Star Citizen Live Q&A: FPS in Alpha 3.23

15 March 202401:07:121,721 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:05
and not I swear if there's one question about night vision on this show I'm gonna leave I'm just GNA walk out the door hi everybody Welcome to Star Citizen live uh your weekly uh discussion of behind the scenes uh uh Q&A uh sometimes where were you born and why did you get into video games questions uh joining us on the show this week we're just going to jump right into it this week uh uh uh uh seen members of our FPS uh improvements team members of Team nuck uh we we still haven't we still haven't named these these teams we're just going to jump into it uh with some introductions because everybody knows who I am unfortunately we don't need I don't need to take up any more time Zach Zack hello how are you doing it's me I'm
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good um spectrum's number one enemy here uh senior game designer FPS man a gun AI creatures the whole shebang that's me welcome to the show man thank you nice to be here we were talking about you were actually supposed to be on a show once before and we did we did you know most people don't know that that you wouldn't see it in the live show but there's actually like this huge prep period before we go live and we did like 40 minutes of prep and making going through things blah blah blah and then right like just two three minutes before the start of the show Zach's internet went out and he disappeared and he wasn't on the show he was supposed to be on before uh but you're here now it's working I am here Sor right I'm back hello oh oh uh oh and you're wearing you're wearing the shades that protect you from the YouTube comments I am I can't read twitch chat with these on they have um awesome comment blocking um
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abilities they're very handy all right uh Pascal who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen hi my name is Pascal I'm a gameplay programmer in Frankfurt and I'm yeah doing programmer stuff like coding and whatever that is what does a game most people can't really yeah what does a gameplay programmer do with regards to FPS like are you the one determining left foot goes in front of right foot what what what's a program uh no that's for more smarter people I'm the one that Zack screams at when he wants something in the game hey can we do X and then I go probably let let me have a look and then I get around and eventually we get a task added for that and
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so it's that classic work that classic relationship between designer and programmer can we do this no but can we do this maybe you'll let me know I'll let you know yeah it's pretty much that Zack charms in once or twice a day hey by the way I have a query can we can we do this and then it's pretty it's pretty much the Austin Powers thing where you got to ask them three times and eventually they'll say yes you know that is though that oh my God that is the relationship between designer and programmer put perfectly Nick thank you thank you for that Nick tell everybody who you are and what you do hello yes I'm Nick I'm system designer 3 so I'm on the core gameplay team which is anything FPS related uh but we obviously focus on
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the features um for FPS and star CZ and so uh I work quite closely with Zach we're kind of like the weapon buddies so um yeah I work on entity setups I work on some balancing I've also just picked up keybinds and everything kind of FPS related um that's kind of me yeah okay uh and last but certainly not least uh atel tell everybody who you are and what you do hello I am Al I'm also gameplay programmer based in Frankfurt um well uh lately I've been working on uh reload improvements and I wore my favorite t-shirt today what does it say honk exactly is there an explanation that honk just honk honk
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honk one more honk okay it's a power Mo yeah to be fair is not German is from Turkey it it is a power move let me let me do a little submission display for atel there you go there I submit to your power Mo uh all right so let's jump into the questions cuz we wasted enough time uh if you've never seen Star Citizen live before lucky you um this show is where we take questions from you the Star Citizen Community uh we posted a thread up on Spectrum which is the Bebo communication platform available on robertsspaceindustries.com we let you submit your questions uh vote up which ones that you want to see answered most then we let uh Zach and and Nick and Adel and Pascal jump in there ignore your voting and pick the questions they
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wanted to answer most which is what we got here we thrown them up we mix them around uh and we're just going to jump all around this list here and just jump right into it um uh right off the bat uh sniper glint start with sniper glint uh we we We snuck that into the show we didn't talk about it we just we just showcased it like I'm like people are going to notice people noticed i' seen a lot of comments seen a lot of comments on on on on on spectrum and social media about you know cyber's and blah BL oh I used our one swear sorry you don't have any um talk to us talk to us about sniper glint why is it there how does it work who will see it uh what how does it uh how does it play into fov angles and everything uh talk to me all things
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sniper glint go so sniper glint occurs when a sniper is in aim down site and they are aiming at you at a specific angle so imagine if um we say that Target a is sniper and Target um sorry sniper is here the target is here it won't matter necessarily what your angle is it matters what the sniper angle is and we're primarily doing that based upon uh the what you imagine fov the player right they have like a a cone in front of them and that determines whether you can see the glint or not and that glint angle is customizable I've previously said like 11.5 but again we were spitballing we were just trying things out there's a there's a minor glint and then there's a direct glint so the minor glint is obviously when you're
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in let's say it's 10° um and that minor glint is visible for 7.5 but when they're directly on you we shine that major glint this is primarily done because of the how powerful snipers are in the persistent universe and if you're injured at all and you're wearing a heavy helmet they can just one tap you in the head and the cost of death is very punishing it's very high along with obviously you know Sniper being a powerful weapon we still want to enable the fantasy of it but you've got to have that initial feedback for um you know you're about to get you know they're lining up a shot they're doing things and to obviously you know there's a lot of gameplay implications there with how that looks how that feels I've seen a lot of people talking about um a lot of suggestions and a lot of them were very
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postfire oriented so we want some prefire orientated warning that this is going off and occurring and hey you know you should be careful uh we're doing some other things as well with regards to snipers with uh removing Auto zering off um high off all all uh all Scopes and we're increasing the zero zeroing increments so you have to focus more on Landing your shot and yeah so so some follow-ups on just the things you said and then uh Nick and at I want you to jump in here so you mentioned customizable you mean you can customize it we can customize it not for the player we can customize it so uh each each Scopes they may and you know different Scopes may have different fovs and things like that to allow uh customiz well not customization but differentiation between manufacturer so
