Star Citizen Live: Alpha 3.7 Roundup

18 October 201901:01:041,799 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of Star Citizen Live Alpha 3.7 Roundup. I'm your host Jared Huckaby and joining us on the show this week we are we have three esteemed guests. We actually I was I was trying to look this up beforehand and I didn't get the time. I think this is the first time on any of our Friday broadcast whether that was reverse the verse before then happy hour then reverse the verse live and now Star Citizen live. I think this is the first time we've had a representative from all four of our primary studios here. So yeah, we're talking Alpha 3.7 recently released under our live game environment. Joining us on the show let's just go around the table and tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what you do. I'm just going to go clockwise here and start with Gareth. Gareth, who are you and what do you do? My name's Gareth Bourne and I'm a senior
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live designer. So I handle a lot of the location side stuff recently including things like caves and the underground facility. Things like missions and whatnot. Cool. And what are you working on that you can't tell us about? That's a trick question. You nearly got me then. You passed the test. What are some of the things that the mission feature team worked on for Alpha 3.7? Maybe not just you exclusively. We've got mission sharing, the new mission sharing feature we've got the caves although that's me specifically. Lots of mission improvements. And the crime stat mission the five star criminal mega showdown. Dan, who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen?
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I'm Dan. I'm a lead system designer in Germany and I take care of the system design team here and all the designs coming out of the DE office and that generally means a lot of the AI stuff, a lot of the ship AI, a lot of the FPS AI. Uh and me personally, for example, more recently, I've been working with our internal PU gameplay team on the FPS mining part that got released together with the caves. Uh hopefully as a nice package that everyone gets to enjoy. Yeah. Now, uh seeing the videos online, the streams online about FPS mining and harvestables, uh we've got quite a few questions here today about uh FPS mining and harvestables for you. Uh excited to
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get to that stuff. And then finally, a man who perhaps needs no introduction, but we haven't had him on video in a while. yeah. Jake, who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? I'm Jake Ross. I'm the senior producer in the Austin studio. Um I oversee various aspects of development. I'm work most closely with Tony Zurovec on his uh his pillar of the game. Uh and then I also am pretty involved with the with the live development and publishing process as well there in Austin. Uh we we don't actually get a whole lot of producers on the show very often. So, I want to take a a minute before we really get into it and talk a little bit about what a producer does. If you had to the describe this I struggled to describe this to to to to to my parents when they ask me what I do. And I'm like, "Uh well, I'm a producer." Like, "Well, what does that do?" I'm like,
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"Well, it's kind of like herding cats." Mhm. But uh if you had to describe what a producer does. Oh man. Um there's uh there's a lot of that a producer does. I think it'd be easier to list off the thing things that producer doesn't do, but uh you know, one thing that we don't do is development, right? We don't actually make things, but we are cheerleaders for everybody who does. Uh we create maintain the schedules and and uh sync with the teams on a daily basis and make sure that they don't have any things blocking them or anything uh that might put their work at risk. And then if they do have things that are blocking them or they will be the ones to communicate with the various people around the studios to help ease that burden and remove that obstacle. I I would submit that if you help developers develop then you are part of development.
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to think so, too, but I don't want to, you know, I can't have Gareth and Dan here to to be like, you know, You're the You're the oil that helps the machine There you go. This is make things possible. Yeah. All right. So, as usual, we take questions we take questions from our community and answer them on Star Citizen Live. You can submit your questions live in one of two places, either on Spectrum, our communication platform available on robertsspaceindustries.com, where you can jump into general chat and submit your questions with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets that'll help our our community management team pull it out from all the other conversation. You can also do so if you're watching live on Twitch, where we're currently broadcasting. Hi Twitch. Hi Twitch. You do the same thing there. Additionally, we put up a thread earlier in the week where we collected questions ahead of time for people that maybe
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couldn't be here live. That also allows them to vote up which questions they want to see answered most. So, pulling from that list, the ones that actually apply to the three of you, of course as every week and I say this quite often, it questions that are voted up that aren't for the guests here. We're going to take the questions that are for the guests here. Right off the bat, Dan. Question for you. Are there any plans to use harvestables for other purposes or for purposes other than selling? Like crafting, cooking, consuming, anything as part of the actor status system. Uh yes, definitely. That is I mean, what we released as an initial release is just that. That's our first toe in the water to see how it all
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feels. We definitely This was definitely not the final plan for for harvestables. For us, harvestables mean a lot of things from We made a system that can be used to to spawn a lot of objects throughout the world that the player can harvest, collect, or do various things with it. It's not just, "Oh, you took the take this thing. You You take it to the shop. You get X amount of UEC for it." We want players to be able to gather research data from harvestables, to gather to to pick up a fruit and be able to eat it and get a bit of a boost for it X amount of time. We want them to be able to extract whatever chemical substances within each each of them has and take that and use it for uh whatever, anything from developing maybe a virus or a weapon or a cure or all of these things.
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So, yeah, the point is definitely to go into more of a crafting-oriented, science-oriented domain and give a lot of gameplay options here for the player. Yeah, it's very cool. I mean, we we we I'm trying to remember when we first started talking about the actor status system, but the the the actor status system for anybody who maybe doesn't know what that is. If you can give us just a real quick rundown of of of of what it's designed to do for Star Citizen. Well, it's it's basically only the player, all the actors, the NPCs, and AI, everything, whether social or friendly or enemies, feel. Basically, a guy that's been starved of food for 1 week is going to be pretty weak at combat. He's going to have a little
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stamina. He won't be able to run much. If if you feed your troops well and if they're happy and if they're clean and all the stuff, they'll behave differently from someone that's been left in a desert for a week and didn't have the required things. This entire actor status system kind of started when we we first implemented the the breathing part and the stamina and uh uh how G-forces affect stamina and the actor and then it slowly evolved to incorporate anything that can influence the actor positively or negatively in in the game. Right. And with every patch, we we make progress towards building that system out. Even even if something's not a direct improvement to the actor's the addition of something like harvestables is another step towards that
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towards that direction of of improving that system and making that system more robust and more capable. Uh Gareth, uh now that we can share missions, uh it seems like there might be a lack of missions worth sharing. Is that something you'd agree with? And if so, what are we doing about that? Well, I would agree to an extent. So, we have about 206 missions in the mission broker right now, I think. Including like some variants of the same stuff going on. But, um the thing with mission sharing is it's it's a new feature. Right. So, if we if we made missions revolving around mission sharing before we like had it, Right. we would uh they wouldn't be very fun cuz they'd be single-player missions and you'd be being destroyed and it would it would suck.
