Star Citizen Live: Targets, Turrets & Take-Offs

3 July 202001:02:451,512 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live targets turrets and takeoffs I'm your host Jared Huckaby and if you've never seen Star citizen live before it's our weekly Friday livestream where we sit back we take questions from the community we give answers to the community sometimes we watch somebody create something we do all kinds of different things this week on the show we have members from the vehicle experience team on to answer your questions regarding the upcoming flight changes in Alpha 3.10 so without further ado we've got a lot to jump into we're gonna introduce each other to who we're talking to because it's always somebody's first show will start immediately above me yogi tell everybody who you are and what you do with star citizen hi my name is yogi I am a coda a
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game take all they're working and 4vt and as part of the vehicle experience team what are some of the things that you contribute to I just work on everything or you have specialties i specialties yeah on everything it's not working everything is impossible no I am so for 3.10 I focused on turrets mostly and on the gunnery improvements okay going clockwise over to a man who probably needs no introduction but we're gonna do it anyway mr. crew tube himself mr. John crew tell us who you are and what you do for star citizen hi my name is John I'm Vivica director for star citizen so I look after all the vehicle feature experience and content teams and last but certainly not least immediately to my left here Richard tell everybody
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who you are and what you do for star citizen yes sir I'm Richard and I'm the people experience and product owner so I'm responsible [ __ ] actor team and designing the features and awesome do you basically lead to me at the vehicle experience team specifically yes yeah yes so I basically look after what we're doing and how we're doing it in designs you know see with all the teams to make sure we're delivering our features awesome now if you haven't if you haven't seen it it's probably too late now you can check it on YouTube later we just did a big segment on ISC last week about some of the work the vehicle experience team has done for Alfa 3.10 Alfa 3.10 is currently on PTU with our evocati test
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flight being put through the paces when it's done with evocati it'll be opened up to you know a wider PTU before eventually going to our biggest test platform that we have which is our live play environment but until that happens we thought we'd do a question and answer you guys have a lot of questions about what's going on especially after the segment so we did our normal thing of putting up a spectrum threat earlier this week and allowed folks to submit their questions for consideration and vote up which ones they wanted to see answered most so we're going to start with them throughout the course of the show though you can submit new questions in twitch chat by promising your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets that's gonna help our community management team pull it out from all the other chat and then send it to me so I can then give it to them and they can give it to you alright so starting with the questions from the thread let's get
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into it how long can VTOL ships expect to hover before they start to start to damage their maneuvering thrusters this is something we've been talking about a lot ok d emphasizing maneuvering thrusters emphasizing ships with VTOL what do we got yeah so we don't have like a current time frame of a howl or negative current you overheat for and this is not something that's going to be 310 but it is something were looking at where you know it could be dependent on the size of trusters the amount of power the thrusters develop and the size of the ship and the design of the ship as well so and this is something which will couldn't a lit release but it's not something that's gonna come for 310 yeah rich so it's a very hard question to answer because there's so many ships
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with so many configurations but generally those that have vetoes will take longer if if at all to get to the point where overheating damages at the moment in 310 we do have that limit so when they overheat they just cut out to stop you damaging it but in a future pressure will give you the option to turn that off if you're a madman you want to artificially risk your life and I would imagine that's of course assuming you're using the Beatles like like if you haven't switched your Cutlass into VTOL mode or your reclaimer and if you don't mode then you and you're just you're it's not providing any any relief for your movie thrusters at all at that point yeah if you know reason the first is then they don't they don't consume any feel they don't heat up they don't
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have a risk of being Amish let's move on we're getting improved targeting for fixed weapons can you go into more depth on exactly what that means and how that will affect combat and fixed loadouts we actually had a lot of questions regarding the the nudging and what what nudging yeah so so dive into it what do you got yogi okay so nothing does not mean that we're kind of like put the bullets around the corner anything like that every weapon on every ship has a has a convergence allowance right at the moment that's that allowance is quite high for each weapon it's like 80 degrees so when you target something with fixed weapons and you wind or with any other weapons and you don't fire the
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target but if the targets really close to you then you will see that your your shots will cross over in front of you that is convergence and this is just an inherited property of the of the weapons so they can they can gimble like a little bit of gambling in the image right so we're using that to to help the fixed weapons finding the target I know that people would say oh wait a sec it's all to him but it's not it's not really all to aim so assuming I'm prepared you have a ship flying in front of you all right so this one it goes into this direction then the predictive impact point will be here oh oh yeah right okay let's say John okay let's assume this is like the the center of the predicted
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impact point what we do is when you're when you're current aim vector is intersecting that at some point we will start notching the bullets towards the target but it won't be like an instance swap but it will be a a fluent yeah it would be a flew the ratio towards the target so if you're really aiming good anyways there that's right but if you're slightly offset it will still match the bullet in this direction but not perfectly so it's kind of like slowly fades them on to the target what this effectively does for fixed weapons is it makes the the targets a little bit bigger so it's a little bit easier to hit but it's not all to aim it's just an an assist that we that we well allow based on the convergence properties that the weapons
