Star Citizen Live: That Vehicle Life 3.14

23 July 202101:02:101,859 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hello everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live that vehicle life 314 i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before it's where we take about a week take about a week out of the end of our day take about an hour at the end of our and uh hang out with our developers chat a little bit discuss the events of the day the week the the month talk a little bit about star citizen's development on the show this week i've now said a week more times in the last two minutes and a half a week on the show this week we have got members of our esteemed vehicle experience vehicle feature and vehicle tech teams on to discuss changes and features and the experience of
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flight in the upcoming alpha 314 which is available for testing on the public test universe right now uh so let's take a minute because every show is somebody's first show let's go around the room and introduce everybody who we are let's start richard who are you and what do you do for star citizen yep so i am yep so i am richard and i'm the lead game center on the vehicle experience team and this is maggie who is currently for swimming this is the first time alexa is the first time maggie's got an introduction it is hi maggie uh david who are you and what do you do for star citizen uh i'm david coulson i'm the lead vehicle programmer in the eu basically mark's eu counterpart i guess i look after the eu programmers making vehicle features
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right and you still have your star wars posters currently hanging on the wall instead of it's actually a little off yeah it's like i'm sorry well thanks yogi who are you and what do you do for star citizen yeah my name is yugi klatt and i'm a senior game to program programmer on the league experience team focusing on a lot of space combat and i don't have a cat but you do have a flight suit i do have flight suits it's right here it's not ready though it's missing a few patches but um yeah not ready i can hook you up i've got i've got a giant wall in the other room full of patches so uh and last but certainly not not least the bug smasher himself mark abend who are you and what do you do for star citizen hello i'm mark aben i'm a lead vehicle engineer at the la studio basically a
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counterpart to what david does in eu and i'm also known as the infamous bug smasher and i'm trying to pass on the title the yogi because he keeps smashing crazy bugs as well and this week of the week we're doing vehicle fun this week on the week we're doing vehicle fun i just want to put in weeks somehow i've only been doing this for the better part of a decade you'd think i'd be actually good but no um all right good so this week we are not this episode this episode uh we are talking exclusively about alpha 314 which is currently available for ptu um i know folk lots of folks have questions about the future uh what you're going to do you know next
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and stuff like this i just want to preface that we do have a little thing called citizencon coming down the pipeline so so a lot of conversation of the future of star citizen everything is being saved for for that major event coming in october so so if i i i understand that you have lots of exciting questions about what's next for star citizen uh rest assured we'll get to those in short order but today we are talking about today in alpha 314 uh so if you're watching live on twitch.tv you can submit your questions with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets that'll help us pull it out from the chat and of course we threw up the thread in spectrum our bespoke communication platform on robertsspaceindustries.com and started collecting questions there all week so we're going to begin with those
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and right off the bat uh a a giant a not insignificant amount of questions uh had to do with weapon ranges uh which have seemed to change uh fairly dramatically in alpha 314. so right off the bat let's just start with a general question we'll get into the more detailed ones that came from the thread what what what what has happened in 314 to weapon ranges what has changed uh let's just start there let's just start there separate the fact from the fiction what has actually changed in 314 okay i'll take this one so um 3.14 does a massive change in the overall combat system and the thing which we always wanted to do and which we now starting to do is to
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give every item every ship and every weapon a dedicated purpose right we do not want these items to be just interchangeable there needs to be proper pros and cons but this is a very complex balancing process um so to start with that balance process we categorized the weapons in different well we created different weapon categorizations the first thing we split up uh was the size one two four weapons from the size five plus weapons mainly because those weapons are typically employed by fighters whereas size five plus except for some cases like the vanguard um are typically carried by heavier uh ships right um but the focus on 3.14 was on the small fighters and within those weapons we also then separated the fast firing weapons we which we consider anti-fighter weapons versus the
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slow firing weapons which are mainly cannons um and um the difference we did there was to check hey what are the ranges in which we want these weapons to be actually employed right most of the combat between two ships happens within roughly 1200 meters when you go when you talk about fast firing weapons so extending these ranges a lot didn't really bring us any many more benefits then we also tweak the cannons to be the heavy hitters not necessarily just by damage but also by their efficiency so you can well together with a new capacitor system you can now use you can use cannons to dish out a longer continuous high dps stream as opposed to the weapons which are meant for fighters because in fighter gameplay um we do not really want to see the situation where you just tape down the
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fire button and then just like fire and fire and fire without any consequences so for those anti-fighter weapons they will empty your your your their ammo load them a lot faster um to enforce the player to pick to pick carefully when they actually want to employ them so this is like the story why we place them place them out that much that doesn't mean though that they're going to stay as they are right so at the moment we have like all the weapons and these categories are pretty similar to each other they will be different again in the future but uh we have to like well we can't do all at once right so um for us it was important to first set up the framework and then do the differences again and uh this is what we're doing um with the weapon ranges to be 14. and just so it is balancing something that can be
