Star Citizen Live: Mantis and Quantum Enforcement
Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment
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[Music] it's a it's one of those morning's it's one of those mornings hi everybody welcome to star citizen live mantas and quantum interdiction I'm your host jared huckaby and you just saw the manege trailer which was released earlier today we are here to talk about an RS eyes new quantum enforcement ship the Manus as well as the quantum enforcement mechanic which is newly added to star citizen alpha 3.7 joining us here on the show this week are an esteemed pal I think this is the first time we've had five people on the show I don't know if it's ever but it's definitely been a long time why don't we just go around the table real quick and tell everybody who you are and what you do for star citizen you Chris I'm actually gonna start with you this time
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because we never start with the person who's the remote so Chris tell us who you are which is over yeah my name is Chris Smith I'm a lead artist here at CI G since well the very beginning and I've built chips and what are some of the ships you built first art student well recently the mantas of course which one we're talking about I've also built the 300i series the Hornets and a few others the bike the NOx bike I did you worked on the concert long ago constellation yeah it was a few years ago so yeah a lot bike and fifty a little bit kind of finished that one up like I said you said you've been here since since the
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beginning so you're your ship list is quite long yeah and mostly mostly like small to mid-size fighters and then here at the table joining us here in the LA studio we've got Kirk tell us who you are and what you do I'm Kirk Tomei I'm the lead system designer here at CI G and I work on ships the implementation of ships and ship related systems the QED and the quanta forcement is the most recent thing that we worked on action and as systems designer in the basic sense what is a system designer deal so we actually to turn what gameplay is gonna be like for ship related systems so how does the quantum forcement work well what's the
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philosophy behind how the players will interact with it how does it affect other players how does it affect other systems within the game the interaction with quant enforcement and AI was something we had to consider for this particular system things like balancing the gameplay and really our job is to make things fun I mean it's kind of an undefinable goal year you're getting to but you know what makes these things desirable for players to interact with and immediately to my left here we have the people who we have some of the people that take those ideas those directives and make them a reality we have a couple of Engineers mark tell us who you are in which of you I mark abent
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I'm a leak gameplay programmer here at the LA studio and my job is basically to work with Kirk to make his awesome designs practical and functional in the game so what this mantis interdiction device once Kirk was able to finalize what we like to see in the design it was my responsibility to take that and see how we can make that magic happen and what limitations we had and what we had to do to address maybe some of the things and maybe at just some of the requirements that we could actually achieve and then once I was able to break down that stuff I handed it over to the person on my left hi my name is Cataldo Finelli but please call me Aldo I am a senior gameplay engineer at CID since roughly one year when I joined the
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company and I work on the Mount is making the translation if you will from the human language into computer language of the various features and functionalities designed by Kirk and other designers and this is your first time you've ever been on video isn't it that is correct thank you so much although I usually have a pretty long-standing policy here I I don't approach anybody in their first six months I usually let people get used to star citizen get used to the product because this is a very dense project with a lot of tribal knowledge it takes a lot to catch up on when you can you come in so I usually try to give people at least the first six months so so you got a bonus six months but I'm really happy that you're here thank you so much although thank you all right so we've got designers we've got programmers we got engineers and we got
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artists we are set to cover all aspects of the madness now earlier this week we put up a thread on spectrum which is our communication platform on Roberts space intercom to start collecting questions throughout the week and just to a and then we would have those questions right now we were able to print them off just before the website went down this morning yes the I'm sure that people are aware that the website is currently down they we I'm told that we are working on it that we have our best people working on it they quoted Raiders of the Lost Ark so I know they were serious about it and it's it's simply a capacity issue is what I'm being told it was we have a lot of folks excited for 3.7 and folks are just hammering everything so we hope to get that up very quickly they're working
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on both the website and the launcher since they're both related to the platform so hopefully those will be up as soon as humanly possible so all right so we do have those questions here right off the bat a question that was that interested me the most from the moment I first heard about the mantis and I actually went to Dave haddock for this answer for a bit so we'll see what you've got and then I'll give you what Dave haddock sensor is what is the intended use of the mantis for the lawful player because at the surface the mantis seems like it's pretty obviously not for people want to meet wanting to be on the rights of the lava you can definitely use it for piracy you can yeah one of the uses that it kind of is not designed to be tailored to but kind
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of fits that role nicely but um the lawful player really the whole point of the QED is to stop players from either pulling them out of quantum travel or preventing them from entering conquer travel and quantum in a way so for the lawful player it's really to stop any players that you may consider a criminal or that the game has determined that you're a criminal by your your criminality statin and prevent them from escaping either out to you know another another area or just you know away from you or way from the particular lawful zone that that they happen to be occupying at the time so you're kind of acting like uh like Security Forces or really just a a way to kind of hold people in place and make them pay for
