10 for the Designers: Episode 05 (2015.06.29)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:05

   [Music] hey hey welcome cherished citizens uh to another episode of 10 for the designers where uh I Western kaix will be taking us through some of our uh subscribers questions with henchman number 21 Matt Sherman uh so yeah we uh we specifically themed this particular episode as the uh Mad Max specific Rim crossover episode uh but mostly we just got questions about repair so we'll just go ahead and deal with those uh we'll start with uh anig who asks when repairing can you choose to

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   leave certain parts damaged if you for instance prefer the handling of the ship without the Cosmetic parts then could you just ignore it yeah um one of the nice things that we're trying to make sure with the repair systems is what you're repairing has direct impact on your ship you're you're not going to be fixing you know the decals on the outside in space when you've been damaged that's more something when you go back to Port but when you have to fix a power plant or a shield generator that that's the stuff you're going to we're we're going to be giving to you to really be fixing up well yeah and you you all basically all repair actions require some impetus you have to do a thing to make the repair happen at all so if you simply don't do that thing

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   the repair doesn't happen all right yeah so our next question comes from am amantel uh asking how will you make Ship Repair accessible to the new player deep enough to support gameplay focused on repair and rewarding of increasing player skill by making it each action really small and condensed uh you're doing a series of very small condensed actions of uh you know I'm I'm going I'm going to go over to my broken power plant and I'm going to uh open it up and see that it's on fire so I'm going to uh use my extinguisher to put that fire out and clog the hole when but identifying that

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   as the issue is part of the gameplay there's the there's the Diagnostics uh element there's the uh triage element and then there's the uh subcomponent replacement element each of those things is a simple process uh and don't particularly have a lot of um there not a high barrier to entry on that uh where there is a lot of complexity is all this damage gets propagated into your ship based on the actual combat and the actual events of the game uh and the manner in which you take damage and the uh ways that you're stressing your ship are going to lead to different kinds of damaged behaviors that will require different repair actions to fix uh what that means is

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   that if you lose Shields that's a problem uh and the quickest act the quickest path between not having Shields to having Shields again uh is not going to be clear to the unexperienced uh repair man so understanding which parts of the of this repair of this Shield component are critical to it functioning at all versus the ones that allow it to have a lot of health or fast recharge or uh accommodates the coolant um these these each function separately so you can have a terrible but functional component uh if you choose to repair only the critical path which could be the difference between life and death in

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   a in in combat um and then if you are the noob you can work through in whatever order you discover these issues you can work through them and solve them individually until eventually you have a working component again uh and through doing that you might organically begin to discover which parts of this are actually required for it to the function versus which of them are required for it to be any good all right so yeah bunch of plans yeah it's it's important to have both levels of of difficulty and by layering a bunch of simple things yeah I mean it's a lot more approachable as a learned action so the more you play the better you get and or the more you

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   really I want to say focus on it but the more you invest yourself into the system it's going to reward you for that personal investment yeah different components are also different so uh there will be plenty of things to learn about Dragon Slayer and then I'll jump to the page one uh so dragon slayer asks uh are we going to be implementing any uh real-time waiting for the crafting or building of structures uh so if you take your ship to get repaired uh will it take different amounts of time depending on the amount of damage yeah um we're actually working on a pretty interesting system to handle a lot of that stuff uh and not just for ships but also uh extending out to components where it's sort of a two-layer system where your your ship or

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   your component is going to have so much durability to it and that's like its maximum health pool and then you'll have its current repair State uh which is its current health and so you'll be able to repair uh a destroyed ship or a broken component up to that that maximum durability point and that'll be a quicker action so you know a few minutes maybe a little bit longer if it's a really big you know capital ship or like a whole series but then when you want to raise that durability back up and raise its Max potential that's going to be more taking it to a refurbishing shop and you're going to sort of have to drop the component off for a little bit of time where it may be a day uh couple hours it'll really vary based on the the size and the Damage um but then that shop is going to bring your durability