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some might have different uh modifiers on different glint angles and you can pick the one that okay cool this is how I'm going to play my sniper and and then when you mentioned you know obviously death is punishing it it's punishing now because you know all the the time it takes to get back into the fight and like this this gets more punishing when you consider death of a Spaceman and all those things that we've talked about is those things more of those facets come online uh finding ways to help people stay alive in these situations becomes more important so sniper glint plays into that uh one of the questions in the chat it was instantly how does this work at night there is oh Nick do you want to jump on this one no no no go for itate go for it okay so this the the regardless of lighting conditions the glint is there and that is because of this how powerful these weapons are and
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how these things are needed to be in to essentially say Hey you know there is this incredibly powerful weapon aiming on you you have time to react if necessary they had to line up their shot on you and so on and so forth so it is visible during the night I'm aware that is uh controversial and we if anyone has any good Alternatives they'd like to suggest please give feedback we're more than open to hear it but this is a very gameplay oriented orientated thing uh yeah Zach Zach and I we had a play test uh the today with our lead toon other toron not Nook Layman and um it I think play I really want players just to have a go with it because I think it's really um it really adds the gameplay especially when we want to make snipers really like really powerful especially these like 50 cal snipers like the pxlr
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we really want them to be beneficial and really reward that game playay but at the same time it needs some sort of balance it needs some sort of counter to that so I think especially with the angles that Zach mentioned um I think at first I think it's a bit like oh I'm not sure but once you give it a go I think like the Crosshair we found at first when we were talking about the Crosshair we were like how we going to implement it and then after a while after you've been using it you're like actually this feels great and we can't imagine not using it now so yeah yeah the key thing is when you look at people especially in places like jumptown where there's a lot of um you know it's it's very dark it's very hard to see things and you have a sniper and at the moment currently we don't obviously have the most fantastic uh Fe feedback for post shot for the snipers for example we don't have the really obvious traitors we don't have the really obvious muzzle flash and the
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audio doesn't go far enough and things like that so we are aware of those things but it's very hard to see the sniper at jump toown and it just leads to this kind of degenerate play style where it's like someone is not Eng someone is not engaging with jump toown right they're there to just sit and be a sniper they're not necessarily say you know they're not contesting jump toown they're not doing it for their team and there's a couple of examples of this and you know it's it's it's healthy for the game yeah so uh cig says snipers are degenerate gameplay send your letters to Zach care of games yeah I I one more thing I will add on this as well uh I've seen some comparisons to you know of the games and looking at glint and stuff arlint is a lot smaller arlint is a lot less obvious and obviously we only showed one distance but you'll see that
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the glint is not like you know the light of God itself is looking at you now people have seen one and a half seconds of it and in one situation and the the imagination's going wild with it like all things try it test it feedback try it test it feedback we change try it test it feedback we change it it we it it'll be dialed in like anything else and if you didn't get the thing about the jener thing joking I'm joking I'm joking I'm joking I'm joking at Zach's expense because of the word he used um I will say uh uh there's there's someone in the chat named Kakashi Kakashi said as soon as you add sniper glint everyone will play quick soping quick scoping snipers that run
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and parkour around uh uh uh do you agree with that do do you disagree with that no because we're increasing sniper ads time as well so snipers will have a longer ads time because uh if you play them against them in close quarters at the moment they're very oppressive so they're also going to have like bigger HIIT fire and things like that so but they're also going to have much more higher damaging profiles than they currently have like the fall off on them is very strong and things like that so leaning into the like the power fantasy elements of the sniper while making sure that hey I'm playing Star sit and I don't expect to die to some guy who's running around with a sniper rifle cuz no that I I you know that that's not the FPS experience that you know we really feel and you don't need ads if you're no scoping so it's it's all if you're trying to quick scope there's where the ads is if you're not if you're just no scoping it doesn't affect you and and
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the GL will be adjusted no scoping as well a little bit like we we with the whole recoil thing that we added with this FPS improvements the snipers got their recoil pass as well I think um obviously this is still work in progress but spray and recoil no scope can be different from spray and recoil in ads so when you're not adsing no scoping can be adjusted by increasing spread or increasing The Recoil there to make it harder to hit Y yeah we we typically don't have spread on our weapons when you ads so there's there's very few exceptions but yeah yeah I I I think the moral in all of this is simply try it keep trying it give us feedback keep giving us feedback these guys keep reading the feedback we talked
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to the player experience team and such last week and stuff it's it's it's a cycle it's a cycle of s the only thing that doesn't help is Doom and Gloom try it feedback process the feedback make changes over and over again until we get to someplace where we find consensus it's never going to make everybody happy nothing's ever going to make everybody happy but it's about finding consensus and we'll find the consensus let's jump into more of these questions because we're we're already 1/4 of the way through the show and we've done one question do any of these changes to Scopes fix the issue of armor clipping into the sights or is that simply an armor issue we are investigating this it is sadly an armor issue when we go into ads then our armor Clips in due to animation because we're right bringing
00:14:35
the weapon to our eyes we're looking into that and we're planning on releasing for 323 a temporary fix for this it's not final yet we're looking into other options to make it a permanent good solution cu the current solution has a few yeah um not so pretty things about or a few issues in the future there will be the perfect no clipping hopefully I will look into that later down yeah I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure there there are clipping occasions even when they were not wearing armor though yes but I what what we've done is we've basically taken what we call like the the near near ey renderer or
00:15:23
something I'm not you know I'm not graphics programmer but essentially imagine yeah near plane so imagine if like this is the end of your gun right we can basically clip the end of this gun off and you only see the uh clipping at the end of the gun off if you're in high 0 uh high fov and while you're going out but the level of improvement this has is incredibly drastic so right now uh we're really struggling to have it block views on sniper rifles for example or assault rifles with a times four the Improvement is Monumental and uh the patch after 323 where we've hopefully got something is um you know a lot nicer and a lot smoother than that obviously TBD okay um are there plans for more grenade types yes we have been we have a lot of