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their crimes when I was asking around to a couple other designers you know working in other systems I got answers such as the team working on bounty hunting is excited about the possibilities of you know a crew of bounty hunters you know going around it's like you have a mantis with you and being able to you know being able to pull you know criminals out of quantum and sure or keep them from escaping into quantum which is what they were really excited right right it's like that bounty hunter and of course when I talked to a Dave haddock he mentioned that in lore an RSI is a major military contractor our size the is the maker of the the Bengal carrier for instance so they definitely had their military contracts and that the Mantis was something that would be used but definitely by the adequacy advocacy sure for instance in their efforts to police the the you space so it's the same
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concept behind the security forces that come and scan you and prevent you from quantum traveling away and in fact require you to not have your quantum device on while they scan you more I'll see a criminality stat does rise you know and current marketing for the mantas and our fiction is towards malicious and stuff we know we've had the vewy mobile of the militia initiative before this is just one more thing like that to provide the ship to militias who were trying to defend outposts that are maybe on the outskirts of UE space you but but there's plenty of lawful uses for the mantas sure right Chris the most voted up question in the thread was was actually one for you and I was really impressed the RSI mantis which if I'm allowed to have an opinion I absolutely love the look of it does seem like it's a
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bit of a design language departure from other RSI ships am i right in that or are they right in that and if it is is is this the future of RSI ships it's just just an aberration what are we talking about here well I wouldn't say it's necessarily a departure we really don't have that many R's i ships in the game we have I mean the Aurora we have you know the bangle and was the third one constellation constellation if you left on and those all like very military style ships this one is a little bit sleeker it was designed by a different person Alex one of our concept artists yeah we had them on hand yeah a really
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good guy like his stuff a lot and I think it's you know it's kind of like a car manufacturer you know like that builds different cars they don't all look the same but they do share like certain features with it like so if you look within the mantas you will see similarities or our sign language you know so to say like the inside columns of the ship for example are very much like the ones on the constellation the front window even kind of echoes that language so so yeah I wouldn't say it's it's a departure but it's just like a different ship in the series locks sorry I say stretching their legs yeah yeah I really I
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III we've had conversations offline before I'm a big fan of the the visual look of that yeah I mean I think it was pretty successful it's very strong the overall design language it's well thought out and I mean I wouldn't be surprised if we we definitely again like some of the medium to small ships maybe even sort of the Biggers will we see some echoes and of the style of the mantas and some of the future artists eye shapes yeah I'm legally obligated due to a youtube comment to say that my favorite ship is the character but my favorite looking ship at least at the moment is the mantas all right when the quantum enforcement drive is X the quantum of forcement Drive is exposed when it's in use we've seen it in the
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trailer it opens up exposed to the drive will we be able to sub target the actual quantum enforcement drive in the Manas and destroy it like we do with other components so it's excuse me it's actually a quantum enforcement device device but the U we can't currently target it but we are exploring ways in which you can sub target the QED in particular and you know keep hitting it till destroy it and then it will disable the device that is something we're looking into that is not currently available in 37 but we're hoping to be able to make that a reality soon with all sub parts of the sub system targeting Schurman right because it's an external so one of the difficulties in the future in the very near future is
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going to be a concept that we want to introduce which is being able to start the sub target internal items things like power plants and shield generators and the like that's difficult because of uhm the differences between how we actually physicalize items on the exterior ships and the interest excuse me however because this is an external item that should be something that we can solve for the QED it also goes with since we since item 3 2.0 we've had everything basically be componentized so the health the physics is as long as you strap them on to these items like this QED device it will function it's just we have to add in those extra bits to make
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them you know if the help slow it has to do this behavior that behavior this behavior right so of course every time we do the tier 0 requirement we want to get the base functionality in and then add in those extra bits so we could add a health component and then allow the sub targeting system to target it and then you could shoot it but it wouldn't be fun and two-player until we add in those extra bits we notify you that Oh your device got hit and it's so the gameplay changes about it so it's more like we what we have the ability to do it but we want to come once we combine them all we want to approach the behaviors and add those behaviors on to it before we release it yeah we want to complete the gameplay with it yeah because yesterday actually met in Ferrari which I'm sure a lot of
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people know about and I were messing around with the actual physical izing be their rings that that composed the QED and it's actually very visually impressive because you actually get knocked about as the rings encircle you and you can you can enter the middle of the Rings and feel very godlike in the in the midst of the QED firing so it's pretty cool but yeah we need to make sure that all aspects of gameplay work before we release it I'll have some of what you're having will we be able to detect and track ships traveling at
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quantum speed from enough distance and with enough accuracy to predict their path to set up an interdiction oh that's a great question so the short answer is currently not we do hope to investigate being able to predict where players travel from quantum point to opponent point in the future obviously that's the most effective way to utilize the QED so some of the things that we're thinking about are perhaps introducing things like heat maps into the star map so the most travel the quantum travel lanes could perhaps have you know maybe the the glow for that indicates the most use lanes becomes brighter as you
