Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Inventory Futures

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:08

   Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Calling All Devs, our semi-monthly series where we take questions from you, the Star Citizen community, and pose them directly to our developers. On today's show, we have core gameplay director Richard Tyrer, and we are going to be talking all things the road to true physical inventory. So, with Rich Tyrer, we know better than to do a long intro, so I'm going to wrap this up. We're going to turn it over to Richard. Richard, what is the road to true physical inventory? The floor is yours. So, we've had a lot of conversations, we've had a lot of segments about inventory over the last probably couple of years. Um and and I think inventory can be broken down into very different categories that we're discussing. So, physical inventory is the goal. That's where we're every patch

2. 00:00:56

   that we we change towards and we're working towards. But obviously, Star Citizen is a big game, right? There's ships, there's characters, there's landing zones, there's locations, there's hubs, there's hangars, and we have to make sure that all of those pieces talk to each other and create that experience that we're aiming towards. So, right now, what we have in game, I think that's probably the best starting point. So, right now what we have is we have personal inventory, but it's a limited personal inventory. It's an inventory that you can open up your backpack, you can see the items in there, but those items are limited to a very subset of items such as commodities, so FPS mineables, and the food and drink items. So, for example, water, you know, Whammer bar Whammer bars kind of thing

3. 00:01:45

   and all of that kind of thing. So, anything that you can interact within the world that is food and drink related or mineables, you can then put them in your backpack and you're golden. But as soon as you get to something like a pistol or an ammo magazine or a flare, then you can't put that in your backpack. So, that's a current limitation and that's a limitation based on our current infrastructure of technology that covers the saving of the persistent items to the back end. So, in terms of what we're aiming towards next is we're aiming towards upgrading that system and making it more flexible so that, you know, I have found a combat knife, I have found a pistol. I want to take my helmet off and put it in my backpack. So, you should be able to do that. The other inventory that we're talking about we have So, that that's what you classify as like personal inventory.

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   Then we have what's classified as what I term as external inventory. Now, external inventory has a physical location in the world like your backpack or like the interaction point on the back of the Grim Rock where you can go up to it, you can interact with it in the world like a physical light switch or something like that and it triggers an interface. And that interface is the same interface that you use for your personal inventory. So, you'll have the personal inventory on one side of the screen and then you'll have the external inventory on the other side of the screen. And that external inventory could in the future be a crate, it could be anything, but you're not actually dealing with the individual items on a physical level, you're dealing with a storage container that has those items on the inside. And then when you have this interface, you can then drag and drop the items between them so you can

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   go, "I'm going to put my bottle of water and my gun into that external storage space and store the thing." So, that's what we classify as external inventory. Now, the next leap in terms of the next level of inventory is what we're classifying as the true physical inventory. So, that is where you'd have a locker or a weapon rack and you'd actually see the physical items stored on that particular compartment. So, if it was a locker, you know, you'd open the locker and you'd actually see, you know, your undersuit or your clothes or your armor. And if it's a weapon rack, you'd see the weapon and you're physically dealing with those items in the world. So, unlike external storage where you're not dealing with the physical items in the world, these are things where you are dealing with the physical items in the world. Now, clearly, that's where we want to go in terms of that

6. 00:04:10

   full physical inventory, but before we get there, what we want to try and do is what's the next step? So, you know, it's like what what's the next kind of like pit stop on the road to full physical inventory where everything in the world is fully physicalized and local to that, you know, to you. And that's the keyword there. So, the next step is what we call local inventory. So, local inventory is a temporary solution on the personal level. So, in terms of I'm not talking ships and ship weapons and ship components, I'm talking like the actor and their armor and all of the items that they want to carry with them and all of the food and drink items and grenades and so on and so forth. And local inventory is going to be a kind of temporary solution for also for that physicalized area for

