of different experiences but it also provides a lot of i would say fun a lot of uh chance for uh machinery yeah exactly so i think what we need to do is um this version is getting out the main use case for this for 312 for the tractor beam is for um trying to improve that flow of you know when you've taken
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someone out or you've been a pirate and you're trying to steal someone's cargo that you know at the moment you're having to eva out collect every box up individually and then bring it back in and to be honest that's actually why those boxes spawn as 50 by 50 by 50 um carriage boxes because if they if you look at a ship and you have one scu size cargo boxes in the back which are the standard uh you know like the stock size for cargo commodities then when you destroy that ship it spawns all of these smaller smaller boxes and the reason that is is because those smaller boxes are actually carriable now really what should happen is that they should your ship should break away and the things that you were visually seeing in the back of your cargo should now visually be you know if they survived the explosion should now visually be in space but
- 00:24:15
they're clearly too big for you to go over and handle them with your hands so that's where the tractor beam is supposed to come in and and it also means that you're not ha it's less fiddly because we can have larger boxes um obviously this is the first iteration where we're adding the tractor beam so we still haven't done the proceeding work but you know the goal is to kind of improve that flow of kind of looting in space shall we say um so yeah so not necessarily for 312 but it is something coming for the future for the future it's always for the future if it's not for 312. it's 312 or future those are the two buckets you're just you're you're gaining a uh a uh a catchphrase in the chat for the future um let's see um on the mercury star runner
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uh why did we increase the fuel tank size instead of lowering the rate of fuel consumption so it was to do with um size comparison so essentially when all the ships are made um you know they have to have a way to be able to balance between each of the categories you know we've got a lot of ships so you know the ship team take a lot of these parameters and come up with kind of metrics for where things should sit so when the fuel tank was designed around the mercury star runner uh you know it was given a certain value but then throughout implementation and then as it developed it became a bit stronger and essentially it was getting stronger and stronger and stronger and then it got to a point where it kind of outgrew its uh fuel tank from a basically a part power to size comparison
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so this was all about bringing it back in line from a balanced perspective that was representative across the board um so if it would have just been a number change it would have not necessarily it would have left this weird you know outlier so it was about kind of bringing it back into that realm and so it fits well within its power well and it's it's also making sure that when we're tuning things you know like those thrusters will take a certain amount of power and if we turn that down you know or adjust that then we're adjusting across multiple thrusters you know across multiple ships so this is a different way for us to to tune um let's see what do we got from the chat here let's go here well will there be any
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improvements to missions along with the reputation system uh things like ground vehicle missions or additional fps missions how do missions change based on the reputation system i i i mean i i would prefer just to think about those missions need to be done you know so first we need to do those and and then depending on the the reputation system if we want to have it be part of a an organization or a corporation um cool then obviously you could gain rep through there um or is it if it's uh maybe like good samaritan rap or so and so forth like you know go and clear out this village that you know has been um infested pirates or something like
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that then maybe you gain you know um gain a reputation around the universe or around that that planet as somebody that did something good um for us i i view it as first and foremost we just need to get those missions working the way that we want them to work and then from there it'll be you know any sort of additions or spices that we want to add onto those um will just influence the reputation towards you know towards somebody or towards something else kind of thing so like if it's a go ahead no no keep going so if you know if if you have a chance of going good or bad in that mission then it will you know adjust accordingly i was going to say as well in terms of
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how reputation will affect missions there is a big thing as well that reputation is really exciting for me personally as well because if you think of the economy and the progression of the game you know in terms of ships than how you end credits and you do these missions and you know that gameplay loop of you know do mission or do cargo trade or you know get x credits and then use that to upgrade your ship and then eventually it allows you to do more strong emissions and then exactly you know and you keep doing it until you've got the ship that you really want if you're you're talking on you know levels of a six seven eight figure values right when you're looking at fps items where you're looking at a smaller kind of scale of um monetary cost you know if it's like somebody going buying a super yacht in real life and then going