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done in a single quarter yes um i mean i'm gonna say no um because it because it's quite a lot of work and you know and you know and especially with 314 we've changed a lot so we've had to kind of reset some things to bring not only the weapons and everything but the ships together in a setting where that kind of resets things for us so the ships are a lot closer in performance but actually he said you know our plan isn't just to keep it like this our plan is to discover you know what our new features mean for the game because you know we can test things as much as we want but but but it's got to get in the players hands and then we can see what happens as the players make choices you know and and then basically it's how their choices influence the results of that so if they pick certain weapon loadouts i'll say put you know our pixel and
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ships at certain times we can figure out and you know we can see patterns in this and that will the balance of the weapons and the ships going forwards but it's really difficult to kind of balance all this in one kind of quarter so we've kind of done it in stages where we're happy with the framework we have now but i wouldn't say we're happy with the finer details within the balance because we're still figuring it out um so that's going to come over several releases but it isn't something we're just going to stop now and go that's it you know we've got a dedicated team now to kind of do this over every single release going forward gotcha so so this isn't this is an intentional thing to to kind of draw things back to a to a simpler state and then start to build them back out over subsequent patches it sounds like
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what you're saying yeah that's yeah that's basically it uh the cool thing too is um as rich and them are balancing stuff they have a lot of analytical events that they research and look at to see what's happening throughout the entire pu ac so you know the one thing we always see a lot too is a particular thread or something like that they say that they're seeing a certain experience which might be true in that certain circumstance but we also have a lot of analytical events that happen throughout so we could rich could see like the bigger picture of what's going on that maybe that little small thing is something much bigger this happens and they do a lot of looking at and data analysis to kind of see you know how should the balance go and where it's going right now and there's always those fun players
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that are exploiting certain things it's like how in the world did they do that oh all right so if how do you work if you you can't do this all at once like like knowing that that you you can only put out part of the picture this patch and part of the picture next patch and then part of the picture the patch after that uh what are the benefits and drawbacks to this approach how does this approach help you how does this approach make your life more difficult um it makes our life a little bit easier in terms of basically understanding the changes we've made to the game in terms of the feature set so the big change for 314 is we've got
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a brand new combat system where you know you can put you know balancing your shields weapons and um you know thrusters and that's a new system so basically going backwards a little bit helps us understand how that system is influencing the game you know rather than being bothered about how it works on the individual ships as much and being cut out by kind of tuning it to a certain ship or not we get to see an overall experience of what this added to the game and then we can look at it from an experienced point of view and go right you know what does this feature allow us to do on this ship on that ship and where does that need to fit because we've done a rough guide of where the ships fit but until we see it in the combat situation so we see all the ships fighting each other and the different weapons and different missiles and torpedoes all
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come together in terms of combat we don't really know because there's so much to test there is you know there's so many ships worth pointing out as well that we don't we also don't want to kind of leave the game in a not very fun state while we're working on it like we are still operating a live game and even though it's alpha we ideally want each patch to be fun um so we're not gonna like you know intentionally do something wrong that's going to make it not fun now in preparation for something in the future we still kind of want to give it the best representation we can in this patch and it just so happens i think especially in the case of 314 that making the game fun for this particular feature set that we have now um also helps us understand the features
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that we have changed for this release which is what you know rich and yogi are after mention um let's see if there's more before we move on from from weapon ranges uh so as far as the as far as the ranges how do you intend to solve uh how do you tend to address what is what's currently one of the uh not side effects but effects of the new weapon ranges and that large ships are less capable of defending themselves against uh fighters with these shorter ranges well that that problem existed before already right because a large ship like a hammerhead cannot just evade evade the bullets it has to tank the damage
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one way or another um but that specific use case actually came out out of the play test like we didn't see that in our internal tests until we but then the behavior of um kiting the ships at a large range and just like trying to avoid the shots that way while still keeping the firing forward is something that we honestly didn't see before right it might sound odd but it it was like that so we tried to counter that by reducing the um the range of the of the heavy hitters to like meeting the cannons like the ones which have like a shorter range now to allow the fighters to get into range take down the amide faster right though i would still argue that um the thing it's it's not the range that is effectively
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defining how well a hammer can defend itself it's always the projectile velocity right um and it came up in the feedback that the hammerhead was supposed to get like you know weapons which with uh projectiles that just fly fast and does give the uh ship a better chance to to hit attacking fighters right um we actually wanted to try that out but the weapon system cannot do this at the moment like we can the change we can change the properties of a weapon contextually but we cannot change the properties of the projectile um so once that kind of tag has been built in we can re-evaluate that thing but for 3.14 was not possible to address that being said we would still say i see any kind of gun gameplay as like short-range short-range gameplay right short-range gameplay
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and we do have missiles for medium and long-range gameplay right um but it can be argued that uh there could be that like looking for we can also implement other kinds of weapons which are more effective and like well beyond the uh the close range area there's also um once we get uh physicalized damage things are going to change a bit um where the hammerhead is going to be like as you're saying more of a tank be where it could take more of an impact it has much more thicker armor that the physicalized damage is just not going to be able to penetrate as well as the guns that it's shooting onto fighters so right now it's probably going to be mostly just a health pool while in the future when physicalized damage comes apart it's going to be a different type of game um that's where velocity and the