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grenade types already prototyped some of them um or implemented some of them for squadron the basic FPS types or FPS grenade types that you know smokes flashes and whatnot and from there on we're going to move move on to the more sci-fi things and other FPS devices as well uh D Nick do you want to give some some of the examples that we've kind of uh that we've been cooking up and we can talk about do you mean the Sci-Fi ones or do you mean just the standard I'd say the the more standard contemporary ones yes obviously we've got like um we've got the flash done and fr obviously like Pascal mentioned but but uh the flash grenades um or even the stun gr
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concussion grenade we kind of playing around with different ideas of how exactly we wanted to do Squadron obviously with PVP as well there's uh kind of you got to be careful with balancing and stuff like that but we we have played around with the idea of the angles of of where it goes off so obviously if your flash goes off directly in front of your face how long that would have that effect on screen whereas opposed if it just happens to the in your peripheral vision to your right hand side um how long that would have an effect and then after effects and we're obviously working with that we've got a really great health system like the BDL system in our game and we looked at some of the effects that we could have produce on the eyes of the after effects of being stunned and how that all plays into it as well and and again like smoke grenade um again it's so different between uh PVE and PVP how long does the smoke last for
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performance- wise so we're obviously looking into all the different factors of what happens bringing something from a single player experience into a multiplayer experience but um they're not going to you know re uh what's the word reinvent the wheel necessarily they're going to be kind of what you expect for those classic items but then like like Pascal mentioned we are going to start introducing some more sci-fi elements things I think like think like area of denial kind of uh types of devices as well so yeah uh don Steeler gaming in the chat asked will grenades have glint they will make a light the flashbang especially but it's like a big if you count this as glinch if you look really close into the scope it might flashbang you but all right uh you mentioned that that the health system
00:18:37
the health the next question we got here um uh does cig have any plans to replace things like percentage of Health with more immersive vitals things like blood pressure and heart rate so players might feel more immersed in the experience of Star Citizen so uh in terms of the overall health meter that's the current goal at this time but we are doing some things related around medical Gameplay at the moment for example with injuries uh we're doing a current balance pass to make them more of kind of like you know a story of combat that you've been through at the moment they're a bit too heavily RNG Reliant than I like you can sometimes enter a bunker and walk out with you know the worst injuries and sometimes walk out with like none at all it's not really the you know you look at your character it's not really the story of your character that's going through uh but there's also some things we're uh working on to kind of add to
00:19:27
Medical gameplay so a big thing we've been talking about is the uh pre-own state where you know we want to move away from Reviving people with uh you know the general Med pens and have specific pens to uh revive people with um so you know the pre-own state is also very handy because it's imagine if like as soon as your health hits zero you can essentially you know focus on crawling into a safer space to be a to be revived at the moment because if someone goes down the majority of the time people are just track to beaming people you know their Corpses to cover and it's it it obviously it looks a bit wacky so the pre-own state is quite nice um and you know increasing the BDL cost for you know uh being revived and getting back up and things like that um the pre-own will be a very limited window of time as well so it's not like you see people
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crawling on the ground for like you know two minutes sort of thing right and there's a uh uh we talk about it in a couple weeks on ISC but there's a there's a new health app being added to Mobi glass in three 23 that'll give you a more detailed uh stuff like that it's still being developed past 323 but you'll see more health related information and stuff being made available to players which might help with that sense of immersion there um oh that's a question about night vision I'm skipping that uh when it comes to ammo repoing are you defining different types of ammo across different weapons rifle pistol sniper shotgun Etc or will ammo pools be bespoked to each weapon magazine um I can chime in so it will be bepoke to each uh weapons ammo so for example
00:21:05
when you're reping a p Force ammunition the other uh um the ammunition that belongs the other weapons will not be touched so it's for that weapon only um uh couple of things to add here is like right now in the current iteration you will be able to repo um only if you actually have that weapon either in your hand or or in your back so you saw the ramage animation uh in the ISC so you have the weapon in your hand um so if you have it in your back you will automatically unholster it um and if you don't have that weapon you won't be able to uh report um and so that's the situation the current situation we'll see what we where we go from there so um please uh give us your feedback then you get your hands on it um one more Point actually something
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that we didn't show in ISC but will be included in 323 uh is that you will be able to trigger repoing um in the inventory UI when you right click to a magazine you see the uh context menu uh you will see the um uh repo option there and when you click that um the repo uh the sorry inventory UI will uh close and then it will trigger the uh regular ramage animation and then similar goes with Lui as well like when you're in the loot UI and then when you hover over the weapon and press a hot key uh in the same way it will trigger rep pulling so you will be able to uh trigger um from the Manus as well um there's a question here as as a followup to this um asking saying that uh all the examples of magre
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pooling that we were able to show in I were ballistic ammo uh and asking whether that uh works on uh laser stuff before you get to the answer I want to take the opportunity to comment a little bit about why you see certain things in ISC and why you don't um um the guys uh who I'm going to shout here because they they they deserve it every week will Dave and Alex who make all the footage for ISC each and every week they work in a in a world if you consider Alpha that you guys get that you guys play and it works this well from time to time it's still it's still it's still a pre-release build it things work and has this level buggy and then underneath that there's PTU which has which where fewer things work and there are more bugs and whatever then there's evoca where even fewer things work and there
00:23:30
are even more bugs and we generally NDA it and stuff like that they work even before that so the place where they work uh uh every frustration you ever have gets visited on them about 20 times each and every week and yet they persevere and they make some of the best damn stuff I ic's ISC is better today than it's been at any time in its history and that's because of will Dave and Alex uh and the struggles that they're going through they're currently struggling right now with the new cargo stuff and the new hanger stuff right now like literally this minute they're in there doing that right now because it's so early um so we don't always get to show every single aspect that you might expect because we're working so early in the pipeline uh so with that said we weren't able to show laser uh repoing but you can repol laser stuff how does that work yes yes um it's actually going
