Inside Star Citizen: Design Brief: Cargo Career, Part I

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   in looking at the way that our teams are structured especially after the Montreal merger with turbulence we decided to combine uspu as well as Montreal pu into napu napu stands for North American persistent Universe Napo is the recruitment of three different cities in order to kind of create a super team that gives them a lot of coding Firepower as well as design firepowered napu is really a collection of people from Austin from LA from Montreal we're all just getting together to try to make some amazing new features for Star Citizen pu so that includes physicalized cargo in-game shops and newer features that we're looking into such as exploration we're working mostly currently cargo and

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   things regarding that we recently finished work on the hall sea an APU was formed in order to work on larger feature sets for Star Citizen so that those features have the time and resources required to deliver them at the Quality level that we want to see in Apu includes several Engineers production and QA we have six different programmers actually we have a few that are in LA and then we have a few more in Austin right now that includes James Mitch Kevin myself as well as Preston on production and and Alicia in QA did I say everyone we have two Matthew and Emma that are here in Montreal yes I think I got them all so at this point a lot of what we're working on is still in

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   the design phase I would say in the technical design and planning phase but yeah there's a lot of tdd like technical design document going on preparing the the feature and all the parts there's a lot of work in that area the North American persistent Universe team are currently at the Forefront to the next major evolution of cargo Hangar and related inventory systems and as their work begins to enter the Pu over the next three to six to nine months and beyond all building to what we hope will collectively become a true cargo career we here at ISC well we didn't want to wait to begin telling the story as much like the engineering and Resource Management systems of the eupu team this work promises to be utterly transformative to the overall Star Citizen experience

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   so these next two shows while they're going to be a bit different than normal that's because we're not going to have anything to Dazzle your eyeballs with just yet yes the ISC gameplay capture team as great as they are well we're going to let them take a break this week as we let members of the napu team take you through the design and intention of their current work in a two-part special we're calling design brief cargo career foreign [Music] Apu and the foreseeable future is going to include features such as freight elevators and instance hangers as well as persistent hangers bright elevators are one of the biggest changes to Cargo that we've seen in the entire history of

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   the game they bring the feature from being something that's somewhat magical to something that's physical it adds friction but also a gameplay experience around hauling Cargo in our game this one addition I think is going to change not just cargo but also the way that we interact with everything else in the game inventory player items purchases ship items it's a fundamental change to how players are going to deal with the world freight elevators are going to be implemented as an access point inside of player hangers where the player can interface with cargo to get it ready to put it on their ship and you'll use a kiosk to interact with the freight platform in order to call things up from your inventory or to put things into

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   your inventory the way that the freight elevators are going to be implemented is actually using the same technology as we use for the cargo grids and the ships players will be using their tractor beams in order to detach things from the platform and then haul it onto their ship and vice versa they'll be using the tractor beams in order to detach things from the cargo grids and put them onto the freight platform I think that this is going to make the whole experience feel a lot more tactile and organic as well as there's a lot of fun and interesting gameplay around just how you stack things how you sequence them take a group of people decide how you're actually going to load things together it's like that time that you go and move with a U-Haul and your friends you got to figure out where to put the couch but in game it's going to be figuring out where do we take that big box where do we put the the ship items where do we

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   put the guns and try to sequence it in a way that's both optimal as well as I think fun we don't just want to have the feature you know exist and avoid really what we want to try and do is work with the whole scope of the game to support cargo so this is something for outposts for ugf where we want to look at how do we really take advantage of cargo in these spaces however it does mean that the Outpost will also support the same manual loading process that the hangers and those other locations use so not only are you participating in cargo you know in a hangar in a station but out in the verse as well at an outpost and while freight elevators will be available throughout locations in the Precision Universe much of the work

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   involved in manually loading and unloading your vehicles will always involve your hangers which presented the team with some unique challenges to address and overcome starting with the next iteration of instanced hangers instanced hangers solve a particular problem how do we have people spinning an extended period of time in their Hangar loading cargo now that we've added these Freight platforms but also allow the locations to have traffic coming in and out of the landing zones what we're doing here is decoupling the access to a hanger from the occupancy and all that really means is that we can dynamically create these hangers at runtime and they're kind of set aside for players to spend time inside of without getting too much into it right you're going to have a personal space

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   we're just looking at ways that a lot more players can do this simultaneously we don't want to have a big choke point of everybody trying to load their ships and unload and all trying to do that in the same space so we have instance hangers as a way to to put you in an area where you can feel comfortable you can take the time that you want to load your or unload your cargo and you know really engage in that system the way that you choose and so you can actually have your personal space to deal with cargo inside a hanger and depending on your ship you know they'll be different different situations and different locations for that but the thing with this one is that when you leave things gonna basically go away once you want to leave you'll just make a request to ATC and the hangar will move into place