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have anyways because you could argue hey if the weapons can converge why can't they go a little bit more on the target so this is what we're doing with that and it's and it is really necessary so we did a lot of gameplay tests with that and it's definitely improved the viability of fixed weapons not to the point that they're already on par with Auto gimble's that's something we need to fix later but there will be more more usable in 3.10 okay before we go on we had two immediate questions yogi first what is that thing on the side of your head there's a trick ir it also does it does it does it does it yeah it doesn't light yeah this is a from our head tracking stuff so I can't recommend that you sit in your carpet you look left and your
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couple you look left you can't even kimball your weapons using that though it needs a lot of training to actually hit something with it I wouldn't play without it nowadays okay well that is obviously it's a third party product it's not you know officially endorsed or anything but we wanted to explain what it was early in the show because questions were coming also as far as those ships those ships are actually currently available with junior fabrications I don't know what the website is but you can google junior fabrications and they have the license to do start soon spaceship so for the folks asking about those spaceships we'll just cover that stuff early in the show get passed all right next question are we going to see any changes with the ship GUI or HUD take place with these flight changes yes but it's more along the lines of
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porting the the in three nines flash-based herd to propriety building blocks system so everything that was there in the existing central flash was your central heads-up display so your your throttle your indicators for landing gear out your hips and reticles moving all of those from flash to building block so they do look different they have a slightly different arrangement and some of them has some slightly different behavior for example EMP weapons have some extra information on there now really because it's a lot easier to do it in building blocks than flash so it's not like a completely radical new HUD and the targeting side is slightly different that I think we'll talk about that later the actual HUD is
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just an updated version of what we had before players who had the Gladius or the mantis or the carrick we got a preview of that in 3:9 anyway so that that's just for its its state in three ten but going forward we're continuing to iterate on the HUD continuing to yep so what's in three ten will be every single ship in the game has a HUD visuals similar to those three ships I mentioned in 39 and on top of that they have some extra features that weren't there in 39 so I think the missile and self destruct measures had messages had disappeared there they're back and then that gives us the basis to then do the manufacturer styling on top of it in a later patch manufacturing styling is something we've been talking
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about for a while yeah I'm just doing my cat in for a different color if they will physically look it's just a suit but look differently style based on the manufacturer rather than just this one's blue this one's green Wilfred new environment temperatures and wind features effect thruster performance yes yep so and the actual wind effects the flight of the ship so it bounces the thrusters of the Trista's how to count the kind of talk that the wind producers on the ship and also these thrusters they're affected by by by the atmosphere and this depends on way around the atmosphere the height so it varies depend on the planet or moon you're on so so if you got up to Louisville for example the thrusters work in about
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fifty eight percent efficiency six percent efficiency whereas on a smaller moon the work in much more towards eighty eight you know eighty five percent of the actual you know it's all capacity the thrusters so you know you are gonna feel a difference depending on where you are in the atmosphere and how thick it is you know which creates a really unique feel for each kind of planet really as a father will there be cockpit or Hut interactions or indications for wind speed and directions so that we can be warned of adverse weather conditions and so it's so it's um definitely something we've thought about so at the moment it's all visual so you'll see the kind of clouds and the storm on the planet and you'll hear the wind and a lot but we don't have anything currently on the hood to kind of show where the winds coming from the direction you kind of
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have to see and feel it and but you know that is something you know we can look at in the future to kind of give a better communication of the wind and the performance of the ship especially as we move ships much more towards as the error um in our sad and the lift is much more important you know we'll have to communicate you know that kind of sad to it here's a common question that comes up and a lot of the ship related and flight related shows is matched target speed coming back so that's something that was removed in three five I think around there is with the the revision of ifcs it was something we intentionally didn't put back in not to say it's never going to come back there was a lot of
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overhead that came with it a lot of miscommunication is the wrong word but there was it was a lot of confusion about how it actually worked the cost of keeping up to date it's something we keep looking at I know there's a there's a sort of vocal group of people that want it back so I'm like I say it's never coming back but it it's not our immediate priorities to bring back I know a lot of folks we wanted for thanked to make things like formation flying easier and stuff like yeah it's especially helpful for folks doing like the cinematic stuff when you when you got ships at different types it's not like this you just like you're trying to keep them in the frame at the same time it's like if we could just match speed that would make that a lot easier yeah I appreciate that when we did the changes for ifcs and we looked at the analytics of how
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much all the functions get used versus the time we had to deliver the project and it was very far down the list in terms of actual use across the games has cargo on ships been factored into the fight model like an empty caterpillar versus a caterpillar full of titanium so and yes it has so you know and we've built a small buffer into the ships an atmosphere so so we've got sure about the caterpillar it's not quite at the limit and it's based it so it can carry some weight but it will be planetary dependent as well so it's quite close to it and you add more weight to it let's say you may struggle to take off on some planets with this and so you know you'd