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   hubs and hangars. So, in full physical inventory, the idea is that you'll be in a landing zone and you'll have a habitat that, you know, you're in a room that you can go and store things in. You'll have a hangar because you you get a hangar every time you buy a ship and you'll be able to store things in there and have a big shipping container and put all your gear in it and you'll have a ship and you'll put all your stuff in your ship. But clearly, you won't want to put every single thing that you own in the ship because if you're out in Pyro or you're out in deep space and that ship blows up, then you'd you've lost all your gear. You know, you've lost all the stuff. Now, your ship might be insured and the components on the ship might be insured, but the items that the small items inside that won't be insured and that's something that we'll need to, you know, you you won't want to carry everything

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   with you all the time. You're not like a moving pack rat. So, that's why you'll want these these areas where you want to store things and keep them safe. So, that might be in the future might be a homestead. So, you have a homestead and you this is my your headquarters or it's a hangar or it's a hub and this is where you're storing your physical goods and those physical goods stay there and are safe and can't be destroyed or taken. Um obviously, in homesteads, you know, there's a there's opportunity there for PvP raiding and all that, but I'm not going to go down that road. That's a a fully different type of feature. Um but in terms of inventory, that's where where we have this kind of local inventory. So, what is local inventory? Local inventory is going to be a local inventory for the area that you're in, but it's not physically represented. Now, that doesn't mean it's infinite, it's still limited in terms of

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   what you can put in it, but it'll be localized to, say, a landing zone or localized to a ship. So, a large ship will be able to fit more things in than a small ship and a landing zone would be able to fit in probably the most amount of things cuz that's equivalent to like your hangar where you're storing all of your gear. So, the next step that we want to go towards is kind of allowing personal inventory for you to be able to store items in so that you can actually have that gameplay loop what am I going to take with me? I can actually open a bottle of water and drink it and then, God forbid, put the lid back on and store it and keep it and, you know, you don't have to drink it all in one go. Um and, you know, that will allow that kind of gameplay with what you can take with you. And then that'll extend it to the local inventory in terms of you being able to go, "Okay, right, what

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    stuff do I want to take with me on my ship? What stuff do I want to store at this landing zone versus another landing zone? What stuff do I want over here?" And then all of a sudden, we're kind of we've implemented the loop, the gameplay loop of physical inventory without truly implementing the requirements of physical inventory. So, obviously, this is the next step that we want to go in terms of pushing that cuz then you'll have the the decisions where you're saying, "Okay, okay, what stuff do I want to put in my my ship from my local inventory from my landing zone inventory and what things do I want to then take out with me when I go cave diving or into that bunker mission?" And you're having to cover that kind of that gameplay loop. We're still missing the physical element of it of you being able to Now, that doesn't mean that you can't take those things out of that space and then physically

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    interact with them in the world. You can do that cuz you can already do that right now, but it's about them persisting and staying there and and being part of your gameplay account every time you log in and log out. Did I leave my 50 Picos in Loreville or did I leave my 50 Picos in Area 18 or did I leave my 50 Picos on my Carrick? Well, actually, that's a good suggestion what you said there cuz that leads on to the next thing in terms of we don't just want to be in a position where, you know, you're managing all of this stuff and you don't have access to the tools to manage it. Or tools to manage it is probably the wrong word. The tools to have an overview of it. Um plus, we want you to be able to have a quick way of being able to interact with these things. So, first off, if if I look at the overview situation, we the next step will also include something what we're calling the

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    asset manager app. So, if you think about the MobiGlas itself right now, we have the PMA and we have the VMA. The PMA in terms of a logical sense kind of makes sense. You're sending out requirements to say, you know, AI or NPCs or mechanics in the real world say, "Hey, can you change out my guns or can you change out this component?" And you and you're managing And that kind of makes logical sense. PMA doesn't really make logical sense in terms of the position it's in the MobiGlas. You know, that really makes sense that it should be in the the inner thought because I don't need to tell somebody else to put my slippers on or to help me get dressed or that's the gun I'm going to take or I'm going to put this in my backpack. That's that's me, my character, that's my inner thought in terms of how I manipulate items in the world.