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which which watch shall i buy you know it's like the the order of magnitude is not right so reputation is something um that will be critical in terms of allowing the progression of things like um that is not just locked to monetary progression because monetary progression is something that is so tied into ships and how ships can be bought and that's kind of sets that level of scale so when you're looking at the fps side of things or the item side of things or character level side of things that scale is not applicable so we need to come up with ways where it's like hey this super awesome weapon or this super awesome piece of armor or this super awesome item or xyz we can then go hey you need to have this amount of reputation to do this mission to unlock this particular item so it allows us to
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offer this deep and rich progression on the character side that matches the deep and rich progression that we have on the ship side with the monetary aspect so and and that's something that's incredibly um exciting important to me because then it it rounds that experience across the game you know it doesn't just mean like well you know as soon as i've brought a significant amount of money on the ship then i could just buy everything on the fbs side it's like well you know i just have everything and i own everything so that's definitely something that the reputation is is a really incredible foundation to build on um for all of this content yeah the next thing is sorry the next thing is is basically getting gifting and subsumption so then at that point in time we can give that stuff away yeah yeah i i i know a lot of folks have been waiting for that reputation system
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to to come online there um let's get some more tractor beam questions in there uh will the implementation of fps tractor beam gameplay or with the implementation of fps tractor beam gameplay what impacts do you foresee on things like push pull will the tractor beaming around supersede this mechanic absolutely not so you know my team's work on push-pull we're working on it right now and the way the tractor beams going to work and the way it's going to work in terms of eva traversal is if you look at say uh traversal on ground so you have things like vault and mantle and jump and sprint and you know if you look at an assassin's creed game you know you've got wall climbing and all the other you know rope traversal and ledge climbing and that creates uh like all of these
- 00:31:33
different ingredients for players or for designers to then craft spaces that allow you to go okay let's have a jump and then followed by this mechanic then follow that miss mechanic so you can create this interesting layered systems across all these different mechanics to create traversal puzzles and that's basically what the fundamentally are but we don't necessarily have that in an eva space now tractor beam obviously the grapple hook is you know at the moment it's you know your spider-man in space now obviously fundamentally that doesn't mean that you know you're just going to have this and you can just track to be in forever but vice versa you've also got unlimited eva fuel with eva so at the moment you can just eva everywhere you want to go you can track to beam everyone you're gonna go so for 312 i'd say really enjoy that guys because that's something that is not going to be a long term endeavor because
- 00:32:20
what we want to do to create a more fun experience is that okay i've got limited fuel in my eva apac so you know i don't want to be stuck out in the black without fuel and then it's like okay i've got a limited battery on my multi-tool but maybe i'm using that multi-tool for salvage purposes maybe i'm using it for cutting maybe i'm using it for healing maybe i'm using it for the tractor beam so all of a sudden you've got a limited use tool that has multiple uses in gameplay but you know could potentially get you out of a bind or if you need a long range grapple hook and eva and then you've got zero g push pull now zero g push pull the fundamentals it's free so it's it's just under your own effort you're not consuming a resource so the zero g push pull is kind of like what i'd like wall climbing
- 00:33:09
that's the one where you want to be going i get to a location let's say it's a derelict i can now zoo g push pull i'm pulling myself around i'm pulling myself inside i'm using these grapple holes to get to my location and you're like cool but i'm not expending any resource and all of a sudden there we have these three mechanics we have zero g push pull we have tractor beam and we have eva and you've got to then balance it and go okay maybe i should use this maybe i should use this depending on what armor i'm wearing how much eva fuel capacity will have how much battery do i have do i have the correct suit that can recharge that battery and all that stuff is coming i mean i gave a talk on at cisco on you know how we're going to be converting armor to to ships that's still the case that's still the plan you know we're working on on all of this kind of working forward so um
- 00:33:56
absolutely not categorically no is the answer to sh is it going to kill 0j because it's one facet of it's like i was releasing jump and saying is that going to kill sprinting it's it's just that's not the case the intention is that we're trying to mix all of these things up to create meaningful gameplay spaces all right uh i want to take a minute right here uh talk to the twitch chat for those who are watching uh yes we're aware twitch is having some broadcast issues today but clearly we are not we're still in communication with todd in germany with richard in the uk our internet is fine we are still broadcasting to twitch with no problems no drop frames or anything there's nothing we can do to resolve twitch's issues so chances are i don't know if you can see this or not but in case you are uh just hang tight and the show will be up on youtube uh later this afternoon
- 00:34:43
so we're gonna continue the show here um what moved us to what moved us to add an ar door finder on the hud isn't finding a door for the first time on unfamiliar ships part of the exploration of the game says this question uh it could be viewed that way but um really this was for the new players um obviously the veterans can turn it off um but for people that aren't super hardcore like this is just a and you know obviously with cars you're kind of trained you know hey this is where a door is at and this is where the handle is um and for the most part they're always in the same spots on cars um versus uh on our ships they're in all different unique locations