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like to use the afterburner or use a different method to take off and you know and it also increases the importance of beautiful ships that can carry as well so you know they'll have like an advantage on some planets where maybe they can carry more extra weight okay as a follow-up there how long will I don't know maybe don't have the exact number and off the top of your head but how long do you expect ships like the caterpillar to be able to hover in a normal gravity environment or it that's basically it that goes on but how long how long do you think a caterpillar should be able to hover in a normal guys like it will say earth-type gravity I'm guessing that's normal yeah I mean that's quite difficult one because you know like you know we want it to be able to be like a limit that we have but it's
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how we build up to that limit over time you know so you know and you know and it's also how we communicate that the ship is reaching its limit it has to be enough to hover as well so you know it does you know does them a lot of different factors to kind of make that overall time feel right in the end yeah it's we don't have an exact number but it's not gonna be like a instant you fall out the sky there will be suitable warning and time for you to do something about it yeah there will be like very precise things on your heads-up display that tells you about that state I mean obviously like it needs to be long enough so people can comfortably launch and land from a planet or so but you wouldn't take like a k2 put into a gunship role hovering over the ground for long for extended periods of time no you want it but I'm gonna load it up with guys with rail guns and just
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there's a choice that you have but yeah one of the one of the other great things about having a live testing environment like we do considering star citizen is an alpha is that we can balance and rebalance and tweak dispatches go on so so even when this fully comes online whatever the first version of that is if it if it's you know if it's a hundred and fifty seconds you know that's not to say that it'll be a hundred fifty seconds the next patch or the patch after that it's sweet we adjust we listen to feedback we we take information in and then we make new decisions so that is the purpose of our live testing environment can we get an altitude hold autopilot for when we fly around a planet so we don't have to babysit our ships from flying straight off into space I think
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that the short answer is there is yes it's not something we're actively working on but it's something we've talked about so that makes sense it's not the easiest thing in the world to do but is when you have to factor in the altitude and then the planet and then all the wind and everything else like how how much do we want to it to be corrected based on Vermin do as soon as you get a gust of wind you want it to turn off you start going down a rabbit hole but yeah is something we've talked about but it's not actively being worked on there's also the question whether it's an altitude hold or like height above ground hold yeah so might there be a camp that once one the other and then yeah sorry right you need to redo one upset the other duty
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both double the time whether it's sea level or whether it's like yeah it accounts for mountains interval yeah alright next question we've had a lot of talking lately about jerk and the increased weight of ships how does the change how do both of those change the general feel of flight in space for example our ships less are more responsive when they are below cruise speeds compared to 3 9/11 yep so hasn't really changed the responsiveness of the ships in terms of the initial movement but what it does is it changes a time it takes the ships are automatically kind of alarm back so the ships feel heavier in that sense so so and if you move the ship and then the and then basically let
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go to controls on the bigger ships you'll really feel the ship will take a lot of time to correct its off and go back to zero whereas a smaller ships will feel responsive and you know compared to that but you'll still feel a small bit of Jack in that but it's much more prominent on the bigger ships at the moment and you know and you know and again back to your point this is something we're put in the game for the first time and we're currently evaluating it ourselves and you know and then it you know yeah yeah as more players get in other hands on it we're getting more feedback towards how it's affected the feel of combat and the feel of fun in general so we kind of you know is something we can achieve this release which you have and then we're gonna tune it enough the next release or the victimís beyond this you know as well so it's a wedding processor is you make a
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great point Richard and I it's it's good enough that I want to reiterate it that it 310 is the next step in a star citizen's continuing evolution of flight mechanic stuff it is not the final step so it is the next big leap forward and it's just as important to get these changes out there to improve the player experience but also to generate the feedback that we need to continue improving and continue iterating as things go forward so and and similar to it like we talked about insights last week I think it was last week or maybe it's the week before every very hard it's very hard to just read this or see us talking about it and go yes that's how it feels you need to get
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in there and play it because responsiveness is subjective everyone feels it differently and just looking a a number in a spreadsheet doesn't give you that actual feeling of how it plays next question is about targeting it's not necessarily 310 related but I want to pose it to Yogi anyway I was playing yesterday in 310 and the new target pending changes were in and I and it was really it was really cool in a hammerhead to have the pilot you know selecting targets and when I was in a turret having him send me targets and priority targets and stuff it was very cool this question kind of builds on that extrapolate that to the future do you consider have you considered
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ships like the hornet tracker being able to play a role in designating targets will they be able to send other ships info to other ships like throughout a fleet yes though the current beginning system is just the first step so it creates like the basic logistics to do that in the long term I mean for now we only have like the ship ins within the ship so you can't share it with your turret Gunners and so on in the long term you obviously want to share it with our fleet and squats and all that but that's a a bigger topic in itself because it requires that certain communication hierarchies and all that needs to be established first and then there's a question how that interacts was like the whole online universe and with your friends and so on so it's it's it's a bigger it's a bigger question which we don't we can't approach yet but