13. 00:09:44

    So, what we want to do is that we want to take that external inventory interface, which I talked about in terms of personal inventory, which is currently like the boxes on the left-hand side of your screen, which is like your backpack, you've got your chest pockets, and then you've got your leg pockets. And on the right side, you have your external inventory. When you obviously if you just press I out and about, you just get your personal inventory. And then if you interact with a a you know a in terms of the one that's live right now in terms of the cargo grin the grin rock of the cargo grid, you'll interact with that and then it'll bring up the external inventory. So what we want to be able to do is two two-fold that's that screen. First is if you're in an area that has a local inventory such as a landing zone, if you open up your inventory either via the shortcut key I or you access it through the inner thought wheel,

14. 00:10:31

    that will bring up your personal inventory on the left-hand side of the screen and the local inventory. And all of a sudden then you can go cool, I want to drag and drop these items, drag and drop this and and manipulate it. Then let's say for example you're in a ship, same principle. I press I, I open it up. Now I have the ship inventory. But then you're like, well actually now my ship's in a landing zone. So I want to have access to my ship inventory and I want to drag something from the ship inventory to my personal inventory or something from my ship inventory to my local inventory. Now in a physical inventory world, that's fine because you have things ordered to locations and then you're actually physically taking them and and moving them to those locations. And we'll have future management apps where you can employ people to move things between hangars and so on and so forth. But for now we want to be able to have like a tab based system that when you open up your inventory interface,

15. 00:11:19

    personal inventory here, external or local or the ship inventory, and you'll be able to tab which side. So you might be able to have the you know the ship inventory on one side and the local. And again, you can just drag and drop your items, move things between them. So you'll have a a seamless way to manipulate between local inventory, personal inventory, and external inventories because in the scenario that we're talking about, you know, let's say I've taken out a a slaver and I body dragged that person back to my ship and I then interact with their backpack which is an external inventory. I now want to be able to drag something directly from the external inventory directly into my ship inventory. Now let's say for the example that I've now flown to a landing zone. Now I have an external inventory inside the ship that's inside a landing zone. But I want to be able to drag something from the

16. 00:12:07

    external inventory directly to my local inventory. And with this system, you'd be able to do that. And obviously another wrinkle on top of that is that we'll have the character in the middle and the character will be 3D and it will be your character and you'll be able to manipulate all these different inventories directly onto your character. And all of a sudden now you're managing your loadout in this inventory system. So all of a sudden we can then go, "Hey PMA, you didn't really make sense because that's not really how it would work. VMA, sure." Now and we do want to kind of tweak VMA long-term in terms of how that and and and deprecate it from what something that makes more sense. But PMA never really made sense. So that would be that would go. Your access to like this infinite bag of holding would disappear. And all of a sudden you'd have the

17. 00:12:55

    gameplay loop of what physical inventory will eventually be or 90% of that gameplay loop shall we say. Right. So you're having to manage the local, personal, and external inventories between all of your different ships and locations. You know, and clearly this kind of system is is what we want to put in place for then you know that's a good step forward which will be underpinned by you know the technology of what we were talking about in terms of iCache and you know or a segment of iCache will underpin this in terms of able to store items and for those items to persist. But this will give us a really good leap towards like making the next step in terms of it okay, now we need to add physical hubs and physical hangars because we need physical locations for you to store these things. We already have lockers, but we're always going to have

18. 00:13:44

    external storage. So if you look at the three things that we've talked about where you've got personal, then you've got local and you've got external. External and personal inventories are how we want it to be. We we always want to have those. Now we always want we want physical as well. So that you know in some ships you might have an overhead locker where you're just interacting with a space that's larger than you can actually physically see and you can utilize the interface to manipulate that. But vice versa you can go to a locker or weapon rack and interact with those physically. But we're also going to offer you the ability to actually go, "Okay, I look at that helmet. I interact with it. It automatically takes it out, puts it on." And then I go, "Actually, I just want to put this whole suit on." So I'm just going to right click and go open external inventory interface and it will bring up the external inventory. Now I can just drag them from that

