Star Citizen Live: Q&A - Vehicle Flight and Balance

12 June 202500:59:261,674 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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for me. Seriously, Spock is the only one you can mention. Yes. On top of my head right now. Yes. I've asked we've we've asked you to to mention five Star Trek characters and all you have all you can do is Spock. Why does this have to start with a roast already? Like is this special enough? No. No. Put the camera on him. He's the one. It's not your failure. It's Rich's failure, right? I I definitely take responsibility for that. Okay. No. No. The why not? Jeez. You know, you got to show the person who doesn't know Star Trek. You're not showing the person who doesn't know Star Trek. You Yogi knows Star Trek. You know, go to Yogi. Spock is literally the only character you can mention. Can we talk about Star Wars? Maybe. I don't know. More educated. Okay, fine. Name five Star Wars characters. Anakin, Obi-Wan, Miss Wu, Yoda, Darth Vader. Okay, now he's a
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prequel star. Okay. Okay. Now, something outside of the prequels. of the prequels. Uh, come on. Three of them. Leila. Leila. Uh, how's the princess name in English? Leia. Okay. That's fine. Princess Leila works. I'm just going to charge face here. Hi everybody. Welcome to Star Citizen Live. The passion of Mattea Montichelli. I'm your host Jared Huckabe. And if you've never seen Star Citizen Live before, what a lucky person you are. Uh that's where we take roughly about an hour, sometimes a little bit less, uh out of an occasional week, uh these days, uh to sit down with our developers and chat, uh things related to Star Citizen, uh or Star Trek or or Star
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Wars. Uh um um uh what other star What other stars are you not familiar with? Starman. You ever seen Star Man? No. That I know something about Star Citizen, though. That can help. Well, hopefully we're going to find out. We're going to find out. Uh, so yeah. So, joining us on the show this week are esteemed members of our the team members who work on uh all things spaceships and what they do. These aren't the folks who build the spaceships. Those are members of our fantastic vehicle teams who build the physical spaceships. These are the folks who take those spaceships and and and craft them and hone them and adjust them so that they perform the way uh that we want them across both of our games, Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Uh so uh uh with that, let's introduce uh uh some folks because every show is
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somebody's first show, including one of our guests. So Yogi, we're going to start with you. You're our old hand here. Tell everybody who you are and what you do for Star Citizen. I'm an old hand. Okay. Uh I'm Yogi. I'm a a principal vehicle programmer. Um, and roughly together with Rich, I'm uh leading the uh development of the uh flight model and the flight experience. Okay. And uh for those people who may who may be hearing that term for the first time, what's a flight model? Flight model is basically the thing that makes the ship fly the way it flies. So, uh how smooth it is, how janky, how sometimes how broken, but uh yeah, stuff like that. Okay. Uh, Rich. Um, yeah. So, I'm basically Richard and I'm the lead game designer on the vehicle experience team. So, I'm kind of responsible Yogi for the overall flight experience,
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turrets. Um, just the way the general gameplay works with vehicles. I know you hid your last name so people can't send you letters. Yes. Okay. This is uh Rich Tyra sitting. Right. I'm going to start making loads of decisions now. Okay. Uh, and last but certainly not least, a first timer for Mattea. Hey yo, uh I'm Matia. I'm a game designer three working with Richard on everything flight spaceship balance related. Uh mostly for Star Citizen these days and yeah that's what we do. All right. Uh so as we are want to do on Star Citizen live uh we uh put up a thread up on spectrum where this one I'm talking to people. Uh this we put a thread up on spectrum and collected questions from you the star citizen community. uh our folks, our lovely
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folks here went through your questions and pulled a collection of them that they felt they could answer best uh during the course of today's show. Um so when you if you've submitted your question, you're like, "Well, why aren't they talking about this and why aren't they talking about that?" Usually what that means is either we don't have the particular guest that's on to talk about that uh because we certainly wouldn't want Yogi talking about stuff he's not involved in or Matteo or Rich. um or uh that's a feature aspect that is not currently in development. The other big kind of misperception in games is that you work on all the things all at the same time. Uh we don't. So the questions that we're going to talk about today are primarily the things that are currently in active development and that relate to the work of these three individuals. So uh right off the bat, we'll just jump right in. Um