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   back up to full and give it back to you uh in a lot better condition than when you dropped it off yeah and it actually takes into account all those elements of uh you have the the very discret levels of damage um so if you take that Shield generator from the last example and you take it in uh depending on how many of those subcomponents were damaged and the degree to which they were damaged it'll go through each of them to get it back up to a working condition I imagine you probably be able to interrupt that and be like I got to get off planet right now I'm giving my component uh and you'll get uh some not quite fully repaired version of your component and be off like that yeah so one really good analogy that we've actually use for even representing this when we're designing

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    it out uh if you look to a lot of fighting games and specifically uh Marvel vers Capcom 3 it has a really good representation of this where uh if you think of your durability is a character's red health and their current health is their yellow bar and so when you know they're out of the combat you know getting some of that repair they'll slowly be able to go back up to that full red bar state but they're still going to be capped at what that red bar is telling them yeah and that's that's also the uh limitation of field repair is that uh over time there's just this attrition of your health and and the components in your hole uh that eventually no matter how how well you take care of your ship you're going to eventually have to take it in to get fixed yep uh or get a new one it's also an option yep all right so Alex

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    Valentine asks I've been wondering with all the Fantastic work you guys are putting into updating all the damage States and the impact physics how will this affect long-term gameplay say I'm a lousy shot but still want to help my friends by turning a wrench could I keep the ship floating in a tough spot uh hopefully I mean I'm a I'm not really a particularly good dog fighter I'm mostly pilot and I'm interested in doing engineering work myself it's it's a it's a pretty uh involved element of of play including for combat because uh not only will you be able to bring uh bring components back from the brink of death um but you will be able to it ties into the workbench and overclocking there um you'll be able to do some of that on a uh shortterm

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    limited basis of you know go over and and really get the power plant to to yeah put out a lot more power for this duration and be sure to shut off the valve again before it explodes but you'll you'll have a lot of opportunity to really contribute to the the performance of your ship um even if you aren't contributing to what that ship is doing yeah um yeah the the goal is just everything can have that active handson gameplay to it so you're never going to just be that guy tagging along for the ride progress barring through your task you'll you'll have something to do and keep you involved with your friends uh so Kieran asks in older space combat Sims ship would automatically repair

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    their certain subsystems when given enough time after damage and multiple repairs could be prioritized will star doesn't have this capability I probably not for just a compl completely automated system now we we definitely had that repair drone stretch goal um and so we we want you to be able to give that you know a simple command or two and say hey my power plant's busted and have that go do some of the the lighter work for you um it's not going to be the the greatest top-notch repair but it'll it'll let you possibly focus on hey I got to get my weapons back online as well I'm going to focus on that I'm going to send my repair bot to work on my power plant while I'm just sitting here you know fixing up my ship after a fight yeah we haven't implemented this

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    yet but I don't expect that we'll want the repair bot to have any initiative of its own uh it's probably going to require that you give it a command and then it'll go off and do that to the best of its ability but I don't think that it will be able to identify uh tasks that need doing uh it's not a very proactive little dude yeah and you're also going to have to be you know standing still while you're doing this because yeah the repair drone's got enough maneuvering to get around your ship but if you're going at 300 M a second it's it's not that fast of a drone to do highspeed repair on you I feel like there's a movie there high speeded repair or at least a lifetime Channel show uh Mad Max Pacific Rim crossover

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    there you go so glaive asks not sure if this counts as repair question but are we going to be able to take the whole panels off our ships and replace them with other panels using different materials or composite materials like heat armor or reactive armor types so as it's not really repair uh repair you'll be fabricating hole where it's been shot up and Torn to Pieces but uh that's generally going to be a repair substance that uh sort of fills in the gaps and is your 3D printed ship as far as changing out your armor uh that's something that I believe will require you to visit a vendor you'll be able to uh go to a planet or to a space port and say hey change out my armor but I don't