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So, now that we have mission sharing, uh moving forward into the future, we can make uh missions that have like the main goal is to be shared so that you can have larger potential well, probably harder missions to enjoy with your friends. Mhm. And is that something that we're actively working on or are are we working towards more missions designed for sharing in mind for larger groups, additional difficulty, stuff like that? Yeah, definitely. Uh so, if you played the I believe it's the patrol mission right now that's balanced for four players. Um but, we don't really have anything that tells you that. So, like moving forward, we want to have more things on the UI, maybe like a a recommended player count. Not something that's like you must have four people to do this. But it's recommended. So if you've got a
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mega ship, I don't know if you if you're the proud owner of one of the big boys, you can go and try on your own. But we'll have a recommended number there that's like maybe try this with four people. Maybe not. Up to you. Cuz we don't we don't want to force your hand. We want it to be like we don't want it to be be the same experience every time. So if you wanted to try and take it on on your own, you can feel free to do so. Oh. Uh Jake, uh we had a question about additional hair and beard tech for the character customizer. I know you you you oversee a lot of our our US development teams. Uh is there anything you can tell us about the additional work being done for hair and beard tech for the character customizer? Yeah, so um for those who may remember at last year's CitizenCon, we had a big old presentation and showed off uh the the
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new hair shader and the hair tech and uh so the tech's the tech's all there. Um it just it just needs to be it's basically just content at this point. So right now the character team is focused on applying that shader to all the the Squadron 42 characters and prioritizing those. and then after they're finished up with that, that's uh there's the sky is the limit as far as how many different types of hair and beard um new new new hairs and and beard um assets that we can that we can implement. Yeah, I know. So Gareth and Dan and and myself are are just waiting itching to create our true selves in the verse and we just can't right now. It's just so sad. You know, but it's getting there. It's coming. Gareth, Dan, and myself And sometimes Jared Jared's Jared's abandoned us uh
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and I miss your beard. No, if you sat through that thing for for eight months, you'd never have a beard ever again either. It was impressive. it's going to be a long time before I ever grow a beard again after that. Well, when you do, you'll be able to create your true self in the verse. Can you get PTSD from a beard? Yeah. Is that possible? Um Dan, will the multi-tool get additional functionality in the future? And can you tell us about it if so? yes, I'm sure it will get more functionality. Um I can't give a lot of details. The stuff is still in flux, but uh I know we're we're looking into I think the first one on the list will be
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more of a tractor beam functionality. So, we'll be able to Let's say we have a crate on the floor. I'll be able to point my my multi-tool at it and activate tractor beam and now I have it connected to to my gun and I can move it forward, backwards. It will help a lot of people like move stuff around and pull be able to carry stuff they normally could not in their hands. So, it has That is I think the first functionality we will add. The The purpose of the multi-tool was always to be a platform upon which we can expand and add module after module after module. And it's one tool that you have and you just change that module and you you now can do an extra functionality that you couldn't couldn't before. It will just take a bit of time for us to As you see, we're we
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just got the mining one now. We're going to get probably I think it's the the tractor one that's being worked on next. So, we'll we'll get them out over and over one after each other. It just takes a bit of time. Yeah. And I I want to add that when we say we're working on something next, that is not the equivalent of that will come out next. Oftentimes It's in the works. Yeah, there there there there there's other dependencies. You work You work on one feature and then you find there's a dependency there either a like a UI dependency or something else dependency that has to be You know, it be put on the side while we work on other things and stuff like that. So, while that may be what we're pursuing next in development, not necessarily what's next for the multi-tool. Following up on the multi-tool, uh we had a question about the cutter attachment. So, right now the multi-tool is capable of mining and the
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cutter. And uh this person's question was simply, "What does the cutter attachment do in the persistent universe?" Um For whoever wants it. I I'll take it, but uh it sadly doesn't do as much as uh we would want it to do. And not because the functionality isn't there, we we have the functionality, it's a matter of us getting the time to build the content. Uh we would love it to start being used as in let's say I I go through a facility and accidentally I find through the harvestable system that there's a crate that just spawned that has this massive lock on it. I can bring out my cutter and start cutting the lock. It takes me a bit of time. I can open the crate and get this new awesome prototype weapon from there. Or it could be I find a certain uh hatch or panel that allows I can cut it
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and allows me access a quicker way inside a facility. Rather than I could still go without the tool and I could kill I don't know fight 10 other NPCs to get to the same point or I could sneak sneak back to through this thing. Uh it it's it's a it's a it's a it's a gate opener for us. It's it's a thing that if you have it will allow you easier access to certain places or we allow you extra loot. There's a lot of games that have these chests of awesome loot, but you get there and you unless you can lock pick it or something like this, you cannot get. This is basically our our lock picker. And I think in the future we're aiming to have different locks and different methods of lock picking basically. So, cutting is one of them. Gareth, if I remember correctly, there used to be a mission that used the cutter on the multi-tool and we were we