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to work the same way so um in the current iteration they're all max they're all subject to repoing uh except for tools uh so mul d a salvage stool at this point in time uh so all are the same um we have the term to long-term idea that toy with uh which is like which rolls around differentiating energy weapons from ballistic weapons by giving uh energy weapons some automatic ammo regeneration that's kind of similar to energy weapons but that's for the future um so yeah uh for the for the time being they will report all the same yeah I will I'll just add you right Jared I think they did a fantastic job um because we' shut our bits earlier on and then that we had a chat with them and they were just amazing at being able to capture what we were kind of talking about because I
00:25:07
felt like I was waffling on I was like they got exactly what I was talking about but um yeah so basically obviously for right now for 323 obviously it's just it's much more easier for balancing and stuff to make sure that both ammo types will uh repo uh but as a till mentioned yeah we are talking about obviously when um Arma suits get the Resource Network potentially uh we're looking into the idea of uh the ammo suits being able to trickle charge because at the end of the day uh the energy weapons are using batteries right so they don't have a physical capacity and so um the idea is that they might be able to slowly charge up uh so there's obviously pros and cons to both and that's how we are going to eventually differentiate between ballistic you know ballistic may do uh more damage heavy hitting but obviously it's limited by its capacity right and it can uh you need to obviously uh reload and run out
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of bullets and repo whereas laser for example doesn't have a drop off so it can travel much further uh but then obviously we've got to think about overheating and we've got to think about um if it does overheat but it also can just then recharge you don't need to worry about running out of ammo per se so um yeah that's kind of how currently right now it's the same but eventually we are looking at the ways we can differentiate the two different Amo types do do the uh do the other FPS items that we talking about the multi tooling are there thoughts about giving them batteries and stuff as well at some point uh the the grin Molle yeah was that or just any of these other things that that aren't strictly FPS weapons but they're obviously energy based yes absolutely yeah we're open to ideas of
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everything that can be um battery wise absolutely could be charged up yeah just u a chat right now is imagining I think U uh uh VL said something about you know bringing a car battery to replenish weapons just just somebody running around with a giant B battery plug in um open to ideas be an interesting you know position on the combat field Ju Just the guy with all the recharge cables um it could be a profession you know we uh while we're talking about uh uh reloading repoing stuff uh will there be some way to either cancel or completely prevent reloading since it's getting updated uhing yes out yes uh so the answer is yes you will
00:27:31
be able to cancel reloading and repoing process um by uh probably sprting and jumping so like there's like a list of actions which uh we can uh cancel repoing with or uh we cannot do while repoing so uh we already have the system but I don't have the like a full list of actions in mind right now but you will certainly be able to uh cancel that ramage animation can you cancel other people reloading if you kill them death is the ultimate cancel that's a bit of a them over right yeah well that's what I'm looking for can you knock them over and it cancels their reload well yeah Force reaction throw you out yeah if someone throws a grenade and you go fry uh frying flying you're not going to be a to rage through your
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backpack and and if some somebody's in the middle of reloading and I can I can unarmed combat you know punch them will that interrupt maybe depend how hard you punch knock them out yeah well it's up I I want a fullon WWE clothesline but Steve Bender keeps trining me on but just think about it WWE clothes line uh yeah but uh Zach and I OB spent a lot of time looking at we've called it like an action's Matrix basically and we've basically looked at everything jumping crouching proning uh what actions are you doing whilst you're doing that you know so um we're definitely working through it's a big list you try and think of every single action you're doing and then it's like do I reload do I want to heal do I want to holster um so it's a big list to get through but uh we're working with
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obviously Engineers to basically decide exactly kind of the game that we want to make and where we want to give freedom to the player and then what actions are more punishable like if you've committed to that then you've got to finish the animation and so forth yeah for example like something with the action Matrix work that we talk about an example could be like if you Med pen right obviously it's quick now um but if you if you know we were to make that Med pen process longer in the future uh you might not be a to sprint out that you have to commit to it sort of thing so on the design side we can kind of pick and choose where that goes It goes a long way to making the game feel less clunky when you have more like autonomy and control over your character and the movement and the feel of that is you know it's it's very important it's where the it's where the word clunk comes from right it's it's an Indescribable feeling of like oh this feels janky this feels clunk it
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typically comes from like uh action is not working as you'd expect uh that that's great we're going to stay on the repoing I I got caught uh racuna nrata in chat says Zach is really unprofessional how do you feel about that Z yes that that is my roots uh I will say you know I'm from a workingclass background in England so everyone everyone you see in the game industry is you know usually a bit more polished and nicer but I I not everyone atude look nobody looks at me and says that guy professional you want to talk about professional you should see his desk at work it's horrific oh don't it's terrible it's it's got Warhammer Figures it's got It's got magic the caving decks Yu-Gi-Oh decks there's some Hines barbecue sauce on here leftover cake can there's a shotgun um there's Cheetos
00:30:47
that Todd papy gave me anything with anyone with OCD like me I just can't sit next to him but un for fortunately I'm forc next to him CLE beautiful iomy like because we sit right next to each other and I've got like just this mind field the Nick has this lovely like diaram of figures and so on and so forth yeah I've got to get got to bring all the cool stuff oh it's not focus yeah mainly necrons on here though go tow for life um all right tow tow is really un that's Jared you seem like a tow guy yeah I don't I like robots doesn't fit into the aesthetic of 40K J that's why I like it they stick out like a sore thumb it's like it's
00:31:36
like apple showed up and was just like hey Warhammer we're here um I just I like really how upsetting it makes everybody else so um all right back to reloading uh uh question from the chat uh nox uh 4085 asks if there's been any thought about large weapons that may actually need a friend to reload yeah I mean who hasn't played hell divers at the minute but um yeah uh not not on our not on our radar at the minute um but you know that's what we have ships for right the the good team the Good Team gameplay but yeah not not on our radar no nothing's coming on for now okay uh can we also Pull Magazines from our backpacks and equip them to the
00:32:27