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    believe that it's something that you'll be able to do through any of the repair functions uh it's a lot more involved um with your Direct ship uh structural Integrity than uh the repair stuff is which is more about um layering over the I mean it is I mean your hole is technically just armor it serves no other purpose but uh as far as field repair is concerned you're not going to be able to um fabricate high density armor versus uh ablative armor or um stealth armor anything like that so I think that that's going to be more uh more a station visit uh beer for the beer godod asks Elite recently implemented the power play

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    feature uh which allows players a means of enacting change within the Galaxy one of the controversies surrounding the new mechanics is that players can contribute while offline allowing them to influence things without any real risk of other players having a way to stop them uh will SC have a similar problem with the PVP slider uh we're hoping not um so any of the actions that you're taking in the persistent Universe are you know it's going to be something you are there to have to to trigger off at some point so it's not like there would be any sort of a passive offline gaml uh but there could definitely be something where hey you've you've brought some good materials to a fabrication site they may be pumping out some better components

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    for a little bit of time um and that could those could still be for sale while you're offline but it's something that you triggered that you helped cause in the universe and that should really affect everyone regardless of pte or PVP because just cuz if you have your slider set one way or another it doesn't mean you can't get attacked there there can be PVE Pirates uh there can be you know PVP you know uee cops so yeah it's not it's not just about uh the PVP the PVE conflict either because um PVP actions and and things that you know any anything that uh influences the persistent Universe to a greater degree than shooting a guy uh is going going to require some level of interaction with

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    NPCs uh either as you know to the to the farthest extreme uh simply as Witnesses um where the uh NPCs are being affected by all of your decisions and as as such whether a player is there or not uh the NPCs will continue to be affected by those decisions when you come in to affect your change um so any any change in state to the environment is going to be propagated across uh additionally if you're going to be doing anything like a blockade or something uh you're going to want to be uh teaming up with um the local NPCs uh because that's you know if I come to this Factory to drop off my stuff uh a blockade is going to require

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    that that factory be run by NPCs with your interests in mind rather than mine um that's how that's generally how I would expect things to play out uh and if if you were able to uh discover a way to um affect the persistent Universe without really putting self in risk of uh player interference that's why that's why the PVP slider doesn't go to zero yeah uh we're able to give different levels of weight to different uh players depending on um how much we think that their uh influence should be making them available as targets the slider is is an issue of player intent it doesn't

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    guarantee a particular kind of experience yeah I mean you could you could get nothing but NPCs on the full PVP slider and you can still get jumped by other players on a full PVE slide to it it's just where you are what you're doing what you have caused to happen and that's really going to have as much backend effect as what that individual player sets their slider to so Aragorn VH asks will some missions ask players to transport perishable items like food and and will there be a limit on the length of time it is possible to successfully deliver them and will this require any sort of specialized cargo containers that are pressurized or refrigerated yeah yeah yeah we're going to have uh cargo containers um that are that are

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    specialized for uh perishables for uh dangerous materials um including radiation uh corrosive materials um volatile materials uh there's also a notion of like if you're if you're transporting livestock um we might still put that in a crate but you're not going to be able to keep them alive in your standard crate you're going to need something specifically with life support built into it uh there yeah the the full the full spectrum of cargo possibilities and and anything intrinsic to the nature of a given cargo type uh perishability or um if there's a a rapid Half-Life Decay to

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    some particular substance that somebody finds where I don't know this isotope exists for an hour and a half uh then you will definitely be restricted by those things in terms of being successful in your trade run all right so Ivan K kintore uh almost anyway doesn't matter it have been mentioned that Bango carriers are available to civilian only for taking by force or as Rex for fixing up uh would The Crucible based external repair structure be typically used in that process to the point where it can move itself to a place more suitable for an over overhaul than the presumably dangerous place it was found in so a crucible not by itself uh I mean Bengals are giant ship so that's going