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yo Jared looking healthy as Oh, thank you. Boomish. Um, true. Thought it was my mom at first. Uh, what is the intended purpose for heavy fighters? Right now, they have a turn rate very similar to ships like the Connie and Corsair, but they lack the shields and firepower of those. What's up? So, uh, this is a question for me. Yes. U, so, uh, we have been playing with every fighter twinning since 323, basically the master mode release. And our idea about the heavy fighter role haven't hasn't changed much throughout the time. So basically what uh we think a heavy fighter is is basically uh heavier fighter that has lower maneuverability compared to light fighters but uh increased durability and increased firepower. That's as simple as
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that, right? Um currently we have reuned the entire heavy fighter class. um that you know includes ships like the F8, the new guardian uh the other Guardians and so on and so forth uh to fit a better spot uh and in our opinion the spot that now the heavy fighters actually cover it's quite fine. We do notice that the heavy fighter class is slightly underperforming right now though uh but we think it's related more to the relationship in between cross classes rather than the heavy fighters tuning per se. So uh stuff for example like how the heavy fighter uh is you know dealing against like a medium fighter for example or a shipper of a bigger size like for example a constellation uh or stuff like it. So we would like to dive more into the tuning for other classes first before assessing the uh you know the overall heavy fighter tuning and if
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that need to be addressed once again. So currently uh this is the state of the the heavy fighter class in general. Uh but we have some even more updates or like more ideas for the more updates model. So the current ratio on where the fighters sit doesn't necessarily need to stay this way. Uh we have the updated flight model coming and we're using that uh to basically I wouldn't say reset but re-evaluate especially the relationships between the fighters. For example, in our perspective at the moment with the new or with the updated flight model, the heavy fighters, they just feel a little bit too tanky because they're still fighters, right? Right. So, we're currently evaluating whether or not we should make them uh more more vulnerable because if you compare some numbers from, for example, a gladius versus a F8, we're looking at like a five times health. That is like quite a lot for a
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fighter class. So, we're evaluating or re-evaluate that once the new flight model or the updated flight model is uh coming online. And when you say evaluate, that means you're still making your decisions. Yeah, sure. Nothing nothing is nothing is ever set in stone when it comes to that. You're you're looking you're asking the question whether that five times is right. You're not sitting here saying today five times is wrong. No, we're still looking at that. And Matia, you make a good point about how it's you don't just in order to tune the heavy fighters or any fighter class or any ship class. It's not just the work on that ship. You then have to make a pass on everything else. It's it's this constant kind of thing where you go through every class and then you go back through and you go through every class, then you go back through every class and you just refine the entire field of ships over and over again. And that's where you're going to find out whether five times is right.
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Maybe maybe five times is right and then things like the Connie and Cutless need to go up to six or seven or whatever. It's it's one of those things you're going to find it through multiple passes. Multiple passes, which is what you guys have been doing for some time now for being, you know, candid about it. Yeah. I mean we can never like really set it to a to a fixed thing like we can plan as much as we want uh but whether our plans survived than reality is a different question also like sometimes other things coming for example the upcoming armor system and so on that will also change these these dynamics and might just require some other uh adjustments somewhere else I imagine your thoughts on these things actually change over time too like how many years have you been here now Yogi yeah it's it's close to me I'm on 11 and I'm like I'm like Well, I can't I can't remember a time when you were here. I joined 2017, but gameplay since 2019, I
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think. Yeah. So, I'm certain the way you thought about some of these things in 2017 is not the same as you thought of them in 2020. It's not the same you thought. I'm sure there are some things that are still the same, but but I think details details change over time a bit, right? Because sometimes you just prove that A or B doesn't doesn't really work. For example, also the idea to have a perfectly balanced game is a bit this can be sure we can go for this, but it doesn't necessarily need to be that because the relationships of players playing, they're so complex to grasp. Um the the hardest case we have in our combat design is uh same skill, same well same pilot, same skill, same ship to get a fight going in this in a one scenario without any other external factors. This is like when you get this one right, then you probably have something that you can really work with.