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it will it will happen eventually I it was I can't understate how cool it was just yeah I've played in the turret before and half the time I'm just looking around trying to wonder where everything is because you know you only see out the side of one ship and then you suddenly get targets pinned for me and marked I was like oh it's like I knew where to start expecting things there was a delightful improvement yeah some point I would like to see like a commander role that's kind of like dusty staying on the bridge or so yeah if I'm allowed to have an opinion as a player that I just really enjoyed it yeah of course I don't think I'm often allowed to have my own opinion where it comes to star citizen how does the new pip calculation UI relate to mix loadouts like the vanguard is it a unified pip to approximate a single optimal fire solution or are multiple pips for each convergence grouping of weapons okay so
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a decision that we did in the past which we're still having is that we're having a a single pip for each individual individual convergence groups group and we have fixed and the gimbals so if you're on the vanguard for example or if you have a ship with a mixed load out and you will effectively see two clips and then they use the convergence to aim at their specific point in its way Matt yeah I haven't played with a mix like that there's there's some differential between the two pips so you know which one is which or yeah yeah and of course you can always link them as well and then it'll put it back into one pip in 263 Wow that was but it has 20 20 18 20 17 to 16 16 to 20 17 yeah up into 2.7
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yeah yeah well two six three actually two six three would have been like January 2018 I feel like six was into six 2017 so to sort of see edgy 2017 and two six three was still the version that was still running on all right well I said all my time was blurring into each other no anyway into six three the target bracket included ship Direction information allowing players to better predict ship movement to line up fixed gunshots will this be returning so for three times we've got the directional which shows you the direction the ship and also we've got a really cool trail as well which shows you where the ship is being you can kind of predict where it's going that because you know you can see the path of the ship and because I really helps you in combat and I look
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and so you know even though it was before my time that's kind of what we've got for 310 yeah it's it's interesting to have both of those because they're not always necessarily in sync with especially like decoupled flight so it's handy to see where the ship's pointing and where it's been because you can sort of glean some information about the person you're targeting and by the way they fly and the trail gives you that sort of clue as to how they were flying so if you see them doing constant zigzags the trail will give you that path so you can perhaps expect them to do that again yeah it risks like reading your enemy and laying out your strategies to combat them any updates are any updates being done to make EMP usage a bit more
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straightforward the current system contains a bit of guesswork and a fair amount of confusion for some nice up among me okay we just taken well I think there's a little bit of like more hard work for the MP stuff in the future we want to move the MP stuff more into the missile operator mode but that's not for three points and that's for post 3.10 all right yeah there is so to give a bit of context for those that don't know what's going on with the MP at the moment all the MP items start off by defaulting you have to manually turn them on that's because it was a design that we wanted to try out where when they're on they use a huge amount of
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power so by having them on by default you ended up sort of crippling the ships are you turn your ship on and then it immediately turn off because the MP just start absorbing all the power your ship needed so we'd have them turned off by default then when you want to use them you have to manually go turn them on and that's a that's an awkward step that we want to solve in the future where if you're an MP ship that you hit right mouse button or secretary fire and whatever control scheme you think it goes in these offline you likewise offline it's because it's not turned on so we want to simplify that flow where it perhaps turns it on for you gives you a prompt of what to actually do to turn it on rather than requiring someone to hunt through the MFT stir - it and then you're then it's you as a player choosing to do this big energy
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absorbing behavior which means you then have to choose like am I going to charge this up or am I going to use all my energy weapons how am I going to use right my power for flying or after blowing it's a choice you have to make between the two that's just sort of a bad guy as to why is like that and then yeah lots of people get confused by it and just a small plug that mantis is currently the ship of the month for 4 subscribers for the month of July so if you are a subscriber you can fly around the Mantis oh my next question see what we got canned ships with wings glide in atmosphere now yes so but but a caveat I'd say we've got a very basic form
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gliding right now where we've couldn't got the ships with a flat surface for the wings and not [ __ ] like wings for example at the moment the ships have flat surfaces which generate lift and drag depending how you pitch and move the ship and basically so if you do turn off the engines you will glide but you won't really have control over the ship but again this is the first version of the atmospheric flight for these ships and it's a really big step move second but it's a step to enable us to do other things in the future so in the future we're looking at having control services and different shape wings so we can actually maneuver the craft with the wings rather than the thrusters because the moment you know we've got wings but the ship is still controlled by the thrusters so you've got the wings going lift and drag and you force the ship
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over and then you pull back and then you get a force in the corner which allows you to pull the Hagi with the wings but you know the bet is given by the thrusters maneuvering that behavior whereas we want that behavior to be generated by the aerodynamics itself but you know but again that's a step in future releases and it's quite a complex job to add in you know control surfaces especially to make it visual you look correct as well with all the ships so you know but again you know the you know 310 it's the first step and you know we're gonna get a lot of feedback and then we can iterate on that and then we could put that into future leaders with control services and make the chips even more different than they are now yeah just so in the futures that can extend even to things like ailerons and stuff or is it gonna get that yeah yeah okay yep yes can't distract boy Ritchie's cat just