suit item ports instead of reloading my currently held weapon so that I can stock up my suit item ports uh in the current sitation no so re repoing process will reload your weapon however to quickly stuck up your uh suit item ports you can just um open up loot UI and then with your with a single like a mouse click you can like uh move your uh backpack Max to your suit very easy it's going to take a second so it it can be done easily uh but not automatically okay um so let's move on we got we got some stuff for dynamic Crosshair here so Dynamic Crosshair is one another one of the the new features that are coming online with Alpha 323 this uh you know basically depending on the the type of combat helmet that
00:33:15
you wear uh some will be able to provide you you know a little virtual cursor that aligns with where your uh gun is going I mean I first saw this feature in I think Blue Thunder back in 1982 is where I first saw it so you know it it's I was like when it when it showed up here I was like oh it's Blue Thunder um I'm sure some people have better references than that but I'm old and dumb that's mine um this question says will we have any reason to use laser attachments on our weapons with the new Dynamic Crosshair uh yeah AB absolutely so go you tell this oh oh me okay yeah yes um yeah obviously there's other weapons which you might not want to wear a combat helmet or other situations where you might not want to wear a combat helmet like we have these environmental
00:34:05
suits and in these scenarios you might want to wear a weapon or a tool and equip a laser pointer to it to know where you're aiming at or you have further down the line with different armor types different armors equipped like a medical Helmet or whatever not sure what what's the design for for all of these armor types Nick can go into detail about this but but there are definitely situations in our game and we will create even more situations along the line where the laser pointer will still be necessary or useful yeah I think the like I said in ISC um this is kind of like the start of our branching off into the archetypes for armors so as Pascal mentioned you know we do have different ideas uh we're
00:34:53
still playing with ideas nothing's concrete right now but we're playing with ideas and and Rich talked about this in 2019 at citizen Con on stage about you know like for example a medic gameplay what would that visor look like would they see the vital signs of their teammates for example or if you're a minor you know if you're if so for example you're just wearing combat helmet and you do a scan maybe it'll just tell you the type of rock it is but if you're wearing a mining helmet maybe the visor will give you extra details like the clarity of the material or um how efficient the rock is will be to break down and stuff like that so or even like say for example like a specialist like if you're pinging as a specialist as a bounty hunter maybe you get to Ping further and get a little bit more of a head start on who you're trying to track so um for example I don't think we touched on this in the ISC but we also looked at like the HUD
00:35:41
for example um with backpack reloading like with the combat helmets obviously it gives you the information of the magazines on your suit and the backpack we may actually lose that information when you use say for example the environment suit so to answer your question I think the laser site laser site still has has a very viable path because if you are doing a profession let's say you want to be a minor or you want to be salvaging or whatever obviously we're in a PVP environment you just don't know what's going to happen yeah um it's if you still want that that freedom of of knowing where your Barrel is exactly pointing you getting jumped by an enemy uh Team or whoever um then it's it still has that choice when you're outside of a combat helmet scenario or you've simply just given yourself a brand new bant hair in the customizer like I'm not putting helmet
00:36:29
on this exactly laser sight exactly right laser sight so I can show show off all that hard work right you're not going to put 50 hours in the character customizer for a helmet right so it's all about choices um all right uh will shooting specific gear destroy the item or for example in the case of grenades make them explode in the future so um again we've spent a lot of time kind of working out exactly how we want damage to apply obviously uh a few years ago I wrote the design for uh wearing um dirt and everything that comes with and overheating and we've kind of implemented that in Squadron and
00:37:17
with obviously thinking with the Pu in mind as well um we we really are quite keen on the idea of explosion happening uh to to the specific area that you've been hit so for example if a grenade does go off right by your weapon then the level of wear and the Damage applied to that weapon will Skyrocket obviously as it's gone off right next to it and the same could be applied for dirt so for example uh if you're walk let's say you're in a swampy environment and you walk through if you then Sprint through the amount of dirt that's then applied to that specific area like your legs for example that will then Skyrocket through same as if you were crawling through the mud you level of dirt will cake your whole armor and and mud and the same for obviously uh damage on items as well so um yes it will damage certain items uh but we are
00:38:07
still obviously playing around with um how much of a factor that will play into right the overall and uh you have okay uh and with things like uh Dynamic Crosshair specifically just before we completely move on for this uh there's a question in here about will will players have the option to modify the dynamic Crosshair either in size shape color whatever for the or since I see we actually did a few adjustments already to the crossair and we're now looking for adding maybe an opacity Slaughter or something like that so you can at least say oh I don't want it fully visible or just half visible so it doesn't really obscure my vision and later down the line let's see what the future brings
00:38:56
right um if we find the time I would like to do it but maybe we have other things that need more fixing or more more help from our side so yeah it's always a matter of priorities it's it's not it's not that we don't want to do it it's just that sometimes there are other things that are deemed more important or pressing at any given moment and then those priorities change which is why sometimes you know we we can say this thing is next and then it ends up not being next and what not the priorities change when you say that you're you've begun working since I see on opacity stuff that's not that's those are exp technical Explorations and stuff and that's not you saying these are guaranteed to be in I'm let's see what the future brings that's what I'm saying I just want to be
00:39:43
clear it's it's you we just started looking into this again it doesn't mean that's one of those things where that's one that's one of those things it's it's you all this season here you know since since we came back we've been talking about all these tremendous things that are on the road map for 3 23 all these things that are being targeted for 323 there is still a go noo process and and if if it comes to the point where you does dynamic Crosshair go in well we don't have the opacity slider we're not going to that's not the thing that's going to stop it from being a go so it's it's there's always these choices that that that that kind of have so it's definitely something we're exploring it's definitely something we want to work at there's just no guarantee that that that slight that opacity slider you just mentioned will be a 323 thing just something down the line we're looking looking into uh I just want to be real clear set expectations Dynamic Crosshair though I
00:40:33