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there's more traffic alone so it's just like a you know seeing them on some kind of electronic map you see where people travel the most so that you can do what we talked about which is basically one one analogy for the QED was that you're fishing so you'd have these streams that represent the most traveled quantum travel paths and you're setting up like a net and so you want to know hey where is the most effective place that I can set up these quantum enforcement economists in their volumes so that how the best chance of actually in trapping people the other thing that we want to do is perhaps increase make some improvements in the radar so that we can detect players at further distances that
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we can't currently that way we can actually not only perhaps increase the the distance at the which the QED or the conocer is most effective but also allow you to know where they are when you do pull them in at those larger ranges because right now the way we're doing our client streaming the the device doesn't allow us to get much further than then we have streamed into the client and so these are things that want me to experiment with them to figure out what's going to be most effective for not only the gameplay but how to communicate that to the player now you're referring to when things are called out after they travel a certain distance away from you you know those items are called out right from from
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your as part as part of it you know OCS and stuff like that right you want to talk about the technical limitations we have so like right now we have client-side streaming and if a vehicle is not within a certain range we stream it out now if you're a player you'll always be streamed in on the server you'll always be there but if you're not a player and you're just a random entity you could get streamed at once we enable server-side streaming and that brings some problems because right now we're kind of accounting for all the things to be there when we interdict and players are detecting things on the Raider to be there on the server but if they're not there because things are streaming out we now can no longer rely on the dedicated server which means we won't be able to know where people are
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traveling towards unless they're a real person this is where we want to kind of move stuff out of the dedicated server into maybe more of the backend so right now quantum drive just fully functions on the dedicated server because players will always be around so it's kind of cool but if we ever have to do any kind of interdiction or we want to see like trace point to where things are we kind of to know what they are to report to the clients and that gets difficult if you want to then report some of that stuff to the backend so there's been some talk about how can we Aranea range some of this data maybe we could put some of that information about how we're jumping to the back end so then we could be aware of all the players on the server so you know it's also gonna get more and more challenging as we add more players into a server
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maybe we want to remove some of that logic out of the server into these like back-end services that they could run you know oh this guy's quantum Inge and then we don't have to know where he's going to be until we want to pull him to see maybe the path he's going and maybe he'll get interdicted and put them in there and then report it to the client or something fun so in the future a lot more stuff is going to be in like these services and we got to figure out how we're going to relay the information between the server at the backend and all the clients so we could get that information where I could pull up you know a heat map or something to see where all the players have been traveling rather than going through every quantum drive and go hey are you traveling here are you traveling here are you traveling here so we want to have especially like right now it might be ok cuz we have only a few but if you
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want a server with thousands of players you can't do that we need to rely on like the servers and the services more once we are finished with like systems these underlying systems you know how much fun would it be to actually bring up the star map and you see all these paths and then you actually see maybe dynamically where everyone is and especially the ones that are actually quantum traveling and where the quantum and for our quantum snare volumes are in real-time and then you could actually see all this information and then you know make determinations of where you want to park the map doesn't actually activate the quantum enforcement it's one of the commonalities we face whenever we do tier 0 implementations tier 0 implementations that the game features are almost always dependent on the what's available in the game right now you know the it's all of these
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systems you know they're designed independently but many of them have dependencies that you this team or this feature there and and when those aren't where we need them what appear 0 implementations tend to have a lot of limitations on them and that's why we call them tier 0 he - you know then this tier 1 tier 2 to 3 so it sounds like there's there's quite a few options ahead of us for what for this to grow in the future sure absolutely although were there any changes to quantum travel with any changes to how quantum travel works because we wanna travel has worked one way up until this point and I understand from conversations I've been having that there were some changes to the way the quantum travel works itself as a result of this new feature coming on online
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what can you tell us about that yes that's correct we had to update the back-end services with the trajectory constantly if you allow me to say this is this work and do some little prediction in order to be able to detect when someone is actually being enforced by another player so we have to track both the position of the player who are activating a quantum snare and the player who are quantum traveling in order to detect when they get caught by the Mounties basically this was basically the main Chan challenge in this and this development cycle that we had to tackle it was a lot bigger too because like a lot of the work that you had to do is in the beginning when he did quantum drive for like the longest time since we've had it the moment you activated the device was when we determined if you were going to get an addicted or not and I know some
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players use that to their advantage because that's when we streamed in the mission and they could go oh I could cut off my device and not get an addictive marks giving way see it's you know that trick now so now other than we know we're going to fix that some of the workout I did was well what did you do to fix that oh yes we had basically to send the constantly messages to the back-end services we had to tweak the probability of being detected by an environmental mission and we basically had to run this sort of prediction of the trajectory to have the backend services correctly located when the enforcement device yeah now you you know before you have the jump from A to B we detected you get