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looking behind him 310 like Rich said you can glide but the thruster sort of take over and less year to the point where like all your thrusters turn off finish you will glide nicely nicely it depends what you doing before you throw a standoff right but the version we have locally there isn't 310 where the control surfaces actually take effects you can turn off every single manoeuvring thruster and just rely on your mains and your ADA and I think maybe the closest ones are actually like flapper ons or something like that because they do both behaviors yeah and can fly purely on the aerodynamic forces that side they of course and find their Gladius without any barriers and everything on the other day actually it's even more interesting when you're
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flying to have a wing ripped off or so because that is also supported so you get like really a symmetric lift then and you can easily crash if somebody rips off your wing I had an experience with an M 50 flying backwards in an atmosphere last week that I won't talk about right now just fine forward I was good and I tried to fly backwards I survived it was very clear the wind was had a bit more control over we flying backwards and forwards positioning speaking of targeting that's how there's a screening of targeting that's their transition online we still only have subcomponent targeting for targeting for engines what are our plans to expand so we're definitely going to expand that out to pretty much all items
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on a ship we're doing it in phases because we want to bring each classification of item you can sub target online with appropriate behavior for when you shoot them or damage to them we've talked in the past about not being easily able to get to the items inside a ship hmm so the next thing will be bringing online will be turrets and maneuvering thrusters most likely so you can target in other ships turrets take them out target another ships maneuvering thrusters we should then have a big impact with everything we've talked about before so I'm going to say every patch but over the course of the following patches you will see more and more things come online to be sub targeted is that does that rely on the transition of all ships to have the physicalized components that we talked about in calling all Deb's last month there are two months ago ultimately yes
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for like if you want to sub target the power plant inside the ship so we will start on everything that's on the outside so currently its main thrusters but then we'll go to maneuvering thrusters turrets weapons and hopefully by that point we'll have enough inside the ships in the right place for you to make choices on what to target inside there why is the Gladius capable of going 800 and 900 in atmo when all other ships are captive below 300 so that's something we've been able to change with the new era demux so the ships are much more balanced now in in terms of speed that they can go in atmosphere so we're hitting kind of that 500 meters a second kind of range atmosphere for a lot of the small fighters but also we've kind
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of gone abroad as well we've gone an increased a lot of the larger ships because a lot of leadership actually was very slow in atmosphere before because and the model we had where's now we've got much more freedom to make each it more unique so you know I've kind of generally you know well you know we've kind of generally sped up the ships in atmosphere but yeah you know if fed said the Gladius was too quick before compared to the ships that's being kind of resolved for now so you know it's much more fair although I will say we know it any news on the implementation of a radar altimeter either height above the ground underneath you as opposed to sea level this is very necessary for low altitude flying it's it's still planned
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not in 310 and I don't have a date for when it would be yeah it's definitely something we need I I'm gonna pair this one right up with it how about any kind of information on the head about surrounding terrain night flying can be kind of a pain being done with only the eyeballs and flashlights so one of the things we're looking at in upcoming patch is improving the the radar display like the sensor globe radar globe and one of the things we're looking at is a way of visualizing hazards on there what form it takes we're not fully set on yet but there's there's options there for displaying the actual pain in it or display and like a generalized blob for
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the there's a mountain in front of you here so here's a big red blob to insinuate something to pull up we've even discussed at times like vision modes for the helmets like night vision or infrared that I think it's more likely we'll go with a radar based solution like a wireframe of the terrain or something so you just see it at night or something like that I don't know what this is necessarily a question for you you guys but it's definitely related to the flight experience I guess so maybe it's you maybe it's not it's simply parachutes we do definitely need to look at ways to improve the survivability of ejecting because there is none at the moment yeah at the moment
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ejecting from my Gladius is kind of a bummer in that must be alright yeah I don't if it be parachutes more like jetpacks jet-assisted for braking from your epa pack so not enough that you can not enough proportion that you can jet pack but enough to not break your legs on landing wingsuits i'd like to see that what can you tell us about a more in depth missile torpedo gameplay in atmosphere with the upcoming flight changes will flight behaviors change the change will fight behaviors atmosphere fly pavers affect missiles and torpedoes performance well not on 310 but hopefully later down the line yeah
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that's that's all is yes that's best for a future discussion there will be a slight change purely based on how ships flying like you're not going to be pivoting around like crazy like you were in 319 atmosphere because things will be flying differently so it will be slightly harder to lock just because it won't be as easy to keep targets on screen but the actual behaviors of the missiles once launched it's gonna be the same I mean we have like a lot of like we have a lot of stuff we want to do with the missiles in the future but it's it's quite big I mean we know that they are multiplayer they kind of like like a missile spam and so on can be very frustrating but the first steps towards that will be with the missile operator not which below which is on the roadmap and then we eat your weight from there
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yeah the whole missile and torpedo gameplay is the next focus of the team after we it wrapped up dispatches work okay so i spects what I expected we'll learn more about that next quarter yeah can we get Oh nope that's the same question let me go in addition to the upcoming changes to fixed weapons turrets and ESP what other near or long-term changes to gunnery controls are planned for or under consideration so gunnery and controls how long if you go do it okay so I mean gunnery is like for us that's the process of like firing firing like aiming and firing your weapons so that we're somewhat like