- 00:35:31
if i had to if i suffered having to find the cutlass door latch everybody should have to suffer to find the cover story latch todd buy stuff for everybody else suffers and a lot of people to have and you know just even even you know like aaron or or brian playing the game for the first time trying to get into carrick i think they wasted 30 minutes trying to get into a carrick yeah you know this this is our way for um allowing new players that are not maybe as hardcore as our current fans um it allows them to be able to access the game as well and to be honest it's something that we really should be pushing for and celebrating for because you know if you look at space games in general across the across the um you know the games industry you know the learning curve to
- 00:36:18
get into those games is steep i remember when i started eve you know a long time ago somebody sent me like 180 word document page word document i'm trying to figure out how to just like get into this was just like the starter guide and it was like you know and it's like feels like a full-time job but you know the more people that we can come into the star citizen community community and you know have a a better experience as soon as they you know for example the free fly events when people come in and they're able to have more accessible gameplay experiences that'll only benefit the whole community because if there's more people there you know if there's more noobs in the sky there's more people to shoot right it's only a long-term benefit from an accessibility point of view uh no i hear that um am i i might disagree that we're with a
- 00:37:09
simpler game though uh uh is there anything else planned for the use of gas cloud tech uh than what we've discussed yes yeah so um basically gas mining um it being like a danger zone like right now there's it's we're missing like distortion damage and electricity and and other factors that would actually you know knock out your ship or even kill you as a player if you're floating around in there um we can do this right now but we're not doing it for 312 is is basically create smaller clouds that we can you know find out in the middle of space and and um use them as really kind of like clouds versus like the stuff that
- 00:37:58
um we've created or it's it's massive you know it's it truly is massive and then obviously uh the other thing is that this is where jump points will be in future as well so not necessarily in the grange points but but in gas clouds and the one big thing to note about gas clouds in space is that they provide an atmosphere so from a a temperature point of view um you know if if you look at um all of our space suits generally a lot of them are rated you know and you know say they've got a plus or minus say 100 degrees or something like that and when you're out in space because it's in a vacuum it's basically insulating you um the active status doesn't really kick in but as soon as you then eva into a gas cloud to either find out what's in it or you know take advantage
- 00:38:46
of that then all of a sudden you are in and guess what the atmosphere is really really cold because it's the middle of space and uh you know all that energy is dissipating so um that's definitely something to be aware of that you know they're gonna be like todd called out in terms of when we've got um distortion and you know electrical storms and inside of these clouds but just from a point of view of what's in there right now in terms of uh gas clouds they will tie into that actor status on the temperature side of things so you know be wary about uh just going in because they'll be cold right uh subtractor beam questions uh i think we already touched on this but we'll try it uh do tractor reinforced will tractor reinforces ever combined uh do will there ever be like a situation where some would like people would use
- 00:39:34
like 12 different tractor beams to yes so the intention when we we came up with the tractor beam was you know it's supposed to be um this electromagnetic force that is kind of gravity you know aiding gravity to lift this item um we do want the ability for people to you know combine together um you know i don't envisage a scene where we've got like 250 people uh you know shooting you know pulling down a bengal from space or something uh i think it would be i think we'll probably have some kind of limit that it's like okay after a certain amount it falls off for some diminishing returns um but yes the intention long term is that we have uh and the way i i described it was you know um the way the weight categories work uh currently
- 00:40:21
any of the boxes that you carry in in the game and they have a physical weight but they're not affected by the carriable system so if you see a box under the hood it might be a thousand kilos but you can just pick it up it doesn't really matter and you can just walk around with it but we're obviously as we're moving towards a more physicalized world we're actually setting all these weights to be correct so some of the 50 by 50 boxes they have gold in them now if you do a 1.25 you know 0.125 meter cubed box of gold which is a 1 scuba gold that's really heavy like thousands of so you know you're never going to be able to just go oh i'm just going to lift it up with my hands so what we're going to have is we'll have this kind of we'll have the weight limits and we'll also have size limits so we already have the size limits in terms of
- 00:41:09