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projectile masses will take more of an account and you're going to see a different dynamic with that but that's also going with what dave was saying earlier you know we're in adding these incremental changes to get to where we want to go and we don't want to throw everything all at once and unbalance the game all there we're adding little bits of changes to see how well it affects the gameplay and getting player feedback to change some things with the analytical data uh you mentioned the physicalized damage uh there are several questions in both the live chat and the spectrum uh about won't all this work have to be redone when armor you know comes online physical damage comes online i mean that's the beauty of star citizen you know you you balance for the tech
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that we have now and you anticipate the tech we'll have in the future it's the same issue that we have with a bunch of other systems you we can't build you know the damage and the balance for tech that it's not ready for the live game so while internally we're preparing for all that stuff and having a lot of discussions and testing a lot of philosophies it will have to get changed once we get to that point but we're already having discussion internally and what that means so it's like when we had um a more recent one the shield tech where it was using sdfs we rolled that out for a few different ships and the community actually found some loopholes and bugs with it we kind of want to do that with physicalized damage too once we get to that point is we roll it
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out see what impact that has and then make balance changes when it gets to there but yes it will definitely change the game and i i know rich is looking forward to it yes yeah yeah you know it's definitely you know it like like you know it is definitely um a big challenge to keep on top of a live product you know as i say it's but also think of what's coming in the future and how we get to where we're going to be in the future but the two do kind of align because we're always thinking about it um which which which you know does make it difficult sometimes kind of explaining to the in our players again that we've done this for a reason and we've done this in anticipation or we've done this because this is what we have in the game currently but it will change um and it is difficult to keep on
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top of that but you know it keeps me on my toes and it keeps the team on our toes so you know it's part of the enjoyment really you know because because we're always moving the tech forwards so it's always going to change and you know for me that's a really great part of star citizen is the tech's always getting better you know yeah let's move on to some uh weapon specific questions that aren't exactly uh range related uh there have been a number of changes to ballistic weapons in 314. uh le before we dive into the the smaller changes at them let's let's just talk about the actual role of ballistics versus energy have they changed are they the same as they've always been they they pretty much haven't changed i mean the balance has changed right but
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the function and the way that we intend for them to work hasn't really changed like the idea um the idea pretty much has been all along that ballistics are not like oh they only work against uh you know the whole of the ship or something um isn't quite true like the shield is is taking away some of the stopping power of ballistic um ammo through absorption um but they still will then go through and attack the actual um uh hull even if you have a shield up now which is how it's always been um we've changed some of this a little bit which maybe uh yogi knows a little bit more the detail of what's happening there but that's largely the idea so like you know the the ballistics then become like obviously very desirable right
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because they can damage the hull even though you have a shield up um but obviously a lot of work has happened in this patch to make ballistics this like significantly more valuable thing where the the ammo is much lower um and they run out really quickly and they don't regen in the same way that um energy weapons do but that's kind of the trade-off right you can do loads of uh effective damage to a ship with ballistic guns but you don't have this uh this cool feature with uh energy weapons that you can reject the ammo which is why they're you know how we're trying to balance this okay um sorry i'm getting uh i'm getting a mess i got a message from uh rit folks uh our la office where i'm currently at right now is experiencing an internet
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issue per forces down and stuff so they're about to switch over to a backup internet i'm still online but we may lose connectivity so the stream goes down uh folks we'll we'll pop back up momentarily hopefully um why were magazine sizes reduced so much for uh ballistic weapons in 314 um that is mostly down to the role we want to see in ballistics i mean the purpose of ballistics was always to feel limited but powerful and in 3.13 we didn't really have that ballistics were practically just cannons which looked and sounded a bit different compared to laser laser weapons or energy weapons i mean they had like fire times of several minutes right um and it comes back to the to the thing that david
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said before like we want to give these things purpose and um [Music] the the specific issue that we had in 3.14 was that um was the amount of what's the length of a continuous fire stream which you could put out um which was always much more powerful than the um than the uh energy cannons which were which had natural fire pauses because needed to regenerate but that offset was very very large still and even when we um equalize the dps outputs of energy repeaters versus ballistic weapons just to see how they would perform the ballistics were still a lot lot more powerful because they could retain like they could keep up this weapon stream right and um at the moment we do not have any other ways to to force a a uh a break in that fire
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pattern so for that reason we harshly limited the ammo and also up the damage quite a lot to force players to make very conscious choices about when to employ those weapons there's a sorry there's one extra point i forgot to mention about ballistics which maybe we shouldn't go into too much detail on but uh mark mentioned the physicalized damage when that comes along ballistics rolls will change um and obviously certain ships that have very high armor will then be much more resilient to ballistics than they are now rash so um yeah so there's more work we want to do on them to make them feel different in the future but uh everything will make more sense once uh the physicalized armor system is in um but for now we're we're happy in terms of like where it