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Um, but it's hard to actually get to that thing because even if you have two players, two really good pro players fighting against each others, it's hard to tell which one of these is better. I mean, you can maybe count kill times or so, but there's so many factors and that's sometimes hard to hard to grasp. So, I'm not entirely sure that that we need a completely balanced game because ships are different. like people are different, real world airplanes are different, have pros and cons and so on, but you can never really balance them out completely, right? So, we'll see. Um, you've just you just given people their first uh, you know, Reddit thread, you know, you know, we start CI developers, I'm not sure we need a completely balanced game. Okay, so hang on. What what what we're still aiming for is like we we try to avoid a meta game, right? This is like something we we're still trying. uh it's it will be incredibly hard. But if we have a game at some point where like almost all ship
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types have have a purpose where it makes sense also like maybe maybe in the value that that that you bought that ship for in in an in-game shop or something like that. Um then we're probably in a good place. Yeah. And it's one of those things it's some ships are meant to be there's progression in mind. It's it's not every ship is supposed to be equal. Some ships you're supposed to progress through. You know, a gladius is where the light fighter journey starts. It's not where your light fighter journey is supposed to end. Sure. And stuff like that. So, you have to So, just by just by the very concept of progression, not all ships can be balanced, nor they should they. They're supposed to be a you start here and you move here and you move here. Now, that will that has changed quite a bit over the years and it will continue to change as the game continues to develop develop. Um, there was one more thing I wanted to
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follow up on and stuff and I lost it. I lost it because there there was a there was a guy in the Twitch chat like C is a joke and whatever and I was just like and I was like I'm like thanks for watching. Um, uh, let's just move on to the next question and if I remember it I'll come back. Uh, what happened with the new quantum travel experience that we saw at Citizen Con 2953? So two years ago. Okay. So at this point uh the quantum uh experience that you saw there was exactly how it was at that time in squadron 42. Uh that design since then has changed a bit. Um also with the requirements of the other flight model changes that we're currently doing. Um so in general there's three parts to the new flight model is like the quantum experience, the updated space flight model and the control surfaces. And all of these got changed and expanded based on the requirements that we saw. Um and
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right now what we back then described as quantum boosting is basically has changed a little bit. So quantum boosting will be used for like uh the slow speed range that you used to do nav mode with right. So if you want to go uh for so there's basically three speed ranges that you need in Star Citizen. One is to go from let's say one py to another or between planets or something like this like where we're talking uh millions of kilometers, right? Then you need the uh um the range in which you're navigating within these spaces. So let's say going from uh let's say you have a bubble of like 300 kilometers or so in size. You want to you need to navigate in between there but you don't want to fly with your SCM speeds, right? So for that quantum boosting will be used and then there's normal SCM speed region. So basically the thruster based flying which will still be limited to I don't know maybe
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300 meters per second or so. Uh uh no ca caveman crafting in the twist chat says in other words that quantum video was marketing fluff. It was not. No, no, no. You literally just said it's exactly how it was in Squadron at the time it was recorded. Yeah, that's how it was. It was all real. It was real gameplay. You can actually see that it was real gameplay because during on stage the our left stick broke and you can see that in the video because the velocity meter on the left side is constantly twitching because the stick broke. It was all real. You try, you try, you try. Um, it was real. Here's a Here, here's a fun uh question. The F8 uh will the F8 ever once more become a mobility monster like it was built in in Squadron 42 prologue at it's at as of the current moment, it
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feels like a flying brick and with all the agility of one. Rich, what the hell are you doing to my baby? That's what it says. Yeah, Rich, that's what it says. That's what it says. I'm just reading it. Yeah. So, it's about providing a tuning that fits the archetype of that ship and and you know, and that's something we're always working towards is giving the ship the archetype and it's, you know, and I said it's always work in progress. Um, and that ship in particular is it's, you know, it's got loads of guns, it's got loads of thrusters. Um, you know, and as you say, not all ships have to fit the perfect progression of balance and that's, you know, in that sense, you know, so we're definitely looking at what the ship should be with a new flight model as well. you know, there's going to be some more changes there because a big thing with a new flat model is we're going to have far more tools at our disposal to make ships different where whereas at the moment
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we've got tools, but we're quite limited in that context of providing ships that are quick but sluggish at the same time. So, we kind of, you know, we we're kind of in a box with the current balance a little bit in that regard. But with the new flight model, we've got more tools to give us maybe a ship that can be really quick but actually takes a little bit longer to get there. You know, or the acceleration is a little bit slower, but it can move, you know, faster. Um, I do want to you want anything you want to add, Mata? So, we do know that at the current state, the overall levy fighter uh angular velocity has got decreased a little bit. Uh but we think it's for the better and once again um we think the feeling and the perception that uh we see uh on the player side these days is mostly related to once again the relation the relation between those ship