the 50 by 50 by 50 centimeter little boxes that you can pick up with your hands and eventually that will tie into a weight limit of probably about 70-75 that you can actually carry and obviously the weight will then slow you down you know so you'll be struggling at that weight uh then all of a sudden you'll be like okay i can maybe manipulate one scu boxes so one scu and then that'll be like okay that's the track to be maybe that can go up to 250 and then we'll have something maybe a dedicated one with maybe is you know more numbers and larger sizes which we've discussed um but let's say you get to the version where it's like hey i want to lift this box out but it's too heavy for me oh just me and my buddy you know a couple of portals will come in we'll we'll shift it off you know because it's full of metal because at the moment how how the records work is that
- 00:41:57
it's a wreck it's a box of gold it's a box of agricultural waste it's not a box and then the waste so they're not kind of separated so what we want to do is separate it into the box and then the item in the box so that means that the box will dictate the volume and size but what you put in it will then really clearly matter in terms of how you can so if i look at a 1s cu box which is the standard commodity box and it's full of say a gas that might be light enough for you to lift it with your single tractor beam but if that box is it's not going to be light enough for you to lift it with a single tractor beam so maybe now you need a buddy or a friend to come and help you later down the road and then you can all lift it off and put it onto you know a graph trolley push pull or something and then
- 00:42:45
you can push it around um you know so think of them like almost like forklifts to be able to get these things on uh to more maneuverable items so term yes 312 no as that stuff comes physicalized and the size of the box doesn't change but the contents the weight of the contents inside it does how do you communicate that to the player so they don't think it's a bug so they don't think it's a bug i looked at a box this size yesterday it was fine so you know when we have um when you have a helmet on and you try and drink what happens right now is it just creates a dead button nothing happens so essentially what comes up is that you you get a warning message that says you know take your helmet off you can't drink so two things
- 00:43:32
um one will be adding um that blocked message action which will probably come out with that tier zero which will say hey you know this item's too heavy for you to lift or decided and you already have that feedback on the tractor beam but this will just be for people using their hands and secondly we'll eventually add an animation of you going to pick up the item and we'll call it's basically a fail animation where you'll kind of go like you know shake kiram struggle and then be like okay okay this box is too heavy oh no worry no you know no wonder it's full of gold uh todd time to break some hearts here uh will players be able to board the idris and take it over in 3.12 no it doesn't have the interior so
- 00:44:23
uh right now no okay so uh sorry yeah just it's better to get that out there now and then for all the stuff it's just just like it was it just like it was at fleet their their their npc controlled you know exteriors and whatnot were trying to preserve the experience you know exploration and discovery for squadron 42. um will every lagrange point have gas clouds or will it just be some of them uh right every lagrange point does have gas clouds um in the future we might you know change that but right now they do and then we have different ways of making each cloud you know feel unique um so like what we talked about before
- 00:45:09
as far as like the temperature the density um the distortion levels on it again the em the ir signatures of the ambient what's actually in there as far as minables go and so on and so forth so like we have a bunch of different ways of making each one feel unique and interesting and then this is our way of you know really kind of stress testing the system and seeing what works for us um and then from there you know either in stan or in future systems maybe we adjust it and kind of adjust the way that they they work and and how how dense they are and kind of how you know do we move them only to l threes or or does it make sense to have them in you know in
- 00:45:56
l4s or or do we make them like super super wispy or something like that so um but right now like i think i know i'm really excited i know that the team that worked on it you know have done a fantastic job on getting them in and and i think it will add a lot of unique experiences okay um fob question for the idris uh with the idris help in the outposts about what frequency can we expect that to happen uh and if and if they're destroy we'll do that one and then we'll go to the next one well i i was gonna say it should be this space stations not outposts so sure um so basically that it will depend on the crime level of
- 00:46:43
of the people you know there at the space station um and then if it's destroyed a new one will come you know based off of the crime level of the people at the space station at that time so um if it clears out a bunch of the bunch of people and then the crime level drops then maybe it doesn't return kind of thing so but that's the that's the goal gotcha so there could conceivably be a situation where there's enough criminals at one station that they can just keep drawing and if assuming they can destroy the idris they could just keep drawing another one until their numbers are so whittled that they're just like there's not there's not a big enough threat there yeah okay and then uh for the arlington bounty mission that is that is just the
- 00:47:31
the the single address for the you know for the story of the mission yeah exactly and to that one there won't be multiple idris is coming after that one it's just that it's this one that shows up and if you and you you and your friends can destroy it fantastic if if not then and it takes you out then i'm sorry okay um what's been done to make the idris more capable than it was previously at invictus during invictus during invictus people were kind of pushing these things around and and dragging them down to planetside how has the address experience changed i i mean we've done a lot of capture um game play so uh there's been a lot of tuning you know on the ship side so shields the
- 00:48:21