think we're that works that's working really nice our guys had a lot of fun with it when they were doing the uh uh stuff for uh ISC and uh I don't think we have to worry about that not being a 323 yeah it's really amazing like when I first implemented this yeah uh obviously I liked it but nowadays every time I don't have a com advisor on I feel kind of something's missing and I I really enjoy it I I hope you guys will enjoy it too it's a really great thing uh sea turtle man in the chat says what the hell is a what the hell is a go no go uh I'm not going to spend too much time on that but it's a good question that I think deserves to be reiterated every once in a while uh we develop all of these features in silos this team working on this and this team working on this and this team
00:41:19
working on this and this team working on this and those all come with their own struggles their all their own bugs their own their own things that oh we tried to get this to work and we just never found it or we got it to work and then we found out it wasn't fun so we want to do it differently and stuff like this then when you start to combine them all in a bigger patch you find a whole new series of bugs of different interactions of oh this worked great on its own and this worked great on own its own but when you put it together uh we got two piles of but so we got we need to do more work and more adjustments stuff and that's where the go no go process goes it allows us to look at these things and determine whether they're ready for Prime Time whether they should go into the patch or whether they should not go into the patch very few things generally fail a no go a go no go we talked I think the last one we talked about was the the last Shion ship that was supposed to be on a patch and it was like no no it it failed to go no Go the
00:42:07
whole nobody liked the cockpit it wasn't a good experience and they held it back and stuff there's a couple other examples like that but for the most part that's what the go noo is it's how we prevent things from Co how we attempt to prevent things from causing more trouble than they're worth do we always succeed no but having the process and trying is better than not having the process at all so that's what a go noo is and that process happens much closer to the uh release of the patch sometimes they're really beneficial as well because you'll get a point of view from someone you know complete different department like you just mentioned that has brought something up and you thought actually that's a really good point and then it leads you on down another path so it's very very important that we do these and then you'll get the other end of that
00:42:54
where for example where we talked about optic Zoom which was on on uh the inner side of sites but then we had issues with upscaling so we've had to take out the inner optic zoom on the Optics uh which we showing off at s and con because it just doesn't work with upscaling so it's like you know like jar was saying when you work on a bunch of different stuff and all of a sudden it comes together you're like oh oh no and as for Shor I'm saying it says wait where does the go no go no go uh right to my eler all right quickly to adding on that inner Zoom thing that Zack mentioned we're still trying to to get this back in because we like the look of it right and the graphics guys are currently looking into solutions to that problem
00:43:42
to give you that Zoom effect on that actual scope for now for 323 it's probably not going to happen let's see what they can come up with okay um oh I like this question uh we've talked like we've been talking about different FPS gadgets and and and things since the yay old days of starmarine when it was being developed by Il phonic back in 2015 uh uh is there a possibility we could see Ballistic shields in the future maybe as Ship boarding becomes more important yes there is a possibility I actually worked on the ballistic shield we have it for squadron we are not sure when we bring this to the Pu but it's there and let's see when this will spill over seriously ballistic shield yes yes
00:44:36
let me tell you as well it's not as straightforward as it sounds because obviously in our universe take away fromer it's yeah um yeah I really hope we can get it into the Pu soon um because it's very cool but let me just tell you it was tough um yeah it was tough to get in the the technical difficulties behind that getting it working like we intended to work but now we we got it somewhat and yeah let's see when it spells over will be great well I think me new Pascal will push for it in Char what we can do well I'm just saying see I'm just saying Johnny javious JJ himself plays in one of my D and D campaigns and he's an orc who double wields Shields and just runs around with
00:45:24
two Shields bashing people and stuff so if you if you need someone to sign off talk to JJ just tell them I sent you okay uh let's see uh in ISC when zooming in with the Scopes the whole screen outside of the scope zoomed in as well I do understand a lot of things shown in ISC are work in progress hey uh but not quite finished yet will this be correct but will this be corrected so that only the image ins inside the scope is zoomed in so this is a technical limitation uh basically um so a lot of games what they do is they have a separate render layer for the weapons which is obviously why we go to when you go to a corner or something holding a gun out we do that because the
00:46:12
gun would clip through otherwise so it is a technical limitation currently but we are working on alleviating that we've seen a lot of feedback H recards to like hey you know if you blur the outside it's more it's more believable to me so something we are working on so the outside of the scotes will be blurred to you know kind of trick your brain almost to not see behind the curtain but yeah we we do something called the universal rig where it's um you know first person is equivalent to third person so you know what you get is what you see and obviously that has some drawbacks so in the instant you know how we render things how the universal rig is set up and so on and so forth um next question uh uh uh sniper scope is my absolute favorite thing in every video game I've ever played I
00:47:01
can't wait until it's added into Alpha 323 can I also hope to obtain equip and use Advanced binoculars for scouting purposes of course also with a glint so binoculars is something that has come up a lot in discussions recently and it's one of those things that um it's on the list of gadgets so it's one of those things where it's like we said hey you know people really want this they feel very strongly about this so are on the list of gadgets it's not in the immediate future but it is on the list for development okay um we can give some more in these more more of these in here um what ammo variants have you been looking at if any examp examples they give here are Tracer incendiary
00:47:48
Etc yeah I can take this um so obviously we've kind of for Star Citizen right now we've kind of covered a lot of we're kind quite happy with the what we've covered so far so we have some nice burst weapons and we have obviously some powerful snipers and whatnot but we have obviously with with energy kind of treat it as like an umbrella term for that ammo type so under that umbrella we have lots of plans so obviously um the players will have seen laser but we also have plasma which is like obviously on the caror um So currently um A's done some really good work with with damage over time with plasma so that burning effect once you've been hit maybe a certain few seconds after that you've got that sizzling burning effect that you've been hit by plasma we also want
00:48:36
plasma to be different than laser in terms of like how volatile it is maybe it overheats a lot faster um so just certain different uh factors like that then obviously with obviously discussing all the time we're throwing our around um we've talked a l about tachon like the idea that faster than light ammo uh but obviously we with balancing we don't want it to being necessarily hit scan because uh that can cause a whole lot of issues uh but then we've talked about Neutron uh what does that mean for FPS you know does it become more powerful the further it travels and then obviously at citizen K we showed the Vault weapons so um we are a really exciting opportunity right now because we kind of feel like we've covered a lot of the standard FPS what you'd expect and now this is kind of where we can really Branch off and be a bit more sci-fi and really introduce some really