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interdicted cool now do what we have player devices they could just turn it on but we still wanted you to get interdicted through that travel so some of the work that you had to do was like as you're traveling now we send consistent messages with your prediction model to see how far out or if you would get interdicted and I know there were some fun complications that you run into with the notification the effects with the interdiction because we know we have that warning that we want to give you that you're about to be interdicted but if someone just pops up a quantum interference device right in front of your face there's only so much time we can give you before your smacking right into it and get out of the predicted what you should get out of the quantum
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is Robin in the ex opposition yeah we have to do a little bit of math you want to talk about how maybe some of the difficulties came from how fast quantum travel actually occurs and then the fact that the quantum travel path isn't always a straight line correct we oh yes this plane traveling thing when you travel on the surface the predictive model needs to be a little bit more complicated and what it is if you travel in deep space because basic that's basically a straight trajectory if you will we know Connor on the surveys it's this is a curve and so the predictive model needs to be quickly and adopted hopefully in an optimized way I do hope so to factor this in and have the trajectory be correctly compute
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calculated by the back-end services in order to correctly find the intersection between trajectory and the inter ticketing bubble yeah this was one of the problem we had to tackle and we are working on there was actually another fun one too this goes what Kirk saying that quantum drive isn't always travelling in a straight line what depends on your perspective so if I'm traveling and I'm going from point A to B it'll look like I'm in that straight line but the moment you hit one of those planets that orbit from your point of view you're going in a straight line but from like another person's point of view you're actually orbiting around because as you orbit you're traveling toward the planet so the backend services don't know anything about zones or this orbital rotation so some of the work that I'll go have to do
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and this was not only send in information in world space to the backend but kind of predict where the quantum jump would be during that rotational and I know that's gone going work right now but another some complications with that with the sampling because we're sending what the I think it was every two seconds roughly roughly and then the back end is like a smooth interpolation but there was a problem with that because our quantum drive does was it fourth order motion where it does velocity acceleration and jerk yes the rate at which acceleration change when you when you jump yes that causes complications at the time that the backend gave us was a completely different position than where we thought
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we were gonna get an inner dictator so that's where the fun that's had to come in and go well this is where the back end thought we have to readjust to figure out where we would actually be yes Yuri project the time in space and that enables the code to calculate where that point is in the correct rejection of the quantum travel and that that's trigger the calculation to where you're gonna get out of quantum travel correctly so we hope we got it right we'll find out when just to sum up some of it thank God I'm an artist well you know one of the major changes we made is that before with the AI mission interdiction that occurred you basically were we we could calculate
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or predict where you're going to get stopped now we actually have to dynamically figure out whether you would get stopped and when you actually enter the the position that we predicted whether the the quanta snare volume is still being it's still active at the time so that was the major change of the head occur yes and then some future stuff I was mentioning before where we want to move some stuff into the backend services well that we're bringing in some new technology to write our services in a way that's more focused in how the game objects work and right now a lot of our back-end services are written in like a c-sharp or some and I forgot what the language is but it's a different whole different story and it doesn't know how to how the game world
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works it just makes some approximations these new service api's are very hooked into the game and they know about these same structures as the game does and they're more on the C++ level to allow us gameplay programmers to write the code ourselves and not relying on like another engineer whose sole focus is the persistent are the back-end stuff and that would hopefully allow us to open up the doors to account for like some of this issues with the zone that we could account for them correctly in the backend rather than doing the site on the game to do these like little hookups and fix ups so again it's just one of those tier 0 this is detect that we have here's how we can solve it and then when the newer tech comes online we can improve it right and then the improvements that your marks talking about would maybe allow us to do longer
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range radar or long-range pings or just get more like further distance in our fidelity for doing scanning for example yes less CPU consumption with this new technology once it will be available and it will enable also more feature and our space is big yes praises been yes any moves everything moves so Chris I understand you have you have the Mantis up in the engine right now let's go and take a look at the ship itself 3.7 went live this morning and then the authentication servers promptly got hammered so a lot of folks haven't been able to get in and take a look at it so let's go ahead and take some time to actually look at the Mantis itself it's an beauty just just yeah some you give
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us the Chris Smith to her okay so yeah all the technical talk on the ship you know it's funny because actually visual I mean artistically or as you know as a modeler the ship was actually very simple to make and very straightforward there wasn't a lot of crazy technical challenges that I had to overcome with this one but it's just all in the back end like this thing as it's causing a lot of you know as is opening a lot of questions I guess I should say but yeah artists I mean just from a modeling standpoint this ship was very straightforward the concept was great that we got from Alex and yeah I just sort of had to make it pretty for in the game that was my