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classes right uh and uh in our opinion once again what we want to reach is like a balanced and intended gameplay experience for the ship per se right so uh having a super OP mega powerful ship it's can be cool the first that you have it right but after a while when it becomes the maid and it becomes the uh forced choice game designwise and gameplay wise uh I don't think uh this is a good direction and or a fun direction so what we want yeah yeah it's not healthy now of course you're going to say that and Twitch is about to fill up with people saying but what about this ship and what about that ship and what about that ship that are currently OP and stuff like that and the answer is we'll get there yeah and that's a big thing about the balance is it's a continuous thing it's moving it's evolving all the time and we can't tune 200 ships all in one go when we figure
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something out. So, it has to come in steps, which is why we're doing pass on the medium. It's why we've done the pass on the heavies and then and that'll keep evolving, but we have to do it in pieces. Um because we just, you know, we can't move 200 ships at the same time. And also, it's more important for us to kind of move those pieces um step by step because we understand the dynamics that we generate inside the game a bit better as well. Uh so, you know, we get uh more knowledge about it. we understand how player uh prefer to use certain type of ship rather than others. Uh so moving those uh Lego bricks in tiny blocks is easier than just moving one and see how it performs and then try to scale everything according to that. So that's what we're going to try to do and what we are trying uh what we have tried to do and what we are actually doing as well uh with the current uh monthly updated patches. Uh so we always try to deliver something uh to address
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maybe a specific issue or a specific area of the ship uh flight in the game. Uh, Zodide says just hire more people to balance at the same time. And he's got that he's got that uh uh the the the one Twitch emo emoji with the kind of sarcastic face. So, I think he's going to be I think he's I think that's a sarcastic comment. I'm not sure. I'm not up on the popular culture, but but no, it is one of those things where, you know, nine doctors don't make a baby in in one month and whatever. Plus, uh, as I said on on uh earlier this week to another thing, not everybody at CG is not a monolith. You have what you think and want. You have what you think and want. You have what you think and and want. Ideally, we find compromise. We find places. But you add more adding more people will often bring in more opinions and more stuff and actually can make finding consensus even harder. So,
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it's just one of those things where unfortunately hiring more devs is not the answer to everything. If you need to make another location, possibly. But if you're trying to fine-tune the balance of a thing, not always the case. I want to talk I want to ask two more questions about I remembered what I wanted to talk about before in in in balance. Um you mentioned player skill. Yeah. There's this thing there. There used to be a guy who worked here, Vinnie Sinatra. He was he was our QA lead back in back in the day in LA studio. And that guy could do things in a Gladius that I could not see anybody else do in LA. He he it didn't matter what ship you flew. if he was in a Gladius, he could kick your ass. And and that was the thing. That was the thing like like the Gladius, the light fighter meta, the way
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that it was, it just spoke to him. It it was it was like this perfect match between pilot and and and and ship. But you don't always get that. Sometimes people they desperately want to fly. They like they desperately want to fly my Superman punching ship right here because it's it's the aesthetic that they want and it's it has the role that they want, but it's not perfectly suited for who they actually are. And the comments that come from that are, "Oh, well, this thing is underpowered or this thing moves slower." And like, well, the answer is, well, maybe this ship actually isn't the one that was right for you. Maybe this other ship is the one. How do you how do you incorporate that and how do you manage that with this this player preference and the the player skill level? It's how does that factor into your your balance plans
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here? So, so it's really complex like, so we start off with a shipping concept and the team we work with, you know, the vehicle team and the drone crew and we work with them on identifying the kind of identity of that ship and what it should be and what it will be in the game. And then and then according to that, we're building a certain character that we think suits that ship. You know, it could be really fast forwards, it could have really good handling or or it's really slow and kungly. You know, we just don't know, but it depends on the ship. So we try and apply that and then yeah it just evolves from the load out of the ship it can depend on the weapons or you know or if you don't have the weapons to defend itself what does that mean as well you know does that mean make it really tanky so it can't fight back but but you know but it can sustain but all those different things that we have all the tools we have out this puzzle create what that ship is in the game and then from that the players
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themselves have choices within that ship what they can have as well and we try and provide as much as we can to give the players to move the ship a little bit more in that place or that place depending what they want. But the ship always has a kind of window that it will operate in and it might creep into other ships if you, you know, have, you know, if you have different components, stuff like that, but it's always got that core identity. Um, and sometimes that's not going to align with each individual player and and and and what they want it to be. And that's not a balance issue. That is just that's a thing that happens when you've got a a game with 200, you know, ships. My if I could if I could fly around in any ship and be an ultimate fighter, this is I'm going to speak about me personally here. It would be it would be the the Mantis. I love the aesthetic of the Mantis. I think the Mantis could