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closing in on that so we kind of know what kind of modes we want to have when you when you fire weapons I mean we are fixed we have manual or free and then we have gimble assist assist for example is a bit too strong so later we want to like debuff it a little bit but for that we need more support from us systems to to do that but combat as such is undergoing a huge change at the moment so what John just said is like in the next quarter we're gonna have like more focus not just on the missiles but also especially on the weapons so the future patches will change the way how players employ the weapon so they need to be really careful when to employ the weapon so they need to pick the times when they do it and they need to decide when not to do it because employing the
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weapons will have a lot of like disadvantages as well right because like you're in combat we want people to to commit to commit to their decisions that they do so so in this regard there's a lot of stuff coming on we mentioned I think we mentioned capacitors and yes about the asset right yeah yeah so so capacitor gameplay as such is quite interesting for us and we're gonna have this both on the weapons and on the on the flight model later it's like it's like become the concept of stamina right so if starters were a fighting game right at the moment what happens in combat everybody's just punching right there's no consequence and not punching everybody punches for us that means players can tape down the fire button all the time without without or with
00:39:00
only with little consequence and that will drastically change in 3.11 onwards so you need to decide when to punch you need to decide when to block and so we're slowly going into that direction of having really short decision act loops right it's called a loops like op or observe orient decide act so effective effectively using analyzing you to situation then deciding what you do and then doing the stuff that you want to do and having a lot of like small decisions and small loops in in combat that was like a mouthful what I'm saying is we want the players to do a lot of important meaningful decisions in
00:39:48
combat and so the capacitor changes on the weapons and later on the thrusters they will they will go into that they will help us achieving that sounds like the next evolution beyond just overheating I guess yes yes so the problem with overeating at the moment is that the player doesn't get a lot of information about it right so what we actually want to achieve in the long term is that overheating is more consequence of like strongly overclocking your ship and being careless with it so the so heat on the weapons or on the thrusters won't be the immediate thing that is limiting your performance it will be the capacitor gameplay so effectively if you have an energy weapon and you taped on your fire button your gun will be empty and cannot fire after X bullets and then they need
00:40:35
to recharge and the way how would we charge is and how fast is going to be that's all on the player control and will again require some decisions on the player so capacitors are fairly normal everyday used to to enforce tactics and foggy consideration and overheating is for the people who choose to abuse their components and yes the now Maxim out and then risk higher maintenance costs on the ships and so on yeah the like you said a while back this is this is the start it's not the final step so this it's like a three-pronged attack on the the vehicle experience so we have the flight changes that have come in 310 will have the missile operator mode and then we have all these capacitor things
00:41:22
and they're all coming over upcoming patches there is there was just no way we could deliver all in one patch it won't drop so we've had to spread it out over a few but when those three things are in together that's that's when the fruits of our labor so to speak should be there yeah and until then like some some design decisions Mike might not make sense for for the player but it will all come together and hopefully a couple of releases yeah okay well ships like the with ships like the Cutlass series only having relatively large rear VTOL engines will they not inevitably end up pitching forward rather than quickly and rather quickly and start going down when trying to hover
00:42:10
so I've got a Cutlass right here so you know so you know someone where you know you do balance this is where you kind of pull the you know there is some kind of gameplay up showing off your spaceships yeah it's making Jarrod jealous Jer fab said my order so you know it just comes out gameplay it's that way you know a lot of the ships we design certain ways without knowing where would be kind of several years down the line I'm you know in the futures we were going to model the a dynamic for us to talk and balance and all this kind of stuff so we have to kind of do balance certain things so if you have a Cutlass you're not just pitching forwards because the ship doesn't have you know these halls of the front it you know if example because you don't want the ships to feel bad won't to make sense you know but but you know we don't want but you know we don't want
00:42:59
necessary to make em feel bad sometimes yeah sometimes we have to the rule of cool works both ways in terms of how how a ship looks sort of it takes some level of performance but if how a ship looks fundamentally cripples a ship's behavior we're going to take steps to correct that underneath so if rich gets his Cutlass out again the the large retool thrusters yeah they they look like large veto thrusters but there are ones at the front that behave like veto thrusters to to offset that yeah otherwise you'd have the same size that is on the back of the front or vice versa I have ships they're just still in the office you look like two minutes from
00:43:50
the office I know we're gonna go with this I forgot I had a to follow up and I lost him Oh as Chris as Chris would often say take you to the point of realism then bring it back to the point of fun yeah so yeah yeah well we see acceleration increases currently they are so low you cannot use six degree of freedom without it feeling like you were sliding on ice single fighter ships so that's a very specific measure so it's hard to to to answer that because we don't we don't know yet like we have a we have a vision
00:44:38
what combat should be and we're gonna tune the ships towards that vision in the long term right just saying increased accelerations might improve a certain aspect but might break other aspects of the game so my the answer is we don't know yet we'll we'll see how the how in the following quarter the combat evolves and develops and then we're gonna decide what we're gonna do with three accelerations I mean we don't want to adjust increased accelerations we want to make it fun flight model so maybe and again it ties back into what I said earlier it's it's what it feels like a lot of people tend to get into the data crunching this value is not point nine in this patch and now it's one point seven in this patches it's
00:45:26