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    we'll open up the doors and you'll be able to leave and then the same thing when Landing you make a request to ATC the system will allocate the space for you open the hanger and you can land for the players it will seem seamless but underneath the hood the system itself is going to be maintaining a representation of where all the players are what requirements are needed without having a bottleneck for players who are actually just trying to play the game otherwise and then we have persistent hangers persistent hangers are kind of an evolution of instant hangers and really what it is is our first step towards Real Player ownership in the game Beyond ships the cool things that you will be able to put your stuff in it come back to it and it's still going to be there it's just whatever the player wants to keep inside their hanger that's their

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    home they can just leave them lie around they can arrange them however they want be it weapons or cargo or dead corpses or whatever very very long term I have no clue of any dates or anything but you'll be able to customize it and upgrade it so it becomes bigger you can have bigger ships in them and maybe at some point even having them like at distant location you could buy a second one for now it's going to really be on your own location it's persistent to you and your character and you can invite friends to your Hangar you can load up your ship and you can take the hall from your mission you know out of your ship and distribute it to your buddies so Persistence of hangers is really important this is going to be developed more in the future and we're going to

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    use the same technology that we're using to build this for other things in the game such as player abs and it's a real I think exciting way for the players to feel like they have a more permanent place in the game that they can call their own I I can't help but notice the ISC gameplay capture team snuck some conceptual visualization in there after all what can I say they love what they do and of course I'd be remiss if I didn't say that everything you're hearing about today is the current intention of the design team at the time that we filmed this now as with all things you see and hear about on any ISE it's always a work in progress and May and often will continue to evolve as development progresses and concepts are tested now so far in our design brief cargo

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    career we've talked about how you'll move and store your boxes so let's find out more about what happens inside those boxes going forward with 320 we introduced a new packing system that allows us to use a larger set of box sizes right now that includes one Su 2 4 8 16 24 and 32. however with this new version of cargo coming out subsequently we're gonna be adding the ability to have what we call inventory container boxes inventory actually plays a big part of cargo as well when you look at the sheer scope of number of boxes and you know a number of weapons and armor and FPS entities that we have in our game we really want to make sure that not only is Cargo physicalized but

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    that inventory has a proper location in place as well if you go to Port Tressler and you hit I you'll bring up the player inventory screen and you'll see that okay I have my access to Port Tressler inventory no matter where I am standing in this station that's going to go away this is very important because what it means is it gives the players a way to transfer in a very clean and effective way all of the loose items that you collect during game play a big change that's coming up is going to be having properties for those boxes so that could be something like a box that's fragile or a box that could be Radioactive or that needs to be kept cool

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    the other thing we're looking at with cargo and cargo boxes is the ability to store large items in your cargo boxes this could be anything from a ship weapon uh to even smaller Vehicles like gray cats that way when you're going with your friends you're going to do a long haul across the verse you can have these larger boxes filled to the brim with as many ship weapons as your ship is going to carry anything that you think you want to take with you and hold on to now you can put them in an inventory container box snap them into the cargo grid and haul it into your ship additionally you'll be able to take those to the freight Platforms in order to put them into your inventories so it gives a kind of universal way to haul things around in the game as well

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    as a way for players to be able to Pirate player inventories now now that you have these Goods that are locked up together in these inventory containers it just takes a tractor beam in order to carry them off so it gives a lot of gameplay possibilities for us to have with these loose items a lot of these things will tie into missions and where you decide to place them on your ship so we're really trying to make sure with cargo it's not just a wide system but that we're actually adding these kind of elements to help further gameplay missions and purpose you guys had the week

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    on talking it's intense and none of this stuff is ready to show yet you want a week off so weird anyway no no weird stuff for cargo grid back to the spaceship we have some additional changes that we're going to be making to the cargo grids that allow them to have any sized item attached into them at the moment we have effectively one kinds of items that attach to the cargo grids those are the cargo boxes and they all have a similar size step on the dimension what I just mean by that is they're all what we call one seu length multiples on each side

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    we're going to have it to where anything can attach to the cargo grid as long as it's a physical item in the game anything that you can grab with that tractor beam that can reasonably snap into a place will be able to snap into place and this is a requirement just to satisfying the inventory changes that we're making now that you won't have this kind of magical access but it also I think broadens the horizons about what your cargo grid and all of your ships can be used for I think it'll also open up a lot of fun gameplay around just figuring out how to arrange change all these things in a way that works well so yeah that's part one of our talk about design brief cargo career next week we'll be back with changes to vehicles and location inventory larger

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    cargo item support kiosk changes the item bank and even unique item recovery so come on back and get the full scope of things next week and is testing and fixing continues on Alpha 320 over on the PTU with the latest additions to Arena commander and the Precision Universe heading your way you can check out the robertspaceindustries.com website or launcher for details on when that releases for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and for indulging Us in these mostly visual free design brief shows and we'll see you all here for part two next week