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have been the coolest damn fighter ever. And that's not how it was built and whatnot. And I I've tried the the few the few times I still get into the game, whatever. I always try to fight, you know, Mantis and I and I struggle and that's just because I I love the aesthetic of it so much. I want I want that and stuff like that. So, but it's one of those things it's like that's not a balance problem. That is that that that is that is that is simply that ship is not meant to do the thing that I want it to do. And I always have to kind of remind myself. I mean there is like a like a good analogy this is from like there was a German World War II ace which is was called Adolf Gallant and uh and he flew the Fog Wolf 190 and the ME 109 and um although one of them was better like the the Fogwolf was a lot better in terms of like the stats he actually preferred the BF or the ME 109
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because it was just better in in handling and like it was it just speaks to the characteristics of the ship. the ship have the characteristics. It might not be the right ship for you. Maybe you just like focus so much on one ship that your muscle memory is all aligned with how this or that ship should handle, right? But this is why we have different ships, right? Like the these are just different Well, they give you different access to the universe. Maybe the handling is different, but then you have a big size 4 gun somewhere else. So the second question I want uh we we've said already and and folks like, will you talk talk to us more about the flight model? We're going to do that in just a minute. This is my this is my this is my setup for that. Okay, we have done Yogi Rich, we have done a lot of these shows over the years. Uh whether whether it's here at SCCL, whether it's on an ISC or whether it's even a Citizen Con
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presentation that we that we put together and whatever. For for for a number of years now, we have said this next thing is our is our thing we're waiting for. Whether that was whether that was master modes or whether that was or that or that was or that was um hover mode before before that or whether that was or that was um operator modes, whether it's flight model uh stuff like this. Uh at various points in over the course of Star Citizen's now 13-ear development, it's it's been some or other that we're waiting on that unlocks the next thing. Now, you know, and along that it's been armor penetration, and it's been uh recently we we we put flight blades in there, and that allows you to to tune things like this. Uh we know that crafting is coming up. Crafting is going to dramatically change how so many of these ships uh uh go
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because now you're going to be able to build some version of these ships and and affect their their characteristics in the one that you buy. you know, we're we're selling the stock versions, but people are going to be able to craft their own individual versions and who and some level of customization will go into that. Is it feudal to try to do any balancing along the way? Is it is this just a waste of everybody's time to try to to try to balance heavy fighters, to try to balance ours when you know there's so many outstanding systems still coming? No. So, I'd say it's part of the journey and let's say we throw away everything tomorrow. We still have what we've learned along the way. Um, and that's really important because we're
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constantly learning. You know, it goes back to you earlier. You know, you know, I've been here seven years and my understanding of the game and the game mechanics has fundamentally changed in that time. you know, and as we've built more systems and we've added more to the game and, you know, we do know the game's not complete, but it's kind of exciting because we're building towards that and we're always moving in that direction and learning more and getting better hopefully, you know, at what we do. Um, you know, so we change things along the way and then we have other systems that come in and they might throw a curveball in that, you know, system that we've made, but we're learning along the way to build what we think is the best game. Yeah, I can think I can add something on that uh from a different perspective because I've joined the team uh roughly around two years ago. So, not a long time as these other two veterans, right? Uh but it's very important in uh in order to
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you as a game designer in my case, but in general, I think as a as a developer uh to have that knowledge and uh being able to have that experience in tuning and uh uh you know uh getting accustomed to the game, getting to know how the game is working currently. also to understand first of all what can you do and what can you plan to improve the game in the future in the long run uh and also be prepared for that when the moment comes uh you know what to do you know what to expect you know what to manipulate in order to create the right experience right so uh it's never a waste of time and also I guess you guys want to play as well the game right uh from time to time so playing a game that isn't is in a better state probably is better than just a game that is not balanced at all in it I think there's often over the course of the 11 years I've been here there's there's I I continuously encounter this expectation that every answer is supposed to be
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figured out before you start making the game, before you start building. And that's just not how game development works. That's it's construction, not development. Uh but it's it's always from the player perspective, it is always incredibly challenging because it's it's we have backers, we have players, we have citizens out there who want desperately to believe in us. They want desperately to believe that we know what we're doing. They want desperately to believe uh that there that there's that there's a master plan and stuff. And the reality is that we know what we're doing and there is a plan, but those things change. We know what we're doing, but we learn more along the way. And those things that we learn change our perceptions. They change our ideas along the way. We have that plan and then new systems come online and stuff. And that plan has to