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removed it, didn't we? Yeah, we had the in the downed relay, you had to cut the emergency thing open, but we found that at the time not many people are carrying a multi-tool, because there wasn't much because that was the only thing in the game you could do with the multi-tool, right? So, why would you know to have it? But now that But now that more people are using it for mining, and as Dan says, the tractor beam may come along sometime in the future, more people are going to be carrying it in order to use it, so we can put it to good use, cuz we found that people were get to that point in the relay mission and then be like, "Uh, uh, uh, what? Yeah. What do I I don't have one of these, and then they just abandon it, cuz they'll be like, "Oh, dang." Yeah, it's a it's a very very real consideration. Yeah, it's it's as Now that FPS mining is online, more people are carrying around multi-tools, but we're we're still finding people. We
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We saw a wonderful clip of I keep calling him Twerk, but Salty Mike, you know, went went out went out to the to mine, and then got there, and there he didn't have his tool. He'd forgotten to bring his tool, and then he ran into two other two other citizens, and asked if they had a spare tool, and they they actually gave him a spare tool, and it was it was a wonderful bit camaraderie between citizens, but it it does shine a light on the on to your point that some of some of this stuff needs to become more ubiquitous before we can develop content that will really really use it. So, the more Yeah, that's exactly it. the more uses we give to the multi-tool, the more likely people will have it on them, carry it around, stuff like that. I think it's also a matter of building a lot of content that encourages people to get a multi-tool, rather than
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forcing them to get one. So, you encourage them where they can figure, "Oh, this is an access point. If I could have had a multi-tool, now I could open this thing, and I would get some big reward out of it." Or you might see someone else in your team has a multi-tool, and they get all the cool stuff, then you will want But I I think it's a bit brutal if we if we just force people as in you have to quantum travel the way there get down to the planet fight some NPCs and at the end of the mission you do not have that one tool to finish it. That can be very frustrating. I mean, of course, would be nice to have a few of these missions but that should not be all of them cuz it's it's painful for the player. It would be very realistic and in line with many aspects of my own life though. All right. Uh Dan I got a question for you. This came from
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the chat but this was this was my own question. I was going to throw this in there even if they didn't. I'm glad they did. Some of us and I mean by some of us I mean Jake here uh have a lot of trouble finding harvestables. No, I'm talking about me. A lot of trouble finding harvestables. Is this a bug or as this person says are they just not trying hard enough? Um no, it's it's not exactly a bug and it's not because the people aren't trying hard enough. It's something that sadly we could not get online in time with mining. We would have wished that there was uh that our FPS radar would have would have come online with this. Sadly, there were other priorities there and the team that's working on that has uh more important stuff to finish uh which we definitely understand but it's a bit unfortunate. Um so what happens
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without an actual radar that can detect those harvestables is that you have there's still a lot of harvest harvestables. We're talking in the areas where there's cities. They're I would say 5 to 20 per square kilometer. But the problem is they're only seated in certain biomes and those biomes occupy only I don't know sometimes 5% of a planet and the planets are gigantic. So it all accumulates. So it's it's it they are there and it's hard for the player to find them right now. Once the FPS radar starts coming in those will be a lot easier to find. Right now they're easier to find in cave once you in a in cave once you find a cave they're they're a lot easier to find cuz but there's very limited ones like Amiochis and Ranta Dungs. But uh yeah the
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the Pitambus, the golden Madmons, all of the more exotic fruits, those are hard to find because they're only I think Hurston in the savanna biomes. So if you go into a savanna biome and you see one of the trees that there's good chance that actually has some some fruits on it. Again, it's hard. We try to spawn them more in clusters so they're more visible but it's a hard one. It's a it's a bit unfortunate but this is what happens with life development. So he gave us a bit of a cheat sheet here. I don't want you to go through every location or whatever but how is that cuz I find ton tons of dung. I've never seen a golden Madmon in my life. So uh where where should we be looking? It So don't tell us exactly but give us
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some uh Just just uh the simplest one as I said Amiochis and Ranta Dungs in the caves. These are pretty much exclusive to caves. You will not find them anywhere else. Then there's uh there's Revenant Pods. These are pretty much in any type of desert environment and I'm talking desert with oxygen or doesn't desert with atmosphere. Let's put it this way. Then there's uh Pitambus and golden Madmons which you find only in savannas. Uh and savannas right now are on a single planet. And then you have Prota uh which is a bulbous spore thingy. Uh you will find that in any acidic areas. So there's a moon, there's a planet that has acidic area. You guys will figure it out. I'm sure that's not
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going to be a problem. Uh they're again harder to find even if the density right now is fairly high without They're small and there's no indicator that will show them up. It's a It's a bit unfortunate. We'll we'll We'll get to it, basically. What what Oh, and I forgot one other one. There's also component boards, comp boards, that you can find in the trash biomes on Hurston. So, in those big trash heaps, sometimes you find uh you find these comp board thingies, which you can you can sell for money. Or in the bottom drawer of my desk. Just a bunch of random old PCI cards from like One of these years ago. Yeah. Why is Ranta Dung only in caves? Cuz that's where the Ranta lives.