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only job with this guy so it's got a limited interior as it does have a limited interior here are just will quick the landing gear action and this is the the actual quantum drive device which opens one of enforcement devices corrected me earlier oh that's how that one works and interiors go to this one so this one yeah it's sorta has a minimal interior I actually like this shot right here because it kind of looks like you're going into a big mouth now I got I got a question for you Steve
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Steve who's Steve Chris this comes right from the cat did you even consider struts yeah where are the struts Chris well they weren't I mean that wasn't designed and into the ship and I think you know over the years we've had some we've had some people complain about struts and stuff so I think this is sort of this has sort of came about to where a lot of the new designs were trying not to obscure the viewed so much which wasn't considered with maybe some of the early concepts and yeah I heard people were actually calling for more stress on this thing well they are there I'm looking at people in chat right now saying bring
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back the struts yeah we'll make a variant that specifically adds a bunch of struts in the front there we want to pull it across right it can be we can make that happen we can add more stress we want struts more struts the people is okay yeah well well we can give them Marian that's you know that's what we do but I think it was actually very successful because it does have some struts and it convey some strength there but a lot of it is just glass and go back to the time of day see some stuff and it still has that feel of ours I basically yeah you know even without a
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million struts like the connivance no it is a it's definitely an evolution of the RSI design language it's still got the the kind of hexagonal shape it stood out that you have you have this shape language here going on islands in the back yeah and overall like the detail is sort of military utilitarian that's still a bit on the cleaner side maybe but yeah we went through a few iterations on the inside out of a bed and a restroom to the guy and of course coffee machine everyone loves a coffee man and the food processor gotta have that so yeah and actually this seat was very reminiscent of the constellation I uses
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the same dual estate control has the same like almost similar screen setup the same pivot you sit around yep yeah this was actually sort of modeled off off the constellation one school I want a race variant and it just looks fast yeah they have been working on some color variants so that might be saying just for that's not a confirmed thing is just something that you've been working on right well I like to play with exactly like when I when I get done with a ship I want to know it looks like an all black or blue black and all that stuff so that's the that's the point where I got to step in and be like artist artist got an artist people they'll make colorize it doesn't mean there's any plan whatsoever to introduce
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them into the precision universe all right it's just got an artist it looks good for colors that's just sick I think the rear end is pretty is is very successful to it actually has like it reminds me of Star Trek in some way like a little Star Trek vibe from these Michelle's here cool so the third person looks nice and yeah anything else you guys want to see it flying in 3.75 with everything up there working on it guys I'm still getting I'm still getting up I'm still getting updates any updates okay moving on to the next questions
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here will quantum enforcement be an automatic criminal offense in the UE when it's used the by civilians depends on the particular jurisdiction you're in there are currently criminality settings for utilizing the QED near to near the jurisdictions that deem it a criminal first in our court right so if you to turn it on you'll quickly notice that you'll get crime stat mornings that's something that we want to expand in the future with yeah it sound that it will evolve along with the law and order system as it continues to evolve you'll have to you know tracking your jurisdiction that you're in will become a very important part of life in
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the in the standard system and in the starts isn't universe as a whole yeah when and where you can do certain kinds of things right it'd be nice to like be able to go to a screen and then know what what's legal and not that's why I think yeah we're gonna be working on all right this was a big question so you've now been interdicted you've now been introductive can we fight back without triggering criminality for ourselves yes so you should be able to turn around and attack the person that has interdicted you and to be honest if you are a soul a soul mantis that's doing an interdiction it's it's kind of at your own peril
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because we all know the Mantis is not the most heavily armed ship in our fleet I was watching poor detox try to take somebody out in a mantis the other night and it was it was not a it was not a pleasant sight yeah so you'll want to have friends with you unless you know you happen to pull a much smaller ship or a much smaller AI effect you happen to interdict so yeah it's best utilized with others to do the attacking for you but yes you should be able to retaliate and if you're a larger ship we tell you pretty effectively once you get pulled out so I saw the conversation with Dave Pollard and we've talked about this before and other segments on the law system basically the the system tracks who shot first you know to attract
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sequester's and there was some question about whether using the QED would count as an aggressive move to some other people and some earlier builds it wasn't it wasn't so that if you defended against yourself you end it you look like the aggressor but that is definitely the direction that we're that we're moving in hopefully it will it will work the way that we intend and if it doesn't it will be bugged up and it was leased yes not looking that way that's not the intention get up and let us know but being hit with an addiction way for an inner addiction field of what or whatever we're calling it will count as the aggressive yeah you're the bad guy yes and now let's talk about that for a bit there are two kinds of quantum enforcement with the Manas there's two different modes right there saying that let's talk about what the two modes are sure there's quantum dampening which you're creating a small sphere around