railgun the armor etc um then from there there's a lot of there's been a lot of tuning on the ai behaviors so updating the way it moves how it prioritizes ships how it prioritizes targets um and threats coming at it and then also the overall distance that it goes to you know how it tries to keep its distance from the targets so if it's going up against a ship that's stronger at it then you know how does it you know how does it maneuver around you know since it's its main threat or is is the railgun then he's it doesn't want to broadside you you know like some of our other capital ships um so that's that work has been going on in the background
- 00:49:09
um and then from there you know there's there's obviously the missile changes in the combat changes that have happened on that side and how it prioritizes and so if people are shooting missiles at it then they'll be taking those out or torpedoes and it'll be you know it'll be basically going through and if a torpedo comes into its range then it it targets the torpedo first and then from there goes to you know it goes back to its previous targets kind of thing so there's been a lot of work that's been done there in the uh the play test i was in i guess it was last week i was i mean i i'd been i talked about it we've been told about it but i was still to fire the torpedo from from a retaliator and watch it go and to watch the idris
- 00:49:56
terrorists go out and just take it out and then go back i'm like i was just oh crap yeah i was not ready for it even though i knew it was coming i was not ready for it it was so cool um all right we're we're almost at the end here let's get the last of these tractor bean questions and geez um if someone throws a pico at you and you can you catch it with the yes you can you can actually catch a grenade and send it back which i i have done which was very satisfying uh yeah so like i said if it's a rigid body you can catch it and use the tractor beam on it so yep yes do you guys know what you've done um
- 00:50:44
the grenade was fantastic the other person just didn't know what to do and it was like what it's just detonated i've actually used it to actually pick up guns and float it to other people and they've been able to pick them out of the air as because you can interact with it so yeah oh that's cool actually we yeah we didn't get a chance to cover that but so you still have all the interaction prompts that don't get like disabled yeah okay um all right that leads me to my next question then then what happens when you shoot a tractor beam at players for 312 we disabled it so obviously you saw there's a few bugs that we disabled or not bugs there was a few actions we disabled for 312. green goblin was one
- 00:51:33
uh you know the ever which was a lot of fun uh tell them what green goblin tell them what green goblin is so so you can jump on a box and then track to beam the box and fly off into the distance uh you can also have other people jump on a box and then they fly so now basically what we do is we we disabled it so that if anybody touches the box it kind of like it disables the tether it breaks the tether um you can do dead bodies so if you need to get somebody eventually when they're hurt or if they're about you know dead or alive bounty you need you know um to their body or whatever uh you should be able to lift them up uh into your ship um but fundamentally long term we do want the ability to offer uh the tractor beams so you know if somebody's injured or somebody's hurt that you can do it
- 00:52:20
or you know if you're using it as a weaponized version of the tractor beam um but you know you will have ways to prevent it i you know it's never going to just be like everyone is trolling each other and tractor beaming all over the place um it will be it will go through some design balancing to make sure it's right for star citizen um and that it fits the mold but yes you know the actor the actor actually is a rigid body so it worked out of the gate it was something we disabled like i said in my previous answer you there's a lot of ways the tractor beam is going to be utilized and no doubt i'm i'm a thousand percent certain that the community will find a lot of interesting and amusing ways to use it and and we will find those and you know have to make a call on whether they fit the gameplay
- 00:53:06
um but yes the fundamental is for 312 nothing happens and if you actually somebody jumps on a box um when when you're attracting it it will disable it um so well if your fix is working as i know it's if okay at one point you could shoot the box you could lift the person and then you disabled if it was touching the feet but then they people were bunny hopping on top of the box and we added yeah the bunny hopping was a good one so we had a basically a delay and we have a delay before the tether breaks so people were jumping up before the delay was resetting so then we added it's like now it's like a cumulative value so if you jump it you but then we just kind of went with a more elegant solution that so essentially as soon as it touches you kind of like
- 00:53:52
disables that um but yeah there's going to be lots of different uses to the track to be going forward you know the the actors we want we want to create a physics sandbox in star citizen that's what it's always supposed to be this universe simulation that has a physicalized nature in the game that everything is is built on you know the physical world so in terms of the weight of your armor takes how fast it can run and how far you can run you know what you're carrying with you dictates it and all of those things should be tying into you know how heavy your ship is in when it moves in atmospheric flight all of these things you know they're all tying down towards the same vision that we're aiming towards and the tractor beam is no different you know it's underpinned by physics so you know if you have a tractor beam you know a ship sized tractor beam on
- 00:54:40