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Loves the dark. Jake, one of the questions that came in on the thread uh uh uh was what are our plans for quality of life work in in room bug fixing and point releases in Q4? Uh we we we've we've had a lot of talk lately about a a renewed focus towards towards quality of life fixes and making the game as it is now more enjoyable, more more stable. Uh what can you tell us a little bit about what that plan is for quarter four? I know we've we've we've got 3.7.1 on the PTU right now. Um take us through what you know. Yeah, so 3.7.1 is up on PTU now. There's definitely uh when we went live with 3.7.0, there were some issue There were some bugs that we definitely wanted fixed, but we wanted to go ahead and get 3.7.0 out the door. So, uh we're working
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towards those things and uh we're trying to get that live. And then uh and then yeah, looking ahead to the rest of this quarter, I think we definitely want to do at least one more point patch. Um and then we we obviously have 3.8 at the end of the year. Um and you're right, like there's a there is a absolute push right now to get uh more focus on quality of life fixes. Um things like making quantum travel work properly. Sometimes there's lots of bugs there that um are causing issues with also that not going to fix to interdiction as well. You know, interdiction I know has been a frustration and so making that a more enjoyable experience. Um, you know, there's issues with, you know, being the the HUD, the ship HUD and not being able to actually understand what's actually happening in the in the ship and so we want to look at that. Um, improvements to flight and FPS AI. Uh, making sure that the the load and
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save features working well and you actually have new areas that you can, you know, log out and log back in and and you'll you know, you'll spawn in at those areas instead of just Portolisar. Um, and then a lot of a myriad of of of other issues. Um, you know, things like ships not dropping cargo when they're destroyed and and you know, the police turning up at the right time and security and when you're under being interdicted and stuff like that. So, uh, there's plenty of things on the list that we are looking at um, that we definitely want to push for in 3.8. We'll see if we can get them all because we're still trying to figure out uh, how we can still deliver some content in 3.8 while also at the same time balancing quality of life. Yeah, it's always a a balancing act. It's it's these quarterly patches. You want to always make sure there's something new for people in there, but you also want to fix things and there's only so
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many resources even with 600 staff around the world right now. You still have to make choices between those two things. So, it's an important balancing act. You meant you mentioned the NPC cargo. I'll jump ahead to that. We had that question too. Uh, the question is it's been possible to blow up player ships and pick up boxes for a while now at least when that works. Uh, but the NPC ships that come out in like when we players are using their Mantis and they're they end up interdicting NPCs, they're not dropping cargo. What's the deal there? Yeah, so I know right now there's a bug where like if you if you if you destroy an an NPC ship, I think the cargo is being dropped, but it's like it disappears for some reason and and it's so it's really hard to detect and I'm not quite familiar with the exact ins and outs of the bugs, but but that that is a bug and a known issue and then
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we're trying to fix that for sure. You know, we are trying to do a balance pass on AI encounters to make that make the cargo actually, you know, make it make it worth your while, I guess, so to speak. So, we want to we definitely want to do that. We're these car these cargo drops are actually, you know, rewarding and and they're worth the effort and so there's there's lots of balancing to do in that area and we just haven't haven't been able to to prioritize that just yet. So. Uh Dan, from the from the chat here, 3.7 introduced FPS mining, introduced personal commodity inventory, introduced backpacks for instance that would expand our our personal inventory. But right now they're attached to specific torso
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armors. Is that Why is that and is that is that where we're going with that? Are we going to be able to use other forms of storage, utility belts, just one shoulder sling backpacks over a t-shirt? I mean, what what are our thoughts here? Uh this I mean, the the reason it's on the backpack is cuz it's the first implementation and we had to put it on ideally the most meaningful piece of armor you have on you. Mhm. Uh and it kind of made sense because it was a big chunky box you couldn't just like hang it on on your belt or something like this. We we we put it on the armor. The The goal is to allow to allow pretty much any type of armor slash clothing to have some form of storage. If you put in your your cargo
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pants, they have two pockets or five four pockets, whatever, each of them has a capacity and it all adds up to to your to your inventory. Right now even smaller lighter armors have a bit of capacity, so you can still loot a few things as you move through the world. Uh you won't be able to make a a fortune out of it, but you still can go pick up, I don't know, a key card or a uh uh a fruit from somewhere or a minable you find. You're not going to bring a hundred of them, but you can still pick a few objects. The idea is to have the same kind of happening for, I don't know, a utility belt as you say or uh more like a clothing type backpack thing that you wear on your back or, I don't know, all of these items that you can put on you. And it all adds up to one inventory.
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Okay. Uh another question from the chat has to do with the specialized FPS mining equipment or any specialized mining equipment in general. For lack of a better term, what's next for mining? Um Where do we want to go? Where do we want to go? I I I think the closest one that's soon, that's coming soon, is uh is exactly as you said, a specialized mining equipment. Right now we have one mining lasers for ship one mining laser laser for ship ships. And we have That's all you it can do. It does one thing. It does it well, but there's no variation there. We want to add more variation to rocks and automatically want to add more variation variation variation to the lasers you can equip. So we if we add a rock that has has a resistance, I don't
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know, let's say it goes over 90%. The current date the current uh prospector will not be able to scratch it. It cannot pump enough power into it in order to break that rock. The idea is to provide the laser that will lower the rock's resistance and it will be able to apply then transfer the power enough power to to break that rock. Obviously, it's going to come with some downsides. It is either going to cost more if it's better or it's going to cost the same, but then it introduces a lot of instability into the rock so it makes the process harder. You might have another laser that makes instability very low, but then it raises the resistance or raises some other parameters, then it makes it could make your the time it takes for the rock to charge up and actually fracture correctly a lot longer. Uh there's I think there's a list of like 15 parameters or we have
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right now between the rock and the laser that we can play with and combine them with in different combinations to create something interesting. But yeah, this is down the line for for us. Also, we're looking into having something a bit more short-term where where a laser is long-term and you make an investment and that is the laser you have right now for that ship. We have something more short-term. Think about it how the med pen is for FPS where you oh, this happens, why I react to it and I use the med pen and I get a bit of health back and I'm I'm good now. I can continue. Consider the same with with the mining laser. We we can have a thing where the rock is about to blow cuz you messed up or let's say you had a lag spike cuz it can happen. It's a very