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you that prevents the quantum drive from engaging so people can't contract travel away right now it's it's a 2000 meter radius volume so you kind of decide all up to someone to to make use of that it definitely uses less power than the other mode which is quantum snare the chrono snare is the charge big explosion you create a big volume that the big difference there is it actually pulls the players and AI out of quantum travel and then holds them also preventing them from quantum traveling away while they're in that much larger sphere at the current time that is a twenty thousand meter radius sphere and to mitigate some Opie use of it there are larger green zones for each of those the
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quantum snare and the the quantum dampening features so the quantum dampening green zone extends a little bit past the normal green zones we have the quantum snare is much larger than the than our green zone so you you can't just like go to port all start and then keep firing off these quantum events you consider like a system that was in place that are as I put in to prevent unlawful use of this device so if you're in a region that should be protected the device is aware of it and will prevent you from activating right plus it's just really annoying to be you know stopped right outside the port that you're in yeah so let's talk about let's talk a little bit more about that at first glance introducing any kind of interdiction ship seems like it
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would be right for trolling oh yeah I mean and obviously and I know that this was a very real concern but folks you know at home we haven't been following every ounce of development this may not be may not know all of the considerations that have gone into into managing this we've we've already talked about limiting the size of the to mode so the two modes let me in the bubble it being restricted within certain green zones you know where I won't won't trigger at all it being in enforced by law you know if you use it even even outside those green zones was still too close to civilised area the law system responding to you we've talked there's also things you talked in your QA post and by the way if you haven't checked the QA post that went up last week on RSI well you can do so once the websites
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back up he realized halfway through promoting the Q&A they're working on so there's a lot of resources for that derp what are some of the ways that we've gone about trying to manage this that this threshold of trolling well that I mean that wasn't one of the main things we were worried about upfront was I could activate this device how do we prevent people from griefing because honestly it sounds fun to just go to port olisar and turn it on and people are like they can't stop you they can't shoot you because you're in a green zone so there was problem number one make sure that they can't activate in the green zone and make sure they could do it if they do go inside the green zone
- 00:41:29
we disable it so if you do activate it outside the other person can't shoot you down and once David Pollard's change goes in you'll be able to shoot him and take them out without yourself getting a criminal infraction so a lot of the stuff that is getting added is ways to use the you know the existing systems to about you can't use it but you're gonna bring it at your own risk so you can activate it outside you'll get a criminal stabbing and then to me I might take you down eventually because you turn into a baddie there's also restraints on the device itself the Mantis is kind of like one of the lower tier interdiction ships so it only has that small range that it could pull ships out of and it also requires a lot of power from that ship so just
- 00:42:20
activating it well basically if you try to fly you'll it feels drunk and if you try to shoot you'll be end up using all your power so if you just use it by yourself you're gonna have a trouble if you use it with some other players and you form your own little group that brings in some systemic stuff and then the question is how do you go and retaliate well I love the community and I'm pretty sure if they find a bunch of people I mean maybe this could be one of those service beacon things that we add actually that'd be pretty cool a bunch of players are trolling someone makes the service beacons saying hey take me take out that guy there Durr griefing a bunch of people with Dumanis and then a whole swarm of people come in so we want to add some ways that will make it I guess systemic and gameplay for the
- 00:43:08
players so it's not like they have ways to counter it using some of the systems now again this is the tier zero so we did the Green Zone the power and the low criminal stuff we'll see how players use it abuse it and we'll just react accordingly like to expand on what Mark said the primary way we're doing it balancing it is to require a lot of power so the the having the mantis at its just complete idle state and then activating the charging up and activating air gets you right to the edge of what your power plant is capable of supplying and so if you do any afterburner maneuvers or fire your weapons as limited as they are and do that at the same time it will shut down
- 00:43:59
the device so you'll players will quickly learn that you'll want to turn down your other systems in order to effectively use the snare so that's where you know the players are it's up to them to decide hey don't want to reduce my shield do wanna turn off my my primary weapons do I want to reduce my thrusters capability so you make that decision before you said you setup your trap and then you go ahead and spring the trap and then again utilizing your friends is probably the best the best method there and of course like any other game system will continue to monitor it through you know we watch streams we read that we read the issue council reports we check spectrum we check reading you know we'll continue to
- 00:44:45
monitor feedback if tweaks need to be made either in making it more restrictive or making it more available right you know you know look those those changes will be made as we deem necessary sir we haven't even talked about like you know what's like what's the counter play to to QED this is the what's the counter what about this do we have the counter quantum enforcement so this is tier zero and we've just implemented so we this is the counter play will be something that we develop as we get some more feedback in and have time to iterate on this but for now again the the mantis is not not the greatest ship to take on another ship head-head so there's that unfortunately we don't have the ability to quantum
- 00:45:34
travel outside of the of the normal lanes by flying quandra right so you can't choose to create your own path but you can certainly choose to like make a doglike path to your destination to avoid possible QED volumes if you if you think that there's going to be one in that path a lot of people traveling to those comlinks yeah I'm racing to go off of what Kirk was saying is use vehicle features specifically has plans in them in the near future to upgrade basically ping to utilize more of those back-end services to uncover more information for they're out so right now ping just find stuff that's actually spawn we want to adjust it to find interesting things
- 00:46:22