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gives us um where it brings us in terms of like weapon versus ship balance um what about uh things like reloading if the ammo counts are going to be so low is there some kind of change to reloading coming not in 3.14 but that is something we're going to talk about after 3.14 okay so have you considered reducing the amount of shield damage that ballistics do in exchange for higher hull damage uh i think that's probably because of the the the big three second takedown builds that were that we're seeing people just alpha striking with gatlings and um yeah though that doesn't so firstly that kind of approach is contradicting
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what uh what we want and the general idea of like energy weapons versus ballistics um but the other part of that is that our weapons they do not have a shield damage property it's the other way around our shields have a damage type property and every and every weapon dishes out um damage of a certain type right can be distortion can be physical energy and there's a couple of others and a shield has absorption resistance values that counter that so even if we wanted to do that we couldn't do it right away um so this is nothing we can do for 3.14 there's also um coming along which we want to do and talk about more price and their point with the physicalized damage is our ship destruction is kind of arcady still um everyone knows it i mean we had it since like the first ac uh you know you hit the health pool of a critical part and
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the ship's dead we and and i'm sure cr has also mentioned many times in the past we don't want that we want it where you could damage certain sections and the ship could still be functional but it doesn't die so we've also been talking for other systems like insurance and that what does it mean that we indicate that a ship is in a bad state maybe all the power plants are gone or certain parts of the wing just make it inoperable so you can now have to you know the ship is basically dead but not dead so once we get more aligned on what those critical areas are we could reduce the arcadey death explosion and that will get rid of those instant build where you just ram a bunch of health and then it dies so the problems that we're seeing now are going to be
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different problems in the future it's just those things that we keep repeating too it's those incremental steps to get us there that is that is quite a meme answer the problems we're seeing now will be different problems in the future welcome to programming i want to see that quote next to mark aven's face on my twitter before the show is done please there's going to be at least 10 of them um there there was a question in the chat about the the hammerhead and why the uh why the ammo is linked uh specifically to the guns and not like the overall turret because something like the poor hammerhead is gonna have like i don't know 20 24 guns uh around it and
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there and and they said like cries and perseus uh why is this tied to the guns and not the turrets uh this is just because uh we can't do it any other way at the moment um but this comes back to the discussion uh or to the question we had before we'll talk about these things in 3.14 but specifically for that reason we swapped out most of the loadouts of the ships to be uh to have at least 50 energy weapons uh and only a fraction of them actually has a ballistic uh weaponry on board but yeah but obviously that is the case right if if i'm flying in a huge capital ship then then of course it makes more sense that we can dish out a lot more of ballistic rounds but yeah at the moment when we say like we can't do it it just means that
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um the system right now needs reworking to do that and we for this release say lack the time to actually do that yeah nick as as as as a common refrain even with 700 folks around the world all working in different areas on different aspects of the game there are only so many things you can work on at any given time so uh let's leave let's do our last ballistic ammo question and get off the ballistic topic uh why does ballistic ammo have range in space shouldn't they travel at the same speed onward and onward and onward until they eventually hit something so there's multiple things there right uh first of all um i would draw the game card um if we had un like unlimited ballistic ammo ranges you could sit at 20 kilometers away from
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my from a hammerhead and just kill it right right there like with enough given enough time um that's not fun and there's not a lot of you can you can do to counter that the second thing is if it just keeps traveling forever you get into a situation where you need to track all these bullets on the client and the server and um given how big our fire rates are sometimes um it just wouldn't be maintainable it would be very expensive i mean this is again like the real world question also in the real world there's a lot of ammunition that has an integrated timer so it blows up after having flown for three or four seconds just to not having some bullets hitting a poor guy on the street somewhere else right so i think i think it is okay just to to go for the gaming part here i
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imagine there's also got to be some the the physics system if it had to track every bullet that was ever fired infinitely across the entire system that would that would cause some unnecessary primarily why we had a lifetime was arena commander one you could blame me it's like yeah [Laughter] it's not worth the additional desync that was that that would cause we have enough desync as it is uh let's talk scanning uh mark uh um currently there are no downsides to sending out a ping is this intended this is uh not intended um going back to what david was saying earlier we've are doing incremental changes to not completely break the game um the primary big changes that we've done with radar scanning is
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for 314 is to move it off of being vehicle-centric and make the system work with any generic entity that design wants so the shift between 313 and 314 was to move the system over to that new system while trying to keep it very intact to what players originally had fundamentally the system has a huge overhaul that exposes a lot of things for design to change and fluctuate and add things it's just we didn't add extra things in there because of time and because of balancing um so eventually yes we'll be able to add and incorporate other aspects into it you got to get that that crimson tide hunt for
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october you know sending a ping out you know also also makes you visible to other people there was something we're trying to get in for 314 but it wasn't going to make it last minute we're calling it i don't i think we called it before signature deltas where when certain emissions come on the ship where we categorize them to help the player understand what's happening one of those is ping and then quantum and then even like emp it's um enough em in ir or is getting uh emitted out of this object we classify it somehow and we didn't get the system in in time for 314 but when you emit a ping the concept is it generates a lot of em and ir