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    to be something where you and a few friends in multiple crucibles are going to want to sort of over to that thing and start getting it fixed up because if you've managed to make one of those things dead in the water that's no small amount of damage that you're going to have to fix up on this thing yeah The Crucible will be able to perform repair actions on things like the Bengal they'll be able to repair hold damage uh fix up breaches uh do component repair um in the field uh to a much greater degree than you could do by hand uh however The Crucible is limited in in its cargo space yeah uh and there are some components on the bangal which are larger than The Crucible can carry so if one of those is broken Beyond repair and must be replaced then you're going to

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    have to uh find a way around that it won't be a single Crucible job um I don't see that being the case for most of our larger ships I think that you'll probably want to have uh two or three at minimum if you're going to be um taking care of capital class ships yeah smaller ships like a constellation a single Crucible should be a good good enough to do a field refit on it but yeah and like the the capital ship you know power plants and shield generators these are massive you know room sized installation so you're you're going to need something with a lot of Bolt carrying capacity to get these bigger components over to those ships uh even if The Crucible can still manipulate and get into place it

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    can't bring that with it cuz it'll just be you know overc capacity so zil Chas in the Pu especially relating to PVP encounters how will we know if an enemy ship has hostile intent before getting fired upon if pirates are laying in weight for with civilian traffic waiting to set up an ambush and I'm escorting a convoy they want a raid will it be possible to ID the Pirates as hostile before even after they open fire on my charge uh will there be an in-game process for this or will the initiative Advantage always line in favor of the attacker further in the example above would the presence of an awax type ship like the Hornet tracker help balance things in favor of the defender it's a matter of uh scanning at the heart of the question is that how much you can identify uh the ships around you uh the

27. 00:21:19

    Hornet tracker definitely does have the advantage in resolution of scanning but overall you'll be able to tell if you're in a civilian area uh you'll probably be with in proximity to tell the whether or not a given ship has their weapons powered um still fleshing out all those systems but there's also the element of keeping track of that is going to be hard that's why you want somebody dedicated to it like that's that's part of the purpose of multi crew is to be able to say uh here is a Minefield of potential attackers go through them and flag for yourself what you believe to be a threat uh if you have determined that this guy is he's he's on his way it doesn't he's not really a threat right now you can Mark him as such and it's it's

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    about uh we want we want to allow a clever pirate to do this situation but we also are very focused on giving the defender the tools with which they need to defend themselves not everything is about simply breaking a big enough cont that nobody wants to attack you you still need to be able to proactively uh work in your defense the the The Sensation that you're at the disadvantage probably not going to go away uh it it's just that's just how it feels to walk into an ambush but you will be able to uh look out into the crowd and try to have the information to determine for yourself uh if someone is dangerous we're the one one thing I I

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    forgot to mention is that we're also um we're revisiting how we're interacting with the HUD trying to make it a little more intuitive to move through the actions and arrive at the thing that you intended to do so whereas right now it's a little bit cumbersome to track multiple targets or switch between them and get more detail about those ships uh we're hoping that as we drill down into each of these actions for the purpose of multi crew will'll be able to also start looking at making that interaction a little bit more intuitive and natural for use because you want somebody in multi crew to empower this gameplay but you also don't want to be locked out of it if you're on your own um so you'll never be as good but we can make it

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    better yeah and and one other thing also with just the you know getting that tagged information on people is um you know the ability to also share that information so if you have a group of four or five ships it's not going to be just on one guy uh or or one ship to do all that scanning everyone can be scanning you know small packets of the traffic around and then sharing that data among their group um I mean that's one of the the things for like a Herald where right you know you have Hornet tracker and a heral that tracker is going to start spotting people tagging them passing that info into a Herold that Herold can relay it to its other friendlies nearby and so you you can web out that information a lot nicer than just everyone has to do it themsel it

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    won't be you know that tedious so that's our show uh thank you to the wonderful subscribers uh for supporting us and letting us do things like this where we can be uh speaking directly to the community at large um forget what else you're supposed to say at this part so uh I'm your host KX rno I'm Matt thanks hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe

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