terrible but does it feel but it doesn't make the game better from being those values in the is you same image on you you mentioned that not wanting combat to be a DPS race for combat to not be a dps race meaningful maneuvers are needed for positional combat on a macro and micro level currently one can back strafe and just hold the target in a cone and the other person cannot push back on the straight for efficiently will you lower retro acceleration for more meaningful combat to take place I think yogi touched on this with this blast question about capacitors so the capacitors will help there because it's using your retro thrusters will have consequences to your thruster capacitor so if you just hammer
00:46:15
like booster or afterburn on you've retro is constant you're gonna run out a lot quicker than someone coming forward so then you're going to be at a disadvantage so that's that's where that will get stopped maybe not stops but it'll it won't be the end of the default yeah it won't be the default scenario I mean we do have Journal PPP prototypes would like be customized tunings where we achieve this positional like positioning knife fighting quality and the normal dogfighting right so but but these things are really like heavily dependent of the the projected velocities and and other aspects so this whole topic is way too big to just being put in like in one single release with like one statement
00:47:05
like yep let's cut back back straight or something like that so we need more more time to work on that so and this happens over the course of the next quarter so we have like a little side project going on at at CAG which is called iterative combat testing and within that within that group so it's not just VT people that's also people from from our user research department which includes Bayer who used to be a very successful PvP player and started an illness so we're working a lot with him to just iterate over the combat and narrowing down on the experience that we actually want to have so and we have enough test results
00:47:54
that suggests that we can reach this position I fighting kind of talk fight again but it's like the whole work that needs to be done to implement this properly is way too much for one release so I mean the the first gallery changes and the turrets and the fixed weapons that 3.10 will have are actually a result out of from that from the testing that happened know we kicked it off I think in March and we still continue to develop things there so over the next course of releases will we will move more stuff over to to the main differentiable then we'll eventually up and end up in in player hands yeah I saw a question fly up in the chat a while back about engaged this being different between 39 310 310 does bring them in
00:48:42
but these changes we're talking about capacitors bring them in another another step so you get that more visceral positional knife knife fighting the spaceships combat experience rather than just two tiny pixels flying around narrow man won't go there any thoughts about helmet or windshield polarization and other improvements that might allow us to see better on super bright planets or even in space when you just turn towards the Sun so in 3 10 we have actually enabled or not enabled the graphics team provided a nice new little bit of tech to make that the central flight hood dynamically adjust its brightness based on the environment so when you're in deep dark space it dims
00:49:34
down so it's not blowing out the eye adaption when you're in light environments it wraps itself up so you can actually see it against like white clouds or if you're on yellow or Microtech or snowstorm it'll be bright enough with a drop shadow that you can see maybe if you point it directly into the Sun it won't quite deal with that but for 90 percent of the environment says it works there are a few quirks that didn't make it into 3/10 so not every single element on the hood reacts like that so 3/10 is just the flight hoods we need to expand that to things on the lens such as the reticule z' and mission markers so they they do the same thing the atc gates and yet the joy atc gates in environments because they're
00:50:23
technically rendered on the lens rather than on the eyes if they can't take advantage of it so there's more to come there that's certainly great news for the HUD you still a it's it's still pot you still lose targets in the Sun on a really bright planet or in space if somebody flies in the Sun I suppose that you know that's it that's an appropriate tactic if you can utilize it as well so tried to tried and tested compass I think yeah still sunglasses let's see will NPC ships reap any benefit from these new improvements and maybe become more deadly they well they take advantage of it as players do it's
00:51:13
purely down to AI behaviors they I wouldn't say they're any worse than before actually 3.10 has a couple of ifcs bug fixes that makes them not cheat anymore that was like that was yeah there was like a a buck that when and I should pulled up then the acceleration on the rotation was way bigger than they used to be and so like a certain ships could like instantly turn around and now they're actually limited to what they actually capable of so that like streamlines the whole experience in terms of weapon I think AI ships do not use fixed assists that's for players only I think it's probably a question we'll follow up on with with the AI team
00:52:00
we're gonna be talking to them later next quarter so we'll see if let's see if we can't hear what their plans are for how they want to incorporate atmospheric flight at the new hemispheric light stuff into their plans any changes you're prepared to talk about regarding g-forces blackouts red outs stuff like that how does how do these new changes affect that so the g-force model is the is still the the same that we had before but we haven't our back look to you to changed a little bit because we're not really satisfied with the effects it produces so yeah but that's it's it's like as far as I know it's on the backlog I'm not sure what other plans it is the same chief or smaller but you do hit with the changes to how atmospheric flight happens you do
00:52:47
hit it in different ways than before as well like because obviously you're doing completely different maneuvers then you did in 3:9 you can do really big Bank steep turns or stalls I wish just you wouldn't have been able to do before in 39 so you never would have got to the point of the g-force red outs and blackouts having an impact on gameplay yeah awesome really serious g-forces as well you know we're pulling some crazy you know kind of future kind of g-forces of these things ball so you know with the g-force itself or looking at you know again it's like managing your capacity so we stay in g-force is something that you know real fighter pilots do so you know if you pull a G for like 15 seconds the next time if you go into it straight where you're not
00:53:34
going to last 15 seconds you can last 10 seconds and if we do it again you're going to ask maybe five seconds so again it's for the management of your own personal you know kind of resistance to g-force really you know that's gonna play a part in the future as well it's opposed it's there's always that challenge of knowing how things are today in the 21st century and then extrapolating what might be possible for the 30th century you know of star citizen and and yeah you know you know it's it's like what what things should be solved by then yeah story wise but then what things do not want solved because you want to maintain a gameplay experience that's you know what people expect today it's I guess it's you know a Star Trek had like inertial dampers that just you know removed all g-force entirely so those ships can do whatever