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so that not only do you get to see things when uh you ping out but other people get to see that maybe you're pinging out there's a contact pinging in that area so you kind of expose yourself a bit when you ping out the other thing that we didn't get to is um power con power requests certain ships might require more power when they do a ping and just balance we haven't gotten there poor rich has actually i think a change list to balance all the em and ir signatures but it's it's just one of those things where we don't want to shove too much into a patch and completely change too many things until we've tried it out and rolled it little bits and pieces of it out yeah uh uh follow up ping question
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uh is the intended design uh to be manual single pings only i mean you got that thing from you know one ping only from from hunt for october it's great but uh uh folks have started to ask about whether they can set intermit uh you know you know intermediate intermittent pings or regular ping every five minutes or whatever stuff like that the intent design was always of course you hit a button and then the action happens however like some other systems that we've had when we change ping to always happen rather not in scan mode the community comes back with feedback that they would like to improve the game so i actually just had this conversation with the radar team before this meeting and even yogi brought it up with myself
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i think a day or two earlier it's like even if we don't add the button to repeatedly action players will just make scripts to automatically do that so we might as well incorporate that so we've literally just got the approval to add that to our backlog to add that to the feature so yes we're going to do that at some point i mean players will just do it anyway so might as well add the support keep referencing crimson tide and hunt for october i'm like k19 widowmaker never gets any submarine movie love but i mean you could do it just be cautious that once we get the signature deltas in you're going to be exposing yourself more frequently now that other people could see your ping you understand jared that all your movie
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reference is going over my head yeah i know i was like movie yeah i heard that before uh are gas clouds a good place to hide because of the new cross-section signatures or environmental concealments 314 we didn't get a chance to add ambient areas into the environment but we're hoping to do that in the next patch or two or at least roll out different areas we have um the room system and the room system could do things like pressure air and heat it also could um add ambient values into the scene so you could design could set up you know a space station like port olisar to have ambient on the outside
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and a different ambient on the inside so we have that full that system fully fleshed out we just haven't put it in to the verse um for players just yet it didn't make 314 but we're hoping to roll out ambient in other areas yes i did i completely forgot you 571 faded defunct had it did have bon jovi in it let's talk about some generations of those words let's talk about some general ship balancing uh stuff here because that's such a big part of 314 uh in general how would you say it's going i i are you happy where 314 currently is is is i we just we just talked about how it's the next step in a series of steps that'll come patch after patch after
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patch but uh did you get where you wanted to get to in 3 14 be honest where are we at i think we always want to make it perfect you know that's the problem is you know we it you know we'd love it to go out in a place where we go right we nailed it but you know i don't think we have but that's part of it being a very you know it's a very complex game to bounce this isn't just moving a few things and the numbers work out and then the balance works there's so many different systems and so many different things you know even having a different amount of thrusters on the or they've been in a different location or or you know or a different power plant setup or a different cooler set up can really affect where that ship fits so even though the numbers look right until it goes in the game and it fits
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everything else it's really hard to know where that ship fits so i'd say we're pretty happy that we don't think particularly broken the balance of the game which which is basically what we said before but we wanted this release to go out where we really haven't done anything majorly wrong and broken everything and it creates a foundation but i wouldn't say we're really happy with how each individual ship fits or how each individual component all kind of weapon fits yet we've we've you know we've still got a lot of work to do on that but as far as the foundation goes i think we're pretty happy um but you know i said you know we you know we'd love it to be perfect but it takes a lot of time um to do this and a lot of testing as well that's a really big part of what we do is it's there's a lot of testing
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you know and then we can look at the data to back up some of the feedback we get and everything so it takes a long time to kind of get together and and just figure everything out because there's so many systems that come together to create what that ship is in you know in the game as well you know and it could go for the rear down scanning system as well you know we've got a lot of intended balance for that and that requires every single component on every single ship to be set you know how it's intended to be and that's also just not it's just not the case right now but you know we've been building a team to kind of do this so you know there's lots of stuff to do and we're cracking on with it um a couple questions in the chat about time to kill is there like a do you have a do you have a specific number
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you you you work towards how do you figure out time to kill and and whether uh what what what what whether it's the items that are getting you where you need to be in in the right amount of time or whether it's the skill of the player talk just talk to me about time to kill and how the hell you guys work with this idea of how long it should take you to kill a ship okay so um in general from the feedback in our combat test what we had in before 3.14 uh the perceived time to kill was always too too long for us right because you needed to you could tape your fire button down on fire forever and eventually ships will explode but it was like it was not really not really meaningful um i think giving an exact time time to kill set is not is not really
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working because you cannot really measure this uh measure it properly all right um combat is very dynamic and whether how a pilot flies his ship uh like if he makes a left barrel roller kick takes like other maneuvers into his uh into his use the the overall time to kill changes so much based on the individual pilot like this this um well it's not really really useful for us right um and also the other thing with exact time to kills is that it kind of like tells you hey you have an exact number you aim me for and i would say no right um because if you just look at numbers and then you tools that determine the data uh data mind the game data and trying to draw strategies out of that it's like this is something we would like to avoid