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change and it has to evolve and stuff like this. And it's never an issue of not knowing what we want to do or or or not being able to do it. It is it is this is what game development is. It is this constantly evolving neverending uh of of thing to find this thing that we're all trying to build together. Uh there's Chris's vision, there's Rich Tyra's vision, there's your guys' vision, there there's every everybody's vision. And it's about synthesizing that vision along the way. And it it's going to change, it's going to evolve, and it can be very can be very frustrating uh both for player and developer alike. Uh and it's just I don't really know where I'm going with this. I just I feel like I want to acknowledge that that I don't think that the vision has changed a lot though, right? I mean like uh the one thing you can't underestimate is like
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engineering and design and development. It just takes time. Like I mean like seriously like 90% of all the of all the things that player proposed that we should do better. We we usually thought about these already, right? Uh because we this is what we're doing for for a living. Um but it's just takes time to implement these. If somebody tells me, oh please add an ultimeter or something like this, then then there's 15 different problems we need to solve. It's it's like it's a lot. Yeah. And those are the easy part as well like because a lot of time player uh you know have very interesting insight and ideas about very complex system that you need that we can potentially put in place but uh those touches such a vast amount of other features in the game and you know organizing that type of work and uh uh getting everyone on board and from completely different teams uh especially
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in a company of the size of CG is very difficult right but in general it's very difficult in video game making so it's not a unique problem to for us. No, but being difficult is what makes it worth doing. Yeah, we've got like a you know, we've got a very complex game, but that's very exciting because it's because we, you know, because we are doing it different, you know, we you know, all our systems are real systems. They function, they they work and they do real things based on real, you know, physics mechanics that happen. And most times most times there's a few exceptions. Yeah, there's a few exceptions here and there, but you know, most of the time that works really well for us because it's a really complex problem to solve. But actually it makes Star Citizen I think really unique for us, you know, and it makes it really fun to work on. Yeah. Uh Yogi is like, "Yeah, we we usually 90% of the time we we we've usually had that conversation thought
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there are still plenty there are still plenty of times where we're being completely honest where where you know an idea has come from the community and it's been like we we've been there like, "Oh, that's a really good idea." Oh, yeah. I had it first, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. I I I you know you know I I agree with dash wheelie cool 69420 that's a thing to do. Let me just call that again. No, but but I mean we we all are ba we've all seen like similar, you know, media. We've all seen similar films. We play Star Citizen because we probably like Wing Commander or Star Wars in the past and so on, right? So, so there is a common understanding. So, oh, Star Trek, right? Yeah. Too soon. Yeah. So, uh I think like I mean like even of of some things where we would say, oh, we had this idea, it's it probably just came from somewhere else. We incorporate a lot of community ideas in the designs as well. Yeah. All right. So, at this point,
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we're about halfway through the show, Yogi. So, I'm gonna I'm gonna turn it over to you. This flight this this this this updated flight model this updated. Now, obviously, when the time comes, we'll probably do an ISC or something on it, but but give us give give us the the lowdown on on what this is and what what what it will entail and what you're doing right now. Okay. So, and I'm just going to go get a drink if that's cool. Just There we go. Okay. So following the master mode release, we uh we listened to the uh uh we read the community feedback and so on. We had our own plans with this and basically made the next step what what the rest should be. Um and there's three things which are not just the flight uh not just the flight model but the whole flight experience right so I mentioned before we've got the space flight model which is how ships use the thrusters. We have the uh
00:30:45
atmospheric flat model which are the uh control surfaces which we also demoed in the past but which got a quite quite big update now and there is the quantum experience. So all of these things combined they're moving the game towards the uh let's say the traversal vision that that CR wants right because the way the reason why we have nav mode at the moment where you can like uh go into this mode where you can reach I don't know 1400 meters per second is just there to navigate in these big spaces that we need to traverse because we don't have the quantum the quantum uh well the quantum code for that yet. So, um, in terms of the thrusters, uh, uh, thruster flying, um, so this is not like a a groundbreaking, oh, we do everything else. It's just like a an an an uh an evolution of the of the previous stuff. So, it's it's just like
00:31:33
building on what we already have. So, uh, the main thing for combat flyers out there is that we're going to have uh a non-pheric velocity space. This means we can go forward faster than we can come backwards uh or or to the sides. This has the benefit that uh these typical six degree of freedom problems that we have in combat like uh back strafing or kiting they're much much reduced. Uh from our perspective this just uh feels better like the the fights are more closer and so on. Um also we we uh added jerk. Um so jerk is the is the change of acceleration. So instead of going uh within a frame from 0G to 9G, we're ramping this up now over over a short uh amount of time at least for the fighters. Um and this just uh makes sure that you have to plan a little bit more
00:32:23