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common occurrence for the for the players. You had a lag spike and suddenly now you're in the red. It's like we'll have some consumables that allow you to you you activate them on the laser, they get injected into the rock and it kind of diminishes some of that or makes it decay for a lot faster for let's say 30 seconds or doubles the power of your laser for 20 seconds. So you you're able to temporarily boost your your mining capabilities using these consumables. The problem is you can only have these many equipped and you have to choose which one do you equip based on what you expect you're going to find. So you if you're going to mine this type of thing and you know it has these problems, bring consumables that will are going to help you in that process. Got you. Yeah. That sounds cool. So so
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so hopefully that's interesting. Yeah, well I I well think what I got from that is that we're not done with with mining. You know, we got ship mining we're not we got FPS mining we're not just leaving them behind. We're going to continue developing this feature. Continue building it out. One other thing, I forgot to mention this. We're uh it's a bit I would say maybe further down the line but not by much. We're looking into refining. So, refining is also going to be something. It's not mining but it's it's what you do with the with the with the with the spoils from your from from mining, yeah. So, you take this raw ore thing. Right now you get this mixed material that doesn't pay up that well cuz it's mixed with everything. You have impurities in there, inert material. You have diamonds mixed with gold mixed with uh agrecium and you want to separate cuz for each of them if you have it clean, 100% purity, then you can sell it for
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way more way more. This is where refinery comes in. You can go to a refining uh station and create like a refining job that gets uh gets processed over time. Some of them might take 5 minutes, some of them might take 1 week. These happen while you're not online. You can log out of the server or go do something else. The station will work for you. Obviously, you'll have to pay the station and then it takes about a bit of time. You take your profit back and hopefully you make you make a run to another station where you get to sell it before you get shot down and your cargo gets stolen which is a different problem. But we're only doing the refining part. Other teams are doing the the getting your cargo stolen part. Yeah, it it all bleeds together with missions. So, if when you can refine it might be someone who's after a certain refined resource and then of of course you've got things like interdiction to
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interrupt your journeys and steal your cargo. It's all like a nice It's well designed, isn't it? It all comes together and builds into something beautiful. Yurith, what's the the question from the chat here? What's the We talked a little bit about mission sharing and you know, it it's it's Now that it's in, what's what's next? I mean, is we know mining is like that, we're going to keep working on mining. What's next for mission sharing? Uh Sorry to interrupt. No, no, go right ahead. Uh moving forward, we want to do like a an overhaul of the UI so that it's it's it's clearer in there. So, you've got things like like I I think I touched on it earlier, but like recommended party size. Uh perhaps if something requires a tool, then it mentions that you might need
00:33:06
that tool in some like clear and easily decipherable manner. Mhm. Um and of course just adding more missions that you can share. So, you might find that as you that missions unlock as you go along. And as you're say, we've got those Northrock bounty missions at the moment. So, you could take those as an example of like as you progress through unlocking harder missions, you might find yourself going into ones where you really need a party. So, that you have that experience of like, "Oh, I've hit some kind of cap here. So, that I can I can make use of mission sharing in like an interesting way. Uh things like balancing the amount of rewards you get cuz at the moment obviously we've made mission sharing missions Mhm. out of previous missions. Right. And the the rewards are kind of capped to one player at the moment. So, a lot of people are finding that they're mission sharing and then they're like,
00:33:53
"Oh, there's only a small amount of money to to give you, sorry, buddy." So, we need we need ones with like nice big payouts, nice big juicy ones people can look forward to doing with their orgs you know, all of that sort of it's it's an exciting feature. Um So, just moving forward, we need to expand on it. You know, iteration two. Yeah, you you you you mentioned there are 206 missions in the in the in the carousel of missions that I can that I can they can jump out to you going through and and rebalancing them for the advent of mission sharing is probably going to be an ongoing process. Yeah. Yeah. No. what about uh uh bounty hunting and the the pro tem missions? A lot of times when folks accept these missions, the targets that they're meant to go after
00:34:41
don't seem to spawn. That sounds Well, uh you know, we Yeah, oh, that's that's sad. But, we we look to fix them. You know, these these are bugs that we really want to smash. And as long as the community continues to use the issue council and help us out with that, we'll be sure to thwart all of these instances. Yeah, for for for those ones specifically, cuz you know, before we do these shows, I go around, I ask around for a couple of different sources and stuff like that. I think that it was actually the last time you and Luke were on, you guys made a good point about how missions themselves are actually dependent on many multiple subsystems. You know, it's
00:35:28
a mission doesn't exist in its own ecosystem. A mission is is a set of goals, but then some part of those goals needs this system to function. Some part of the goal needs that system to function. This part needs this system to function. And the mission itself can be fine and can be functional for weeks, if not months, and whatever. But, then when an issue happens with one of these subsystems, now a part of that mission breaks, and it's actually not mission related at all. It's related to one of those subsystems. It's a very collaborative and independent process. So, tracking So, when a when a mission like a pro tem mission breaks, one week it can be because of this system. The other week it can be because of this system. In the other patch it can be because of this subsystem. So, while they always manifest in a similar symptom, the
00:36:17
causes can actually vary from from patch to patch and even from instance to instance. Yeah, very eloquently put, I I say. Yeah, that's exactly it. That's kind of one of the really interesting things about Star Citizen. A lot of these things happen behind closed doors. You know, we make a mission, test make the mission, we get feedback, we get to improve it. But, during all of that time you guys also get to play the game in alpha. Mhm. So, you get you get to experience this kind of even flow of development first hand. And uh it's really helpful cuz you guys get to send us these issues, too. Issues that may have been missed, issues that only happen when there's 50 people on a server, and all of these kind of things. So, moving forward, we like we love we love to find these bugs and stuff. That's one of That's one of the reasons it's so important to continue to submit to issue council. Even if you see what seems like the same issue, you
00:37:05
know, that's like, "Oh, this mission doesn't work. Oh, but some There's somebody's already submitted that this issue is doesn't work." Your cause may be different from Dan's cause may be different from Garrett's cause, even though the visible symptom is the same. Because these things touch so many subsystems, your individual occurrence may lead us to a whole different path. Yeah. It helps us It helps us prioritize. Prioritize, too, cuz if enough people are reporting the same issue, uh we've got an internal, you know, review process where we look at, you know, the the feedback that's coming in, and that helps us when we're doing our quarterly planning, it helps us when we're doing um kind of feedback reviews and and and just feature reviews in general. Um you know, it helps us kind of look at like what are the most egregious issues, and especially as we kind of shift towards this um this quality of life, you know, focus, um you know, what are the things that are most bang for buck? Well, let's
00:37:53