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we want to avoid the um the gameplay of bail of building and meta build that will always be better than all other builds combined right so as such for us it's not important to to go to to get an exact number but rather to experience how these ships and fighters and shields how they feel and if you if you as a player think they give you the advantage that you need right um because i mean ultimately we we we want to play a game and not um well read out an excel sheet yeah um so yeah that's that's why we do not have a time to kill uh a specific time to kill um i mean we have we roughly know what where we would want it to be but this is some data we really don't want to give out because we want people
00:39:19
to enjoy it and tell us hey this is too long this is too short and then we adapt it accordingly um so yeah i think it's also i would add as we um improve the actual flight uh you know experience as in moving your ship around in combat we want to head toward a situation which i think we've done a pretty good job in this patch where it's not a dps race of just hold your you know your gun down and then eventually the ship explodes and so the result is that particularly in this patch and going forward um combat is not like about waiting for the health to go to zero or something right like you could like back a simple naive way of doing ish um is like oh you hold down your button and then the ship blows up and in the
00:40:08
older patches that was like two seconds but the actual experience like what yogi's saying when you actually have a fight with a real person it doesn't feel like two seconds and that issue is much more magnified in this patch which is why this is the way it's you know the way we plan to do it and of course you know we're using the phrase time to kill but with physicalized damage and armor and stuff you know at some some point it's going to morph into a time to disable i suppose would be a more appropriate term yeah well it also depends what you're targeting too because now you know you have sub-targeting and more items are getting physicalized if you want to kill the ship maybe you aim at the power plant and it blows up if you want to disable it you shoot out the thruther
00:40:55
trusters and then if you want to take out just disable the guns maybe shoot out the guns it's it's got a definition of a witness different yeah can be different yeah uh yogi you you mentioned you know us not necessarily wanting to you know give out specific time to kill numbers and stuff uh there was a question in the thread about um whether we'll ever create a tool to view the health of ship components like to basically scan your own ship and and come up with an overall like health number of the ship and be like this is where my my my ship is uh uh what's your what's your view on that because i i think i know what it is that's why i'm asking well it's it still emphasizes like the uh or a
00:41:43
tool like that would actually emphasize the uh uh the thing you want to avoid which is like building a meta gameplay right like we do not want players to say okay if i at this part and this part and this part this part i have 20 000 hp together right but those 28 000 hp they give you no idea what the actual effective hp of a ship is um so even if we had this tool it wouldn't be like it wouldn't like we wouldn't want it to be an effective thing in your decision making right i mean if you buy a car um you maybe you you look at how fast it can go but you're not really interested in the exact number right you you're interested in how it handles um if it's safe how many airbags it has right but you do not care about hey it has a top speed of 260 well 260.5 kilometers per hour you do not care
00:42:33
about hey the frame will kind of like uh um dissolve itself when you crash it with that much velocity into into a wall or something right um it's always about the experience and like i would like to avoid that that kind of thinking that you kind of like just add up numbers right i mean stars is not an rpg where you where you do that right it's a it's supposed to be a believable gameplay simulation slash experience and as such i would like to de-emphasize the kind of just pure number thinking and more go to the experiential view of things that said we actually don't do not have a tool ourselves to actually display all the data uh sometimes it will actually be useful but at the moment sometimes we actually have to draw the data out of xml tools um there's also um on top of us wanting it to be
00:43:21
experiential there's a lot of subtlety to the combat system that makes giving numbers actually quite hard like a really good example that we have had is that a certain fighter could have like i don't know let's say 50 000 whole damage right or whole uh hp points but it has like say a wing or some other part that's extending out and it has thrusters on the end of it um you could for example break that part off without dealing all of the hp damage and effectively nullified the effectiveness of that ship um which makes the actual like hp for example not actually that representative of what fighting that ship is truly like and that subtlety is not captured in in just straight numbers
00:44:10
i i i i hear i hear what you're saying and i'm going to challenge you guys a little bit oh yeah meta every mmo in the universe has has has a meta you know gear score hits every mmo at some point you know what what what whether the developers make it or the players you know make their tools like the thing that uh uh ercool has and stuff like this it's i understand where you guys are are are coming from and what you guys want you want to build a more experiential uh type of thing rather than just everybody opens up a spreadsheet opens up a website and just you know builds the same meta build you know and everybody's just flying the same homogenous meta builds you know and there's no variety out there i i get
00:44:59
what the intention is do you think you're working against what comes naturally to players i think um like what a desirable experience like yes there is meta rush and i think it's not we're not necessarily working against that because the players can still play the game and figure out the meta and make their own notes about it and try and learn about the game by playing ish to then decide on what the met is and like an ideal situation is you know a group of players play and they they find that a certain configuration of components like works really well and then a different group of players start from a different starting point and discover that actually a different you know set of components is better and
00:45:47
that kind of like variety in the community that's desirable right and you're not going to get that by the game giving you just hard numbers you're going to get that from people like trying to learn about the game and quantify it and then having disagreements and discussion about it that's that's what we really want i i get i get you i i i get it it's the difference between us just handing everything on a silver platter and and being like this is your meta build and your duns and and letting the community make their own decisions make their own deductions whether they're correct or not another aspect of this too is going to be more it's like with scanning it depending upon what you want to do we're going to have different scanners give you in different information you