ahead and the rotations feel smoother. Um what else is there? Um you can um Oh yeah, and then we built in a lot a lot of like different steps how to customize IFCS for you. So um So what you have in the game right now is more like an IFCS on training wheels, right? Where at the moment you can turn off a couple of assists like gravity compensation and and G-Safe and these things um in the future they will actually always mean a little bit of like a buff in terms of like what your thrusters can do. So when you um so what you have at the moment in our internal builds, you can turn off gravity compensation, you can turn off um uh you can turn off the stability. So the stability for example changes the behavior of of IFCS and uh gives your lateral thrust more uh more importance
00:33:13
than the longitudinal thrust which means when you're in fights you are better uh it's better for you to uh or it's easier for you to evade shots but at the same time it makes the flying a little bit more dangerous because it doesn't keep the TVI stable anymore. Well there's like no technical more technical details. I'm sorry you're falling asleep almost right. Um, no. I was looking at I core 102 who was like, "This doesn't sound like it's going to solve the problem." And you're you're like four minutes into a into a 20-minute exploration. That's fine. That's fine. I mean, like, um, honestly, don't don't believe me. When when it's when it's available, play it and then you can can can judge it properly. Uh, the other thing which is a pretty big chunk uh or makes also a big difference is that we don't have top speeds anymore. And now before you uh grasp, oh god, unrestricted speeds. Uh, no. Um there are still restricted speeds but uh we
00:34:00
don't in in the game data we don't have any top speeds anymore. The top speed of a ship is what your thrusters can achieve in a fixed amount of time that we define. Um but the good thing is when you have your power assignment and you put more pips into your engines, your thrusters will actually produce more thrust. And more thrust means then more speed. Um not some artificial speed limit that the universe has applied to you. Well, you still have we we need speed limits. We're we're a game after all, right? Um so but but this basically means like um but because it's based on physics, what will happen is um you have your Gladius and you fire a missile. You see, oh your overall weight of the Gladius reduced now. So your thrust have the same thrust output, but your chip is now lighter. So you actually get more GS. We had this before, but now you also get more speed based on this, right? And
00:34:48
looking further ahead, I mean this is like outside of the new flight model, but when we have Mel and so on, we're also going to have like more realistic ship masses. At the moment the gladius weights 55 tons 55 tons. Our squad weight it's a little bit heavy. Our squad gladius was up at 180 tons which is like close to 747 right. Um but now the squadron gladius is around 20 tons which means like the weight of every missile and every component actually matters. So if you for example have your have your gladius or any other ship and you just rip out the most important components you will just get much much faster. Yeah, this is going to be very very relevant for like smaller craft maybe for racing as well like uh having lighter components or removing weapons will you know uh give you that extra uh window of performances that you can exploit throughout throughout the race. Right. So, right. So, and that is basically just the space part of this. Um on the control surfaces um we have a
00:35:38
a full licensed pilot on the control surfaces for now. Right. That's Kareem. Um so he's um he's working on the control surface support. What we have already ready is the is the unassisted aerodynamics flight which means uh how the ship feels when you directly affect the um the deflection angles of the control surface. So you can you can glide, you can even uh you can even like your ship can be entirely off and shut off, you still have control over your uh control surfaces, which means if you're getting distorted in while uh in atmosphere and you can actually glide down, you can flare and you can crash land your ship in a you can do a controlled crash landing, right? And uh so and and the core onoff thing which I just mentioned um we we introduced a concept which is called the IFCS core. Um it means what you have right now in the game where the the ship is just uh
00:36:27
constantly um uh stabilizing stabil stabiliz uh compensating for your rotation. Uh this means the core is on. So IFCS is actively working for you. But IFCS in the future can be can be uh can be slapped down or even turned off. And in this case you don't have uh pure Newton flight. So also on the rotation which and this also happens when you for example crash into something for example on the gladi let's say it can let's say we know that the glados cannot go below above let's say 20gs then we might have a limit in the IFCS code that says you know when that shift goes over over 25 gs the course is is is slapped off for like a couple of seconds and then it needs to reboot. So during this time you still have control over your ship you can still like use the thrusters and so on but it will not auto stabilize yourself. So it's like more or less like
00:37:14
flying like a kerbal space program. So it's um which means like you will tumble after every after every collision the ship will not recover as fast and whether the core is on or off also plays a role in atmospheric flight because in atmospheric flight when the core is on we will have a fly by wire system um that keeps the TVI stable but when the core is off you directly control the control surface uh directly. So that's I I want to jump in a lot. Sorry. Yeah. I want to jump I want to jump in and say give give Yogi a chance to catch his breath. That 20 and 25 thing, those were numbers off the top of his head to illustrate a point. No, don't go up update and whatever like it's going to have a 25 20g only only a 20g tolerance and blah blah. This is just examples, right? Just examples. Hold on. It's just an example.
00:38:04
This is great. I want these We might need it to be fair. The open space at the time we're like, "Hey Matia, I need something from you. I'm coming over." So, so thrusters uh uh atmospheric flight control services. And the third one was uh quantum quantum quantum experience. Yeah. Quantum experience will change because at the moment uh the um it's very clunky how we traveled uh through the game. So uh I think the best example is Nathode will die is probably the uh freaking you. So, but but this is like Hold on. No, no, no. Look directly in that camera. Hold on. Look. Say it again. This one, right? Hold on. Go go go to yoga's camera. There you go. Say it. Say it again. Nav mode will die.