you know a mole or something that's going in collecting huge boxes and allows you to manipulate those you know that ties into into what we know the star citizen universe that we're trying to create so um yeah long and short of it though it's actors is is a no for 312 right now okay um kind of an interesting process question here uh with so many duplicate and cash glitches in the past few patches um quite a few players are rolling around with ridiculous amounts of money uh has this changed how we test certain systems and whether we will there be a wipe at some point yeah there will definitely be a wipe at some point um we actually discuss a wipe you know whether it happens at every patch and uh i think in in some cases
- 00:55:31
what you know what we want to be able to do is we want players to be able to earn different things obviously sometimes now they're they're finding ways to exploit it or cheat it but um but basically that's what that's what this time is for you know we we want them to to to break the systems you know and um and even be able to see okay if this person's doing this and we want them to be able to earn you know a ship uh let's say after a month of gameplay or two months of gameplay or something like that or even even longer let's say six months or something um this allows us to do it since we're not wiping all the time and uh that sounds wrong but um but then but uh basically
- 00:56:20
um you know it allows us to test things and allows us to work so um but yeah it's it's something that we've we've we talked about constantly um and it allows us to to test certain things out but you know but if we were wiping you know every single patch then you know there's a lot of these long mid game um systems and and goals that we have for players that we weren't able to test so this this allows us to go through and try that out there's also you know from a short-term point of view when you've got you know when you've got loads and loads of loads of money that short-term gain of i can buy everything and enjoy it fundamentally it kind of devalues the game for that person who has all of that money so you know it you know
- 00:57:07
if it's just something they've exploited to get or you know they've just found a loophole or something like that you know it's it's like going playing like playing dark souls and turning on god mode you know it you get boring fairly quickly so um you know like like todd says this is the moment in time where we we we're taking all this data so that we can rebalance it so that you know when it is when it goes to the the unwipable uh times then it we've got a solid progression that people can play through and feel really like wow that guy's got an idris and that's like wow you know it's spent a long time to get that and you have these really achievable goals and and it makes it makes that progression all the more worthwhile so it's it's it's definitely a critical thing for us to discuss and make sure that we get right
- 00:57:54
have we decided if there's going to be a white 4 312 yet or not no not yet it's nice when you don't have to wipe well it's it i mean it's it's it's usually yeah it's something that we we normally talk about and once we go kind of like wave two um then we start having some of these these discussions but it hasn't been brought up yet okay i figure in the new year like you know we'll do it okay i think we only wiped wave two so yeah i'm gonna get an email gonna get an email um uh all right let's let's let's let's wrap up these last two tractor beam questions here before we're done uh similar to the question about the
- 00:58:41
push pull will tractor beam will the tractor beam gun replace simply carrying boxes by hand or will there still be a reason to do this the old way no i mean again it's like saying i have a knife will it replace me opening boxes with my hands i mean the the tractor beam is a it will be a limited resource how you spend that resource is up to you so if you're down in a cave and you're using that resource to mine then you're going to want to carry um you know so it depends on what scenario you're in you know you might not have a multi-tool you know you might have uh you might not have had the tractor beam attachment so the caribou system is something that we've put a lot of effort into investing in um it's not going away it sits under my teams again it's something that is critical to the gameplay
- 00:59:28
uh you know we have lots of different variations of loadouts that people have uh so you know and when we add more gadgets in the future it might not be a sure thing that you're going to take a multi-tool in every single attachment so it depends on what you're doing and how you're using it and how you spend that limited resource when we add you know the fact that it is a battery and so 100 it won't remove it um you know certain circumstances it will vastly improve so if i want to put a box in something or somebody in and i have to climb a ladder right now that's an impossibility if i need to get something out of a cave and i have to default something up again it's an impossibility so it offers more player um choices i know you asked me the day jared player choices this is player choice is underpin game design
- 01:00:16
so that is a fundamental essence and core of of designing things so that you have choice and the player can choose how they manipulate or solve particular problems that we present with them with all right last question what happens if you cross the streams i wouldn't cross the streams 30k basically [Laughter] nothing right now not nothing will happen as you cross the streams total protein from that all right everybody that's it that's that's that's all we got time for on this week's star citizen live all about alpha 3.12 uh thank you richard and todd for taking time out of your busy schedule i know everybody's working hard to get this patch out the door uh keep an eye for those uh watching
- 01:01:04
live if you missed any part of the show this will be up on youtube a bit later this afternoon and for all the latest updates on the patch itself like when it's going to come out or how it's progressing be sure to keep your eyes on spectrum and post their patch that's all that good stuff so for todd richard i'm jared thanks a lot this is the last scl of uh 2020. um we got one more isc on thursday and after that we'll see you in 2020 or 2021. so take care everybody
Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.