19. 00:14:31

    locker directly onto my character and then put them on. So we have an interface based system, but also a physical based system. And this is all underpinned by the physicality of all these items being in the world. You know, these external inventories like we did with the grin rock, they're not going to be magic bag of holding. They are going to be physical to the volume that you can actually put in. Like for example, your backpack, if I I good example I was talking about the backpack in terms of how we're limited is A you'll always be limited by the amount of weight you can carry. And weight is something that we're starting to push more and more. Track to being was the first example of that. When we when we go forward eventually we'll be able to carry everything that is you know just the 50 by 50 box which is what you can carry. So weight will always be a limitation in inventory. Item dimensions is also an

20. 00:15:20

    a limitation and the volume capacity. So a snooker cue is always a good example because if I put a snooker cue through a wood chipper, I could put all of those wood chips into my backpack from a volume perspective and I'd be great. But if in the in the orientation of the snooker cue, I can't put the snooker cue in my backpack. So all of a sudden we've got those measurements of you know that external inventory still has to be physically correct even though I'm not dealing with the physical items. So everything is still underpinned and working towards physical inventory, but we have these steps that we want to go towards to get there. So it's essentially in summary in terms of what's the next step. Next step is external, local, item based for the character so that you have that premise. So that when you do you know die in a cave or on a planet or

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    somewhere else, then you know those items will be left there. You're going to have to go back and try and get them. And then it is you know that that core loop of physical inventory. And that's kind of the road to personal inventory. You know that is the next step. And the one thing that you touched on in terms of where is my item in this location where is my item this location, that's essentially what we're talking about it's called the So the asset manager app is where you'd be able to open up in your mobile glass and go, "Where are all my items?" So you'll have an overview which is what I was talking about before in terms of an overview of all your items. So you'll be you'll be able to know like, "Okay, that's in Area 18. That's in Grimhex. That's in my Carrick. That's in my you know M50." And all ships going forward will have some form of external storage and physical storage. So you can see

22. 00:16:58

    there's there's a lot to kind of underpin. You know, we've we've we've come at this a holistic point of view to make sure that we're covering all the different bases and there will be a transition period where we kind of deprecate the local inventory to turn on physical But if we just waited for true physical inventory, we'd be a we'd be much further out because it's not just the underpinning of the persistency technology, it's all about it's also about the content and the hangars and the physical hubs and all of those locations and they need lockers and they need to work and and that's you know a huge amount of work from multiple different teams. But we want to get that gameplay loop live as soon as possible so that people can start experiencing the game that we're trying to make. So that's what we want to do go forward next and this is a good interim step. Then the next step would be you know the

23. 00:17:45

    moving forward of that in terms of the true physical inventory. I love making videos with Richard Tyrer because I just back and I just like just just go. I pondered just sliding out of frame. Richard, that's it. Thank you so much. As always inventory is it seems it seems like a on a surface it seems like such a a mundane you know kind of topic, but really it underpins so much of the Star Citizen experience that we are you know working to build you know in the future. So I mean I mean 100%. I mean that that's why I like to give people the understanding of our intentions of what we're trying to achieve cuz easy it's easy for me to just go, "Yeah, this is what you're

24. 00:18:33

    going to get. Local inventory, it works like this. You open it up in the local area. It's limited to that. You know, job done." But it's about you know I think our community deserve more. They deserve what why are we doing this? What is our intentions? You know, we've been told physical inventory. Why are you putting this random local inventory in you know? And it's about explaining the the reasoning, the understandings what we're trying to achieve to validate that gameplay and then you know to bring all the other teams along with us. So It's a long journey. That's why we get along. Follow-up question though, as a child are you like this because your parents didn't get you a suitcase or because they got you too many suitcases? To be honest for me, I just I like RPGs. And if you play every RPG, I I remember playing uh Skyrim and it's like you go to you go into the first dungeon and you're like,

25. 00:19:22

    "Oh I do need a load of money." And then it's like okay, five trips later back and forth to the town. You're like I'm collecting all that that dwarven gold. You know, it's it's it's a gameplay loop in and of itself. So it's definitely lots to achieve. All right. I'll let you go. Thank you so much Rich. Folks, this has been Calling All Devs starring Rich Tyrer. Also appearing Jared Huckaby. We'll see you next time everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.