that may not exist yet or could happen in an area so we want also pingel much further distances and will allow you to scan potentially much further distances so not saying it will happen but in an operation what would happen or something we would probably explore is maybe you know do a large ping and we discover maybe there's a interdiction happening in that area maybe not give you the exact coordinates we're like that area has some kind of interdiction play you should be worried it give you a clue as to where these things could be um and then there's other things that we can explore like yeah this is our currently our owning only QED ship should we make more we can certainly balance it so that maybe we require a capital ship sized QED device that in order to pull other
- 00:47:12
capital ships out there might be some counterplay with that like maybe you do have to have like the same size ship to do that maybe the smaller ships can you know pass through these using some kind of quantum quantum physics dangling tunneling that's not only better or maybe we can team up with other small smaller QED ships at the same time to create a really powerful quantum enforcement bubble that can pull like that yeah a quantum I'm sorry a capital ship out of comm travel and we do warn players like you're about to be an addicted a few seconds beforehand it would be cool if we had a mechanic where we can boost power to some system to potentially serve first through it or so
- 00:48:00
like I mean there's a lot of options we've talked about exploring in the future no definitely and of course we've also mentioned in the past you know the size and quality and grade of components themselves will start begin to play a factor like you may be able to outfit a ship that's more resistant to being pulled out or something you more resistant to the effects of a quantum enforcement device it's like that so as more and more of the component system comes online there'll be a number of ways to work around this yep you guys know the app Waze when you like travel you can have like a word of mouth thing where you know like someone who's been in tradition leave a mark or something and somebody you know they they message everyone in a
- 00:48:48
second only thing that oh there's it there's an inner tater down this way so I I think you're probably absolutely right in that Chris as more than as more the Stan system comes online there's more star citizen comes online and this becomes a bigger thing you will see orgs that that act as service organizations for this kind of thing reporting you know quantum quantum enforcement's you know reported in this sector and this sector along this route nothing and it there will be an entire new cottage industry created for players to provide services to other players I think you probably hit that right on the head Chris man even thought about that good job I love that how will players be aware that they're being pulled out now
- 00:49:37
you talked a bit about the problem with the having the warnings in time what what will we be able to tell them plea the okay I've just been pulled out am I gonna know that it was Kirk am ia what am I gonna know about why I just dropped out of quantum so in the future we want to improve the UI so that we give you more information about that currently though we do have the the rather large the effect ring that comes that emanated from the mattress as it's doing it's either either the dampening or the quantum snares so you will see like this shark like ship kind of floating toward you with this with this ring of rather impressive the effects coming
- 00:50:27
around you so that is one method because of the current distances at which we do entrap players with the quantum snare they should also be on your radar and so you will see the the mattress that it's naired you because it should be within radar distances because the quantum zone it also increases your e/m substantially there's no way that they'll be they'll be hidden once you get pulled out of corner travel and are within the range of your radar we were talking about that the other day about you and when you pull them out of when you pull them out of quantum like your that you you have to be there you know yeah you want to hit them and they come out of quantum so far away that you can't that you have to like travel to them and catch up to that
- 00:51:15
you can't catch up to them to do it's not it's right that's a dichotomy because if we were preventing quantum travel then we can't pull you out far enough so that it requires quantum travel to get to because what's fun is that yeah yeah and it's it's you want to pull them out with enough range that you can actually get to them and attack them or steal in whatever but at the same time as a game balance you want they you want we want them to come out close enough that they have a chance to attack you for pulling me out and it's like that so it's a it's gameplay reasons to make sure that that that they stay close together once they come in what were some of the most difficult technical hurdles bringing about quantum enforcement we talked about this stuff
- 00:52:03
you had to do to change quantum travel but to make this work and we touched on a little bit but this question is what was the most difficult technical hurdle I the thing that just made you put your fist up to the sky in rage now the most difficult technically is what we talked about earlier in the predictive model and have it work with back-end services whose model it's very simplified they don't know anything about zones at the moment so they don't know that you could be in a certain zone that rotates because it's orbiting about itself so the game server has to in an optimal way hopefully to do the math and the calculation to consume as at least the CPU as possible and send this prediction of the trajectory in a simplified by yet
- 00:52:50
not to approximate way to the back-end services so I do believe this was the biggest challenge we tackled in in this implementation yeah I believe that was it yes there's also the interdiction device itself so the back end for this functionality to work with the player in addiction we had to have the back end be aware of all the interdiction devices that are active at a time so we didn't have the new nice API that I was referring to earlier where we could hook into that with the new services so we still have that ole or I wouldn't call old but it's our current I think service that determines player or not we're gonna get interdicted um so I think it was the probability volume service and
- 00:53:37
so we had to work with Tony to figure out how we could give him information to the back-end all about these interdiction spheres and long with those segmented interdiction points to determine if we actually haven't interdicted when autos are mentioning that those rotating zones well when the interdiction device is on we have to relay that information to the backend that we have this bubble and it's at this location but that locations in world space so you have to worry about the frequency of these updates because if you're orbiting and you're going this way and the dots right here it will rotate around and maybe you don't get it interdicted but the backend says that you are so then we have to take that information that we gave to the backend