let's look at what's what's the feedback is and and use that as a as a tool. Garrett, let's talk about caves. We talked about the future of mining. We talked about the future of of uh of uh mission sharing. What can you tell us about the future of caves? What's next for caves? Or maybe not next, but what's next up development-wise for caves? Next up development-wise, we have uh we have a couple of prototype new entrance entrances. So, we have big sinkholes that you can fly the ship into. We have larger and more cavernous entrances that you could drive a ground vehicle into. We had those a little while ago but we had like a little talking about you know all of the different teams you need. We had a little tech hitch where we needed real time probes because obviously our planets do rotate
00:38:41
and the time of day changes organically as they rotate. So we needed some tech to make sure that the entrance to the caves wasn't pitch black during the day. You know cuz we could only like light it in one certain way at a time. Moving forward we'll be able to have it dynamically change as the planet rotates. So we'll be able to introduce these much larger entrances. And then with server OCS streaming coming online we can have them we can have more of them and we can have them much bigger and deeper. We've got these remark types that we already have that we want to expand upon so you might find some with like some structures inside, some that are more lived in. Moving forward we'll have AI combat inside there. We're also working towards of course that'll be really cool cuz I've seen lots of videos online of people shooting
00:39:27
their guns and really enjoying the reverb and all of this stuff so I imagine it'll be really chaotic having a nice big fight in a big central hub of the cave. Yeah that was like that was literally the first thing I saw like when the first people got in they got to the first cave all they did was sit there and just shoot their guns and just bring out different weapons and see what the gun sounded like shooting with the different guns. really cool and the void as well the way the void reverberates inside you know you're going to be working with the team trying to fight the AI inside and everything like that. So just yeah it's really expanding upon it. As Dan said a few times it's a it was a toe in the water for caves. We're going to just I'm going to just jump head first. Yeah the ever present zero implementation. Yeah. One of one of the sorry sorry to interrupt. One of the things that I would love to see in caves I would like like love to see them become more
00:40:14
dangerous. I would love to see them every step you take you have to be careful. And you don't know what's behind the corner. I I want to I want us to get I know we're far from from that right now, but I want us to get us to the point where we have creatures in there and stuff that can bite you, stuff that can jump at you and stuff like this. And you when you hear a sound you don't know what's coming. You're like, "Oh, was that it or is it something else?" Or That's where I want to get where people are like in the dark alone and the flashlight starts flickering. Yeah, full That's why I want to get I'm super excited for fauna and Okay. I I the one video I saw that I really enjoyed was speaking to the danger of caves. It was somebody a group was was mining then the FPS harvestables and I guess they weren't they didn't do a very good job cuz there was a reaction and then it exploded and then they ragged all the way. So, it's like I love
00:41:03
I was like that. Did you see that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was funny. I really enjoyed seeing that. I was like, "Wow, like that's like, you know, you got to be careful, man." Like there's a there's a there's a there's a skill here that you got to master. So, uh yeah, I like that cuz it's a kind kind of a combination of the two, uh caves and then harvestables all coming together to make a really cool experience. Jake, producer, tracker and prioritizer of issues and bugs. Yeah. What can you tell us if anything about this damn unclaimed ship bug? I can confirm that as of yesterday that bug is fixed. Um and it should actually be in uh the 3.7.1 patch. So, uh it may be on I don't think it's on yesterday's PTU publish, but it should be on today's PTU publish if we end up going today. Um so, uh the next PTU publish should have it and uh that should be fixed. Um just for
00:41:51
a little background on what was happening, I actually hit up the our our back-end server engineer who was working on it to see what was actually going on. So, the issue was that sometimes the loadout service uh or what we call the loadout service was failing uh to return a customized loadout um to the DGS and it was you know, there was a possibility there when that happened for an outage to occur in in chain. We have a it's called chain of services. Um so now if if the the DGS can't get a customized loadout, uh it's going to get a pristine version of the ship uh instead from the entitlement processor and keep running with that. So, no more should users ever fail to get claims anymore. So, that's good news. Thank you. Yeah. And to the other to the other persistent uh bug, we had a question about uh bed logins Mhm. and some of the issues that cause bed logins uh to be uh
00:42:41
unreliable. Uh we we actually don't have the guest on here to uh today. We it was uh we we had a we had to talk to Rob Johnson, but I did reach out to Rob Johnson to get an answer to this cuz I cuz this bugs the hell out of me and I really wanted an answer to it. So, we went a little extra here. Uh Rob Johnson tells us that uh Rob, wherever you are, probably at work. Uh that uh re in recent patches, we've been adding more analytics to the bed to try to really nail this down because the the bed logging thing has been a persistent issue for quite a few patches. And the as we learn more about what we need to look for it in order to track this down, we've added more and more analytics uh to the last few patches. Uh in the there is a potential fix. I won't be quite as concrete as as Jake was about the about the unclaimable ship, but there is a potential fix in 3.7.1
00:43:30
that has already that through the analytics has already told us we've got an improved the where the success rate was hovering somewhere around 50% of the time, the success rate of successfully logging out and logging back in the bed is up to 80% in current PTU builds right now. So, while we may not have every Well, when I talked about multiple causes, that you know, the same symptomatic issue that can be caused by multiple systems, while we may not have found every single cause that can cause it, uh we are pretty confident that we have improved it quite a bit in 3.7.1. So, look out for that. Hopefully, when you go to bed, you'll actually wake up where you're supposed to uh from now on. So, good on that. Gareth, where are the terminals that allow us to pay off our damn fines? Terminals to pay fines,
00:44:17
they don't exist yet. At the moment, your fines are paid straight away. That's very quick debt collection. Yes, garnishing our wages. But moving forward, the terminals will come in and they'll be in easy to access places, fair places, things like rest stops, including Port Olisar, it's kind of a glorified rest stop, Loreville, Levski, fair places like that stuff. So, you can find them easily and you won't be too harassed while you're trying to pay off your fines. Dan, are there any plans to allow other ships besides the I think it's the Prospector, the Reliant, the Terrapin, maybe the Reclaimer if I remember correctly. Are there any plans to allow other ships
00:45:05
besides these the small minority to search for minable resources, even if they can't mine them themselves? Uh definitely yes. It should not be something that is restricted to a ship. It is right now because those ships come equipped with a specific radar that can find resource signatures. Uh the goal is to eventually have any ship that has the power requirements to equip said radar or the size of the slot needed for that radar to be able to equip the radar. But there will be a downside. A radar that is very good at detecting these signatures, the resource signature, will be not so good at detecting your ships. So, you're probably going to be able to detect something to mine from I don't know, let's say 3 km, but then you'll also lower your ship detection from
00:45:53
whatever 10 km to about half of that. So, there's a trade-off. You want to be good at finding resources, you're not going to be so good at finding enemies. So, it's up to the player to configure their ship how they want based on what function they want to serve. It might be my I don't know. I have a ship that I use for fighting a lot of the time, but my buddy needs me to scan ahead of him and find minable for his pros- prospector for her fleet of prospectors. And you just go like, "Yeah, I'll equip this one. I'll do this job now. But if we're getting attacked, I'll be a bit blind." Yeah, cuz as more and more of the component system comes online, we'll be able to customize our existing ships and outfit them the way that to our to the purposes of the day. I like that so.