00:54:22
it ain't given time so I suppose it's always a weird balance we've talked a lot about atmospheric flight today let's talk about gravity how is gravity affects how the gravity of the various planets in the size of planets that affect flight in 310 or going forward yeah so and you know it affects them at first you need to you know keep level you know so if you got again a big planet like level you've got much you know you've got much more pull pulling you down to the surface whereas if you've got a moon you can hover that pretty easily you know it's fine so now it does play a part in the overall fight experience you know which again makes all the planets feel different it's a combination of gravity and atmosphere because they're no they're not all the same that they all have different
00:55:09
combinations of gravity strength from from one to zero and different atmospheric strengths and different environmental effects like some of them have wind storms on them some have grounds snowstorms so it really is a very experienced you ship is not going to behave the same if you take it to every single moon and planet in star citizen in in the IFC segment we showed how the the Atmos the atmospheric Plains anything change for transforming ships you know I like the the the the the reliance fly differently in atmosphere vertically then horizontally that the changes in the car to all like this this question from the chat as asking if that extends to things like opening cargo
00:55:57
doors and and stuff it's it will that affect the flight performance of a ship if you open up every single door on the side of a caterpillar on both sides of the caterpillar does that now handle differently than if they were closed and so it doesn't currently but here's something we've talked about with doors and also landing gear as well so you know this is all things now you know now we've got the system we can build in these bespoke effects if you know so if you take off and you know you leave your landing gear down that's gonna cause drag to take off you leave a door open you know that can cause drag you know so it's just a question of how we implement this across all the ships but you know that is definitely something we've talked about is definitely so that's gonna come in a future really yeah you know something like the I think Eric or the even the the star lift is I couldn't I can open up the front door in the rear
00:56:47
door and just let a whole bunch of air pass through and it's not gonna fly well we want to be inside yet let's see what else we got we are almost out of time gentlemen just a couple more questions there have been a lot of questions in the chat today just about the Cutlass in general I know we did want a show about the ships just five weeks ago I think was just five weeks ago yeah but since there are so many questions any changes regarding the colors and then you can tell us about the colors John why do you hate the Cutlass all ships equally I don't have a favorite I don't have a worse so the colors specifically the only real chain
00:57:33
in 310 is it's got some armor so we did a pass on pretty much every ship we added the the armor items to them and gave them awesome primarily manufacturer derived base lines so Drake ships have better armor absorption values than some of the other ships at the expense of maybe some shield performance and the Buccaneer and the caterpillar got some buffers in terms of their weaponry as well so trying to just improve the usability of the Drake liner because to looking at the analytics there the Cutlass fares quite well despite the amount of noise that we get if you look at all the data even accounting for the fact that everyone has a freelancer at
00:58:21
the moment the Cutlass all the Cutlass variants actually outperform it in the metrics that we have to look at internally but the Buccaneer and the Casabella really did struggle so for 310 Buccaneers weapon and missile mounts have been swapped over so if you lose a wing you don't lose all your guns the coolers and the fuel tanks don't fall off the slightest breeze anymore so again if you lose a wing you don't fall out the sky the caterpillar command module guns have all been up guns a bit so it has a bit more firepower the Dragonfly and the NOx got a change to increase their speed and lower their ground hugging ability so hopefully 310
00:59:11
should see a bit of a usability improvement for Drake owners as I expect folks when you know the patch goes live that you know check out the patch notes for the full list of of all those changes that are coming in 310 last question a second the last question I guess before we let you go let's see how granular skits we've talked about you know we now we know how wind effects flight in atmosphere we know we know gravity will affect flight atmosphere how big a factor is temperature in in the atmospheric flight of ships does it will it affect things like the overheating of ship components at all well does it change anything about air resistances or some like that it's how big a factor is temperature it is it a factor I guess in 310 it isn't a factor
01:00:02
but it is something that we want to do so if you if you fly your ship down to an ice planet and you'd leave it there turned off for a few hours and you come back to it it's boot up time to the point it can operate will take longer if you're flying in a love of volcano planet somewhere in pyro you are going to overheat quicker than you would in deep space so we do plan for that to have an effect but in 310 it doesn't I don't know if the current temperatures affect the pressure on the planets that's not really area but if it does affect pressure then it will affect a handlink breath and last way before we let you go from the chat are Richard can your cat come on the show next week even if you're not here yeah whoever's on the show you realize no I'll put me in a box
01:00:53
with well it's just staring at me right now it's called rocky and he's very hungry this is it because it's his feeding time and it's just fat staring at me now all right well that's it for our show guys thank you so much for taking the time out of a busy Wednesday to Wednesday that was even on purpose it's sexy Wednesday busy Wednesday it's Friday it's July it's July 3rd it's a holiday weekend here in the United States I've for folks in United States watching happy Independence for folks in the UK watching happy ha ha I thought it was Wednesday just like just like a minute ago I thought it was Wednesday so don't listen to a thing that I'd say they alternately forgot your name at the star I know I know
01:01:41
Yogi John Richard and rocky thank you so much for being here on the show with us this week guys as we are want to do lately we are gonna throw the hosts over to a star citizen streamer who's broadcasting right now I am being told it is flying Sparrow who if I'm not if I'm not mistaken has a has a cat of her own on her stream so you can check that out we the this the the host should start any minute now so opt-in tell them tell them rocky says hi when you go for starts is in life thank you so much take care everybody and we'll see you next week you

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