- 00:54:26
go okay when we give them the information they're over here when we got the information because there's delays sending and receive we're now here are we actually going to interdict or is the interdiction point at a new location so the we use the back end service to kind of give us a hint and then on the game side we kind of look at that go that's right but we're actually gonna be here or we're not gonna get interdicted but it looks like we are let's send another one to see if that hits the back end because maybe it's on or off so the problem is not just with the device itself but how descend where the interdiction is where we're jumping to and have everyone be happy with the agreement that we actually did do an interdiction I think the general issues that we had to oakum overcome was we're dealing with
- 00:55:14
kwang-ho travel Karma travel is very fast so with that speed comes big distances and so being able to ensure that we're actually going to hit the mark and be accurate with the collision of the quantum snare volumes and these Quantrill paths and ensuring that that will work every time is was the biggest hurdle that we had to overcome especially since it lost communications communication we're having acceleration get higher and higher as we move along you know in this one second of your jump you could be a few thousand kilometers which is a lot but a second later you could be a few million just because of our acceleration ramp so a little small error can add up to a lot of errors yeah
- 00:56:06
you agree with all that Chris yes where we talked we talked a little bit already Chris about how the Mantis has taken a lot of the existing RSI design language and maybe a vault it you know maybe maybe a you know brought it forward quite a bit we've been making these ships for a while now hypothetically were you to work on another RSI ship what would be the part what would be what from the Mantis would you want to bring forward to the next I should curse a whale no no time by a specific ship but what about the improvements to the visual language of
- 00:56:53
RSI what would you be looking forward to bringing bring forward to the next artists a ship obviously I bring this part in hell I mean I would say you know again we sort of said in the beginning this is a different ship from RSI it's actually this well the Aurora's oh but I mean we it's been a little bit more a little bit more may look this one is a little bit sleeker than the ones before I would say I would say we the players probably would probably still do a minimal amount of struts like we did with this one I'm not saying we're getting rid of them but you know strike a balance I think the early iterations of our size ships you know could be excessive in some cases
- 00:57:43
and yeah Hotel may be some of the just the tech design that I that we incorporated in this one just some of the small details and stuff it's a little bit more round again I don't know if I would want this look on a bangle carrier I like the bangle carriers it's like a big you know military ship so you wouldn't want this sort of like sleek design probably why Ryan either which is it there's the RSI Orion and there's the RSI Polaris which are still yet to come it's not a lot of that look language wouldn't work for a more industrial yeah yeah yeah agreed yeah I think it really just depends on the ship itself a lot and most of the smaller ships I could see us going a
- 00:58:34
little bit more in the direction of the mantas perhaps yeah it's also interesting there's something I've followed this this community for a long time and we see it we see a lot of that looks like an Aegis ship or that looks like an anvil ship or that doesn't look like a Drake ship or whatever there's everybody's got an opinion about you know what looks like a particular shape manufacturer and what doesn't you made a good point earlier that as far as ships that have been implemented the game we don't actually have a lot of RSI ships that have been implemented in the game since the the Bengal and the Polaris and the Orion are still outstanding it's really just the aurora and the constellation before before this so that still leaves a lot of room to explore what it means to be an RSI ship and I think you've done a pretty good job with that with the mantas thank you it was a
- 00:59:23
pleasure I really like it and I don't get to say compliments to people very often so I'm gonna do it well when I saw it first I thought it was I liked it too but I thought it was more like you know when a car manufacturer they'll hire some external designer to say hey go do an experimental design to see how it looks right that's exactly what I thought when I saw this I'm like I kind of like it they make a good point I don't know not only do manufacturers do that very often but they also get influenced by other manufacturers when they come up with something real popular remember when the Mustang was redone by Ford and how many other car companies started taking taking after it or when dodge introduced the charger later than they redid the charger and how many other car company start going okay well you know start taking us in that shape language a lot of that is actual car
- 01:00:11
designers moving from one company to the other and then that's how that happens that's true I mean III I wouldn't I wouldn't put it past I wouldn't put it past anybody to say RS I might have hired somebody away from origin that some of some of those bad girls there alright that's it that's all the time we got I gotta go you guys get back to work thank you so much everybody for Tate one more time join us although you made it through your very first video anything and I made it a live show through you right in the fire how'd you do you okay yes job salafi to participate thank you very much for the opportunity and I look forward for another time all right I'm gonna remember that already warmed up yep all right so that's Kirk that's all though that's mark that's Chris I'm
- 01:01:03
Jarrod that's all we got time for here on star citizen life I keep an eye out on the website guys I've been reading updates they are still working on it they've made a lot of good progress it's just as they get past one thing there's another thing and another thing though that they're trying to free up the bandwidth anything to make way for all of the people that are trying to get into a star citizen right now it's it sounds like a trite thing to say but that's what I'm being told and I have no been looking at the chat I don't doubt it I don't doubt it we've got we've got more viewers on than we normally do it sounds like folks are pretty excited about star citizen right now with the caves and the Mantis and the defender and all that good stuff did you see that defender trailer well it's great I actually just saw it for the first time today I wasn't involved in it at all so I got to see it the first time today it was pretty much everything about the fender is all the crab-eating boxes videos awesome alright guys take care we'll see you like next
- 01:01:55
week everybody thank you very much thank you thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen a 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
Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.