00:49:24
Unique Mechanics and that can really different differentiate gameplay and really make each energy type really stand out from one another and really create that difference so um yeah some exciting things hopefully on the way soon it's gonna get sci-fi up in here which is nice yeah wono the saying in the chat says tachon weapons would hit before you fired them would probably help Captain Burks yeah fast and light yeah so um I don't know why I picked on Burks he's just the that pops up um will oh this one this this is an oldie but but a goodie uh will it be possible to equip weapons with civilian clothes please uh yeah uh hopefully something we're currently working on I don't want
00:50:13
to definitely say yes or no h it's something we're definitely interested in I actually had a meeting uh last week with um tech tech Adams and character art about the possibility of what we do because obviously um as most players will know that we spend a majority of time in armor and we really want to utilize our clothing sets so uh it's definitely something we're interested in and it's something we're trying to figure out how we would go about it yeah and and and and and to to to clarify this there are some weapons you can use with civilian clothes we're just we're talking about the ability to Stow them and and and and stuff being able to holster on your back and a lot of it is obviously you know we have such a high attention to detail so we don't want clipping we don't want it to uh just completely break the asset
00:51:01
essentially so and obviously we have a lot of Legacy clothing and we're also introducing like a new clothing style and and it's just basically kind of um working with different departments to see okay what is absolute noo what is what works like you know different ideas would it have necessar like a magnetic plate would attach would it attach like via holster all these different IDE are being thrown around um because it is something that we are quite passionate about getting into the Pu so yeah hopefully yeah even if it's yeah like equipable holster just something you can you can add to your you know your your your pants or your trousers that gives you a the hard point to Stow the the gun would be cool yeah um is the plan we haven't talked a lot about recoil let's find a recoil one it
00:51:50
is the plan to make weapons generally follow recoil patterns like the 3221 uh like the 3221 c-54 lots of recoil but no but lower no Bloom uh this would be cool that part's not a question that's just a statement so uh in regards to this uh there's kind of been some confusion because obviously we shipped a lot of procedural recoil in 322 so there are some improvements coming to uh the recoil system in general so for example we've uh well let let me answer the initial question first so uh each weapon does have a recoil pattern that are minor amounts of uh VAR ition on The Recoil pattern as you know it help you know you know on the weapon feeling the same every single time you fire um but each each weapon does have a unique recoil pattern so you imagine something
00:52:38
whe a sarcastic arms weapon is more unwieldy there's a bit more noise it's more horizontal where something bearing is more uh traditional you know very vertical with you know less Firepower than um cast like arms so uh what we've done for 323 is we've uh these recoil pans and made them uh well General like visual recoil and actual recoil is a bit smoother than previously in 322 not to any kind of noticeable from a you know very noticeable you know you're not going to get very you know static and boring weapons but it's in the sense of helping firing at range so if you try useing like the the bearing at like uh you know 40 50 m um engagement ranges you can typically struggle and it's it's not the gameplay we want with the scope
00:53:27
and the expanse of our world so it's you know it's it will help you basically take these fights um other things as well uh just off the cuff like you're looking at magazine sizes especially damage uh profiles in in regards to uh damage falloff uh projectile speeds so overall making the kind of uh on the ground pu your contesting jump down your contesting goes Hollow far more viable with an assault rifle as it should be I don't know um yeah it was we we we we we we uh struggled with that in the in the edit because some of the recoil changes have already been out there in 322 and some weren't and making sure that that got communicated but still demonstrated um stol Strath that looks like in the chat uh has a simple question uh slide
00:54:20
mechanic slide yeah they talked about slide at a citizen con but we haven't seen any mention of that with 323 and stuff is is is that still intended is that back of the drawing board is is is what can you tell us anything about sliding uh yeah so sliding um won't be in 323 but in general I've seen a lot of like you know cause and concern around uh you know this potentially being very arcadey and uh obviously we don't want that to be the case it's primarily a thing that is used to get into cover uh for example in you know in in our game when we talk about like you know what is a slide it has a a high stamina cost um you know you can't fire whilst you're like going into the slide you know you can't ads or going to the slide it's basically a full body commitment action Prim primarily designed to be defensive SE some concerns about uh you know
00:55:09
initial bursts of speed when you go into the slide and things like that but obviously our Our intention is to make this you know a slide that you know makes sense in the universe of the game and that is what we are planning to do and uh more no details uh for 323 but obviously as we go on more will be revealed okay uh what's your current stance or opinion on Force reactions with regards to how it applies to gunfights so uh Force reactions are always a very contentious point we tone them down uh for 322 and at the moment we're looking at removing staggering of all um weapons uh all FPS weapons so no weapons will no longer call all weapons will no longer cause the player to stagger but obviously you know we're still keeping flinching and things like that in um you know grenades will still
00:55:58
cause knockdowns and things like that but basically making it more believable and you know as you as you'd expect and less frustrating uh because we know staggers are a big pain Point uh for people who do a lot of PVP and FPS okay uh know at least two people will be happy with that um shotguns how will shotguns be made more relevant with the upcoming changes I don't want to talk for the again but it is my is my area so uh we are doing a big bounce for 323 taking a lot of community feedback as you've been talking about like damage profiles and stuff uh shotguns are going to bring the pain uh the game director is very fond of shotguns so they will be coming in pretty powerful um so but obviously you
00:56:47
know we don't want to make them busted obviously so this will include some things like uh tighter spreads to make them even more accurate distances I know a lot of people are very annoyed when they shoot somebody shotgun who's 20 meters away and they don't do anything so that is not going to be the case um shotguns haven't been viable for a very long time and we don't want to make that the case um some other improvements as well to pain points that we've seen uh rail gun and grenade launcher um in PvP scenarios um on the ground will becoming stronger and the intention of that is so saly might can actually win a gun Rush game okay uh we got time for maybe two or three more uh what are the major challenges you still need to address in 323 and beyond in order to bring the feel of FPS combat and Star Citizen from
00:57:35