00:46:36
know if you're a mining or a prospector or something like that the scan that you're going to get on another ship is maybe not what its guns are maybe it's not any good information about combat whereas a fighter ship may when you scan something it's going to tell you how combat ready that is against you whereas a more security ship is going to want to scan and give you maybe how much bad cargo that you have in there so it also depends on what we want to give the players when you scan and what information you get based on the role of that particular ship or what they're trying to get at you know a medical scan is going to give you something different than a uh someone who just wants to blow stuff up you know if you go in the game you just want to blow a bunch of things
00:47:22
up eventually the idea is you're going to run out of money you know if you blow up a cargo or a prospector up that has a bunch of valuable cargo you just lost it all you want to disable that ship and maybe capture it but that's going to make that prospect or maybe call in as friends so a lot of it right now is how can you get away from just making the gameplay blow people up how do you incorporate different information so that the i i gameplay i get you we we're we're we're trying for something i don't think it's any surprise that we're trying for something more we're trying to then the standard mmo out there uh and i think it's i think it's admirable uh that we're working towards it and i sincerely hope we succeed i'm just yeah i mean you're going to get the people that
00:48:10
want to blow stuff up but you know if you repeatedly do that how are you going to get money to continue to blow some people up yeah okay um let's see what else do we have uh do g-forces still play a role in balanced decisions uh yes absolutely we also have a change list that brings the tolerances back because especially ice out g-forces like going backwards and going downwards is something that humans cannot endure for long so most of the ships have already been balanced to allow less downward like downward accelerations and backward accelerations than on the other axis um but we did not have enough time to actually tweak the g-force tolerances yet um so we're planning this to do in the future which again will then
00:48:58
change a little bit the uh the combat um geometry when between between fighters okay uh we've only got like 10 minutes to go and i realized that i have not asked you about capacitors yet yogi uh okay we're going to jump into capacitors here we did a segment on isc a couple months ago about capacitors and they've gone through some changes since then uh we actually recorded yogi and i actually recorded a whole calling all devs about the changes and then they changed again after the the thing so we never aired it uh that was fun then it was a really good episode actually it was really fun uh we had our we had space helmets in our flight suits and everything it was one it was delightful and then like right before it aired the plan changed again one day all right so that's that's out i'm really glad we didn't air that
00:49:45
uh talk to us about where capacitors are now in 314 okay so the uh the role of the capacitors has slightly changed um since we had this first ic um and like there was a lot of feedback from from the community there was a lot of people from chris actually and how to make them better and we try to incorporate this all so the thing is like we do not have like a separate capacitor item or something like that like every subsystem for weapons shields and thrusters have their own idea and implementation how capacitor gameplay which is like roughly translates to stamina gameplay is implemented right the most um well developed part is i think the weapon system so um when you have energy weapons on board um they if you um so they on their own they cannot even fire even when they're
00:50:33
powered because they're now they need some kind of like you know energy ammo that kind of ammo is being supplied by a weapon capacitor item that is on the ship itself so it's an item that's on the ship and it has x amount of um a thing we call ammo load which is practically the amount of uh well damaged weapons can do and it has an x amount of regen so once this item goes online right so at the moment you kind of power it on off but it goes online it will start supplying the weapons with uh with well the jews right so and then the weapons based on their requests that they that they're requesting from the system will get a slice of the uh of the ammo load and the and the region cake um and this also means if you for example have two laser repeaters and one laser cannon what you can do is in order to increase the output of your laser cannon
00:51:20
you can turn off the repeaters and then all the jews from the repeaters will go inside uh go into the cannon um and this will then just to allow you to keep a longer fire stream and you will also see that you have more shots in the cannon for uh yeah just my shots in the canon now this is all coupled with the um with the power triangle so if you have if you put full juice with a power triangle towards the weapons you will see that uh the weapon capacitor will now just or or the item on the ship will now just be able to output a little bit more so we'll you will see the ammo count and your energy weapons actually going up um and also the the regeneration will be faster right so that's the weapon part then we have this on the shields um on the shields when you assign more energy to your
00:52:09
uh by the power triangle um they will regenerate faster but you will also get a little bit more resistance in them um not a lot but just enough to give you a little bit of an edge when you need to fly defensively need to recover in some other ways right and for the thrusters we have a similar system there so on the thrusters we have now a limited capacitor pool for which we which we're going to use with boost um which was um afterburner before now we call it boost and uh the more assignment you put on the uh on your thrusters um the faster this this boost will will regenerate and the more assignment you have will also make it a little bit more efficient so you you use less the longer you use it um that said the i don't think this is the last iteration
00:52:57
of the capacitor gameplay i think we will iterate on this because especially for the shields for example there's more stuff we'd like to do with that in the future but this is where we are right now okay i know that when we talked to when we talked during isc the capacitors were not a physicalized item uh on on the ship uh is that still the case this question comes from a risk roberts okay so uh physicalized so at the at the moment at the moment not because um the the items which we would build into the ships they haven't been like set up to be measured and try to be fit into into the ship so at the moment not but specifically the weapon parts we would like to like because it's a an actual separate item that powers all the um this is a thing we would like to like swap out and turn on and off in the
00:53:44