00:46:40
Um that said, help finding minable resources. What about finding caves themselves? It Are we going to be able to What's the future hold for being able to search and find these caves? So, right now, cuz we figured out when we got the final numbers of how many caves we can perf- with while keeping the same performance, how many caves we can put in the game, we kind of figured out that they're going to be a pain to find cuz we're talking question, so. so many a planet that is so big and five caves. The chances of finding that are very small. So, what we did initially, we prepared we had a solution of putting a a signature on the cave, so the radars
00:47:28
will will pick it up. Right now, we started with signa- signature of 5,000 m. As soon as we didn't even go live with that, we made it 10,000 m. And I think now we made it even longer. There's a tiny triangle that appears as soon as you go close enough to a cave. The problem is even that is not enough. So, one of the things that we don't really want to do is that just give a mega signature that everyone sees just cuz they are there, they just win a cave. That is not what we do ideally. Yeah, exactly. You get a cave and you get a cave. No, we we would like to get to the point where a planet has a realistic number of caves. So, if everything goes well with server OCS, that should allow us to put way more caves in that we then we have
00:48:17
I'm talking like orders of magnitude more. So, ideally if you look at Earth right now, there's thousands and thousands of caves. We want to do something like that for our planets. We'll see what the number actually is and what performance allows us to to do, but the idea is to increase the density. That will automatically make them easier to find. We will still like to keep a bit of a signature on the cave. So, if someone comes comes close enough to to a cave, they'll detect it. But again, this will be dependent on what radar do you have? Do you have a radar that is specialized in finding caves? We can put a specialized signature type on the cave that is just for I don't know, not necessarily on the cave, but for like underground deposits. Cuz we will have this in the future. We we already talked about this where we will can own a piece of land and we can
00:49:04
prospect it and go like, "Oh, this piece of land has this amount of stuff underground." Ideally with the same device, you will be able to say, "Wait, there's a cavity here under the the crust of the earth." So, but that is coming a bit further into the future. Yeah, that was actually the next question of was why do we seem to have so few caves, whether it was a design choice or a technical limitation. Oh, no, no, no. We want as many as possible. It's just that right now without server OCS, there's a limit of how much content we can how many entities we can have in the game running at the same time. As soon as server OCS hits, we'll be able to stream them in, stream them out based on who is there and First thing I did was try 500 on Aberdeen and I got told off. You got your hands loud. You're like,
00:49:53
"No, Garrett. It's a good time to plug that for those of you who are looking to hear more about the ongoing development of Serro Side OCS. You can check out this month's Jump Point magazine, which is coming out towards the end of this month. We got a huge deep dive article written by Chris Bolty in that in that article. Chris Bolty is a wonderful person who has never appeared on camera and will never appear on camera. But, we did get him to write a wonderful article about about Serro Side OCS. So, you guys can check that out. And if you're a subscriber, and I'm sure if you're not a subscriber, people will share it cuz that's we're all in this together and that's what people do. let's see. What else do we got? We got a question One of the questions from the live chat is is will we ever be
00:50:41
able to steal the backpacks? Can we steal backpacks? Steal what? While? Like like like it's being worn? Yes, like like actually just take the backpack and run off with it. Yoink. I don't think this is something we considered yet, but I find that it's an intriguing thing. I'm not sure if you should be able to steal all of it, but maybe like steal a hat and knife out of that entire box that the guy got on his back if he's not looking. There's a lot of other prob- problems there. If you can steal that, automatically you can steal maybe his weapons or some important piece of a mission critical item that he needs to There's a can of worms that needs to be very delicately opened and checked for other problems. It's it's
00:51:29
Once we open that can of worms, it's is dangerous, but it would be it would be cool. We we all love pickpocketing in various games. It's but it needs to be done to to a certain extent where it doesn't heavily inconvenience the the guy that had his stuff stolen. He needs to be able to retaliate or there needs to be consequences if you're bad at it. yeah, it's it's a tough one, and I would say it's a bit early to to call on this one. Yeah, you know Just use the tractor beam and put a bucket on its head. Problem solved. Oh, if you don't you you you you were you were talking about the tractor beam attachment for the multi-tool earlier, and the first thing I thought was Hi Jake. You know, is he shooting the tractor beam at at other players, and what that's going to do? This is again one of the reasons
00:52:18
it takes us so long to develop that, because we have developing a tractor beam to pick up a crate and move it around is something you can do like in a month. Easy. Dealing with all the consequences of what players will do with it, that takes years. Yes, but be be honest with me, Dan. I've worked with you long enough that you look forward to what the crazy things that players will do with it. No, of course. Of course, as long as do the crazy things." Yeah, I I want them to do the crazy things. I want them to do as many crazy things as possible, as long as they don't end up griefing other players, which end up getting upset and end up leaving the game because they got grieved by someone over and over and over. That needs to not happen, and our systems need to be robust enough to not allow that to happen. You're allowed to steal from players. You're allowed to kill them and hunt them, but they need to be able to
00:53:08
retaliate. If they're just there getting punched over and over and over and abused, that is not fun for anyone. I was just thinking about arguing with you, but no. Decided against it. Some of the more trolly instincts bubbled up to the surface there. This was an interesting question from the from from the chat. I don't know I don't know if we've considered this or not, but uh one of the questions talked about have we considered the possibility of of taking since FPS radar scanning isn't fully online yet, consider the the ability to take scan results from our ship and like transfer them into the HUD of our helmet
00:53:56
so we can take that information with us. So we can like fly our ship around, do a big robust scan on something, and then, you know, swipe that over to our helmet and then and then go out and use that in an FPS setting. So I I think I know where this is coming from because right now people are going with a prospector and they find like a field of a cluster of whatever hadanite or aphorite or whatever they find and they they see them there in the ship and then they land their ship, they get out of the ship and they start looking around and like where was it cuz you have a completely different perspective from your ship. Suddenly everything is a lot larger once you go into FPS and and you start looking around, you can't find them. Definitely the idea was with the radar and anything you can scan all this data acquisition to be able to store it, sell it, or transfer it to your own player.