that of an alpha to a modern FPS experience do you want to take this one Nick I think you should all take this one yeah I think we kind of already brushed on it but I will just quickly say Obviously you know the uh we put so much work in our uh Scopes and obviously we've got such a wide range of armor sets and having what we Pascal mentioned like having the armor sets completely block the vision and then having to do that work around and then making sure that you know we've got to especially when you wake your game for PC you've got to think about different fovs and you've got to think of different setups and how it will impact different players and so I think that's something that we've um is kind of been a bit of a pain point but I think the the change that we're doing now and then eventually down the line hopefully the change we make
00:58:23
later on uh will really uh be so beneficial I um so that would be my point I think okay uh so I can I yeah just sorry again just to add on that there there are some things uh obviously uh the the biggest one for me personally is uh sprinting and general movement and how that feels so uh we're sprinting is an prime example of one of the improvements that we're planning to make uh when you run the gun goes below the camera there's not too much headshake and things like that so the overall feel of when you're sprinting especially if you're on a planet it doesn't ever feel like you're properly sprinting sprinting again that ties into uh you know how much stamina that takes because it's it's not too expensive or painful to Sprint at the moment and that pays plays into how much like weapon Sway and
00:59:10
things that you have but yeah some stuff I mentioned earlier you know traitors uh more you know more obvious muzzle flashes uh better improvements how we do medical gameplay just some other stats on the weapons we need um like Sprint to fire is a big one so at the moment all the weapons use the same sprint to fire which is a big reason why the P6 LR was a very big offender in 322 and if you basically say okay cool it actually takes you time to shift your lmg from the sprinting pose to the return pose then lmgs are not as good in CQC and we can make them slap incredibly hard over you know those 40 meter ranges because the LNG person is already prepped already aiming at you they will shred you so it's stuff like that that stops us from getting that you know cuz lmgs at the moment feel like assault rifles with big mags where everyone uses lmgs it's examples of things that we're
00:59:59
looking at to say like hey you know this is how we improve our weapon sandbox and overall get something that's you know feeling like the weapon variety is very intentional just like we're doing with armor and Pascal and ail I I know these are these are the designers and they get to set a lot of Direction but as programmers there got there's got to be some things that that that that that you want to get in there to to to Really bring the experience up what do you got honestly from my side I have a lot of f put a lot of focus in the clunkiness and how the biggest point I always had was like that that that feels not really smooth firing in the weapon and now that we worked on The Recoil that's the great thing of The procedur Recoil right I I
01:00:47
did the tool and Zach has to do all the work now bringing in the recoil so that's a a nice benefit of being a programmer I don't actually have to do the work I just do a small bit and then Zack suffers but yeah this was for me the biggest gripe about our game um The Hut Al also was always a little bit not too clear to me we improving that as well with 323 and for now like we have all of these new improvements going in and all of my biggest concerns have been answered or addressed and I don't really know what I want to improve at this point in time obviously when I play more I will start picking up on the more minor annoyances and then want to improve that until they become a major annoyance for
01:01:34
me eventually but for now I'm I'm way more happier than 3 uh 323 and don't really have anything that I must do it's good how about you at uh well I'm I'm going to mirror pcal here so um yeah for example the the the combat Hut was was a really good addition like um a really good Improvement now we convey information way more accurately and uh a lot more useful information to the player like um the difference like for example from time to time uh we uh we play Star Citizen like in the office and I see the old UI and like in my my you know I when I'm working on on this new Hut like the difference is like
01:02:23
unimaginable really and it's it's gonna uh feel really different and especially after what uh the guys were working on with the recoil um uh and the new Scopes they they also made a difference so probably um like this particular update um made a lot of things uh like closer to to the to to our golden standard so uh I will probably uh get a a more concrete opinion on on like how awesome uh we uh made the things after a few more play tests but it's really really promising all right last question uh because we're already a few minutes over um this is personal you're speaking only for
01:03:11
yourself you can add one new weapon or Gadget that doesn't currently exist in Star Citizen or Squadron 42 what is it silence what yeah so uh the big thing I want is a a a slug shotgun easily it's my favorite weapon type in games I absolutely love them I also want a just one just one okay okay okay okay shotgun that's what i' take hands down all right etel um probably a rocket launcher from one of the old school shooters that feels really good use Quake three rocket launcher chainsaw that would be great who said who said chainsaw who said
01:03:58
chainsaw me Pascal said chainsaw all right that's that would be great Nick ah man what a question um I'd love some sort of gameplay kind of weapon maybe shoot a black mini black Cole and they all get sucked in the middle and then something happens I'd love that something really out there sci-fi yeah there was a funny thing with Pascal's answer actually because he says chainsaw that the most doomed thing when we making the procedural recoil when Pascal was like testing it he would always hit fire the weapons to say hey look how cool this looks because he basically only plays Boomer Shooters so we we we're in a we're in a feedback loop of like him making recall purely from a hitfire perspective because that obviously you can't ads in a lot of Boomer shoers well you you should see his test
01:04:47
level it's it's E1 M1 from from the original Doom no it's not it's it's it's legally distinct it's legally distinct n it's not for the public but I I just took the map layout to learn our editor right I have to learn it at one point and what I just do E1 M1 I know how that looks [Laughter] right all right fair enough fair enough I asked the question uh I'm a simple baseball Batman myself I just want I just want to I just I just want to chase people around with a bat um all right that's it thanks everybody for joining us for another episode of uh Star Citizen live based on the FPS improvements coming in Alpha 323 uh we are uh we're going to do another raid Lenn you already start that raid looks like we're raiding V and and Shan zakin uh they're oh I know those guys they're a father
01:05:37
and son streamer team so yeah they're pretty cool uh if you stick around say hi to those folks um uh uh just be nice wipe your feet you don't have to you don't have to stay there but you can stay here um if you haven't checked it out already watch the character customizer episode of ISC that came out uh last week week uh there's just a lot of stuff a lot of people have been waiting for and uh and coming the waiting at 323 and then come back next week for our cargo and persistent hanger uh uh episode of ISC um this week that's the episode that that will and Dave and and U Alex are over there uh trying not to eat their faces to to get footage to show you uh because it's still early and it's it needs work what but uh uh so appreciate their work and I want shut
01:06:25
them out again uh so yeah for this show that was Zach that was Pascal that was AEL and that was Nick I'm Jared thanks a lot for for for for showing up it's David on the keyboards it's Pete who looks like B rabbit in 8 Mile right now I don't know when that happened that happen sometime in the middle of the show uh thanks for watching and we'll see you next week 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.