future separately and like so practically the idea is if this thing goes off i know if you turn it off all your energy weapons will stop working um um so as in physicalized i don't know yet this is more like a question for you um just for the benefit of someone who might not understand by physicalized jared you mean that the capacitor has an actual interactable object that you can see in the ship right an object that can be swapped out upgraded damaged so the the thing to keep in mind is that even though right now um it is not a physicalized object because we need to work very heavily with the content teams to actually modify ships and so on to do that it is still an item even though it may not have a representation so we still do have the ability to swap it out and upgrade it and so on which we
00:54:32
haven't done for this patch but we do have the ability to do that okay that's a proper item with with pipes and everything cool um all right let's go back to some general stuff before we run out of time here uh do you think shield hardening would still be around if more people could use it via hotkeys rather than just the mfd it's a very suggestive question isn't it i usually avoid these ones that tried to try to tv sitcom and answer into some into their question but i like this one so okay so specifically on the shield targeting um like when we had our combat submits uh like we had a couple of them now um we it was always the thing that we don't really think that shield hardening
00:55:20
as it was implemented in the past is really is really interesting because it's just an on off button and it doesn't give you really meaningful uh differences so in 3.14 shield hardening is uh disabled and removed what we would like to do in the future is just to supply a more interesting implementation of that but that's also uh for the future okay uh what about uh uh profiles for the capacitors that that folks can load up with keys yeah so that was a really good idea and it's already tasked up but i don't know when so it's it's somewhere in the task list so not for 3.14 okay this one just says the saber flies bad and that's not a quest i don't think that's a question they just say the same reference that's all you yeah why do you hate the saber richard
00:56:08
yeah that's not my fault um so that's one of those ones where we've taken the saber and we've gone we think the server fits here um but again that's not final balance it we could have i could have pushed it too far in that bad zone where it doesn't fit quite right but that's where we can react to this and we can work on that in the future but it will just moved back to a baseline that we thought would work for the ship but it's where one of the ships that hasn't quite fitted where we thought it would fit so would you know we can definitely look at some changes because because i think it's got quite a weak yaw compared to where it should be but that's also a consequence of the way the ship is as well but we can work with that and we can definitely improve it um one thing also to indicate too is if the saber is bad it would also be really really nice
00:56:56
to know why it's bad uh we see this a lot on the forums and that it's like someone says this is broken this is bad this is if you can provide extra bit of detail that would actually really help us understand why you think it's bad any bit of context other than the word it's bad now given there might be a chance that there's a bug and it's bad in the case that it doesn't fly that i get but any extra input and why you think it's bad please put it in there because when we scroll through the forms and that any extra bit of information helps us gather and build why a certain thing is the way it is yeah you know and also it's not just a question of it being bad in flight because as a comparison it could maybe have worse flight than a similar ship but the saber could excel in a different area
00:57:44
um so that's definitely something we've looked at where we've tried to give ships different reasons you know um enough of being you know what those ships are and there's some ships where that's not possible right now that they fulfill their complete role i would say um but it's coming right what if what if i said the saber flies like you took a pancake and crushed it into a ball and then submerged yourself in water and tried to throw it at a target 20 feet away i just kind of just think about pancakes i just want pancakes now i'm not sure what you get but i think jared likes to savor and he would like some tweaks to it yeah i mean the shirts are not i'm not being tuned without like some some some context right so um specific
00:58:33
for 3.14 we added a couple of measures that tell us hey what is the what is like the rough dogfight uh performance we can't explain we can expect from that ship and um the zebra is actually not not that bad if we look at the raw numbers but i get why my players don't don't like it that much but this is also because the the role that the zebra is supposed to excel at excel at is is not very well developed yet so like don't melt them down they will they will play their role and they will have their proper space in the combat environment going forward yeah it's uh you know i've had some fun at the uh you with with some of our guests here today but it becomes very important to remember that 314 is not the end end-all be-all of of our of our ship
00:59:22
balance and development uh richards i think richard said it best early on and we're wrapping up here uh that 314 is a new foundation for which to build a an entirely new balancing scheme on and that that comes to uh introducing the various ship archetypes and and all kinds of stuff that you're that i imagine you'll probably hear more of in the next in the coming uh months um but it's just it's for now get in there play provide your feedback uh that's what that's what this experience is for that's why we have a live game operating in the middle of our development in the middle of our alpha it's to get in there to experience it to yeah we brought it in close we brought everything in close so that we could start
01:00:08
stretching the little tiny threads out individually so we don't explode into something that's just jousting back and forth we don't want to get back to where we're at so it's a process that takes time it's a process that will draw out over several and the best way you can help us is to get in there to play it and to give us your a detailed contextual feedback as a as mark aban said so and i mean we're human you know we will try to do those balance things without doing too much of an impact but sometimes they happen and that's why i was also saying before any extra information you can will help us fix those problems but well you're a human i'm sure dave coulson is still at least 40 percent
01:00:54
oberon i think that is true for references all right gentlemen thank you for taking the time out of your week to to to be here on the show with us uh uh this was a last minute uh a pull uh our show was originally supposed to be with a different team but they had to reschedule because of uh some off time so i always appreciate when you guys you know come in and face the face the firing squad especially on such short notice so uh rich rich tower dave coulson yogi klatt bug smasher mark uh i'm jared uh isc returns next week uh with an up with an episode about loot generation uh so it was you know coming to uh star citizen in the future so stay tuned for uh we'll see you right back here next week with another episode of star
01:01:42
citizen life take care everybody see ya you

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