00:54:44
If you can sell it to other player, if I can sell it to Gareth, so he can be I maybe I'm not a miner, I just scan, I find the stuff, I sell to Gareth, Gareth makes money. If I can do that, automatically it should not be very hard for us to transfer it from our ship computer to our FPS. It's my data, I I choose where I keep it. If I keep it in my FPS helmet or I keep it in my in my ship, it's up to me. I see no reason why we couldn't do that technically once we have the tech to transfer the data to other players, which is in the works. Yeah, that that like is actually really interesting you bring up cuz like it's it's it's a like a stepping stone towards the exploration type of gameplay that kind of just happens naturally in the verse right now, but like, you know, if you're able to actually scan the data and then and then take that and then actually you're the you're like a a data seller. Right. Yeah, data runner,
00:55:32
exactly. That's exactly what we have ships for that reason, you know, so Uh, but yeah, like the know, maybe you don't really care to to actually go down and mine things, but you want to enable other players to to do that. Maybe you're you have an org and you're the you're like, I have no interest in mining, but I'm going to join the mining org over here so that I can help them out by finding cool places for them to go. I just like the exploration aspect. Like that's really cool. I I think right now this is kind of happening for free where people find where for example, they find where a cave is and they know where it is and they go on YouTube and make a nice video. Here's how you find it. You go in orbit, you look at this pixel and you fly your ship at this velocity exactly there and you see this mountain, fly to the left of it and now you find the cave. When people will find a rich cave and they can scan and gather the data and sell it, I think you'll see a lot less
00:56:19
YouTube videos and you'll see a lot of people going like, "Hey, do you want to buy this cave data?" Yeah. And that's when it becomes interesting. It's way more gameplay oriented rather than people just trying to be helpful for the community and which is appreciated right now, but I think the gameplay will change once you can make profit out of it. I I I I think there will always be incredibly helpful people in our community. Uh, just having been here for as long as I have. Yes. But yes, you are absolutely right. There will be people whose whose, you know, in the battle between their better angels, the other one will win out and be like, "No, I'm going to I'm going to keep this one for myself." Yeah, it's a Now, it's data running and and the the the selling and collection of important data has been one of Star Citizen's promises for a long time. Uh, like like you said, midships like the Herald are are built around that. So so yeah, I I
00:57:08
definitely see this, you know, if if not this specific version of taking the data from this and putting it in the helmet cuz that might require some UI work and stuff like that. But the ability of the ability to take data from one thing and use it in another and in another way uh is definitely been in the road map in the in the Stars is were for Star Citizen for some time now. So uh while we don't have an ETA for something like that, specifically, uh I think I think we can all say that's that's definitely something we want to work on and pursue. I can't wait for the Herald. It's like the ultimate producer-ship, because you're basically just taking information from one place to another and enabling other people to do things. So, it's great. I I I just want I I've always wanted the Herald to be like a drag racer. Oh, you know, Herald drag racing.
00:57:56
Uh we won't talk about the stream where we tried to race in a Herald like 2016. Oh, yes. I did not acquit I did not acquit I tried to do New Vanderville in a Herald and it did I did not acquit myself very well. Well, in my defense, we I think we made everybody in that competition race in Heralds just just be for the challenge of it. It was not a it was not a particularly enjoyable experience. all right, guys, that's it. That's the show. That's the show. You did it. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Um Gareth, uh what what's next for you? Where Where can people see you? Where can people find you? Where can people find me? At my desk. Right there. Yeah, I'm right here. They can find me on Twitter if they want. Ah, it's early.
00:58:44
It's It's It's still the That blindsided me. I don't know how to I I know. It's not even 8:00 a.m. yet here. that's one of those things actually for one of for the for the the folks who were asking, uh we obviously do these why this the time of Star Citizen changes Star Citizen Live changes so frequently, uh it's because we work around our development schedules. I know you've got a you you've got a a you know, a a couple of production things that you've got to go to like it starts in a minute, so be calling me in 1 minute. Yep, so they'll be calling you in 1 minute. So, you've got to get to a thing. Uh yeah, I know you've got missions, you know, meetings to wrap up the end of the week. Uh we work around our development schedules for the show. It's It's It's It's It's important to me that our videos, whether they're ISC or SCL or Pillar Talk or whatever, never get in the way of development. You know, we're here to help. We're not here to We're here to illuminate, to shed light, to educate. We're not here to get in the
00:59:32
way of development. So, so we do work towards our to our developer schedule. So, that's why you may see them to see your broadcast times change as often they do. And that's why some of us wake our happy butts up at before the sun comes up to come to the show. But, hey, it's worth it to me. Yeah, and don't forget Inside Star Citizen returns next week. We are in the Citizen Con quarter. Citizen Con is only, I think, what, 5 weeks away? Is is is that what it is? I try not to think about how close it is. So, we are in the Citizen Con quarter. So, so uh Look for that. I think there's more. I think there was an announcement. There's more Citizen Con information coming out on the RSI website. I believe next week, if I'm not mistaken. You can check the post for more details. Panel schedules, Bar Citizen schedule, all that good stuff.
01:00:21
Gareth, Dan, I pointed to the wrong people. Thank you so much for for being That's it. Thank you for getting up so early. We'll see you next week. Thanks for getting up early. Yeah. Nice guys. Take care. Bye-bye. Thanks for watching. For the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42, you can subscribe to our channel, or you can check out some of the other shows, and you can also head to our website at www.robertsspaceindustries.com. Thank you very much for watching.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.