00:38:54
Fson in chat for nav mode, everybody. Yeah. Um the reason is more because like it's it's very clunky to uh traverse the verse. So the way how it's currently planned I'm saying currently it can change right is what it can change of course it can change right like if we if we play it and it's and it's and it's not good then we'll change it again so but but the overall the overall goal is to make the traversal through the uh through the verse very very fluent. Um and when so the thing that will define whether you can do a quantum if you can use a quantum drive or not is just whether it's uh powered or not. Um and this is like a resource network problem. So if you select for example uh or if you set up your resources so that your quantum drive is not powered you cannot use quantum. If it's powered you can um and then it will be as easy as looking
00:39:42
somewhere holding a button and off you go like we had in the past. So there won't be any mode switching anymore. There is no quantum drag that slows you down suddenly with 70 gs or so. Um yeah. So that will all be uh more more fluent. And uh and this is like I'm I'm not talking it will be it we have most of this already in squadrons. Um it's actually on my to-do list to on on this week to rip nav mode out. Uh the pu no no no. So so the way is like we um so um due to the time constraints we have in squadron we first do these things in squadron but every everything we do on the flight model is directly moved to the code base of the pu. Um basically most of the stuff for the new flight model is already in in the current 4.2 code. Um but it's of course turned off and we will also not enable it until we have all all things in place. um
00:40:32
including the ship tunings because in the master mod release we u Matia mentioned that before um we had to do um we had to go through all the ships very very fast because we had this time window that we needed to commit to the master mode changes within two months right uh for the new flight model the data sets all in parallel so uh which means we can I don't want to say take the time because uh but you know we don't need to rush uh the implementation or uh or the uh the tuning of the new ships because Um because we don't want the ships to be as similar as they were before. We want to give them character and uh we don't need to rush rush this out because we can have the old and the new flight model data side by side without destroying each other unless uh you do an integration wrong like I did. Uh there was a little buff to the Gladius which was due to an integration
00:41:19
which I messed up and I apologize for that. So yeah, you guys are so fast in catching up with those changes man. So 20 minutes later. Yeah, there were like 20 videos on YouTube and 20 seconds later I was I didn't let's let's be let's let's be real honest here. There there is there are like there are three levels of anything that sort of happens in Star Citizen at any given time anytime a patch comes out. One is we've put a thing out there, it's working as intended and that is either great or we learn a lesson. We learn a lesson and it's like with master modes and whatever. Okay, well it changes and that's that's that's as it should be and what that and I'm proud to say that I can honestly say that's what happens most of the time. Then there's the
00:42:08
second scenario where we do a thing, we put it out and it doesn't work the way it's supposed to because of a bug. There's some other competing system that it integrated into our work and and suddenly like it worked great on my build and here and then we it got into everything else in the PU and it doesn't work right. uh some underlying system is is screwing up, there's some there's some rare use case that is being used to exploit it, whatever. It's like we wish it we it's like it kills us because this thing we just put out doesn't perform exactly the way that we wanted it to because of something that was out of our control at the moment. And then there's the third one where sometimes we typed a seven and we meant a nine. Yeah. And that goes out there and you're like, wait, why is that doing that? And it's like, oh no, that was me. Oh no. Usually it's our fault. But this
00:42:58
time, this time, oh no, we need to fix that. We have very tiny keyboards. So it's like we need just bigger ones, you know. And it's one of those things like, sure, you might not hear an admission like that at EA or Activision or whatnot. I guarantee you it happens everywhere. Um, but yeah, we're it's we're human. We're human and and and some and sometimes we we do those things. Those things happen more often than not. There there's a number of times like you just said mate where we're watching we're watching a streamer or we're watching a YouTube going that's not how that's supposed to go. You go and you're like oh no I mean we we we had a case of something similar just with like uh with the 4.2 release um like the the ground turbulence. Oh, was meant to be in there since for six months. We didn't notice that that
00:43:48
there was a bug in the u in the uh noise generator. Well, it was wasn't really a bug. It was just me not being careful enough, right? Where it basically did not work on life environments because the time uh the time uh the time uh difference is bigger, right? Because in our environment in our deaf environments, it's the time since we started the game. In the life envir in the life environment, it's the time since 1970. So um so yeah the variable was too large in order yeah so the value was too large for the for the noise generator to actually give us a a value. Yeah it was working for us and it's great works on my machine. It works on my machine but this happens. There are people out there who will take admissions like that and stories like that as some indicator of not being professional or not knowing what we're doing and whatever. And and and if if you're choosing to to take that that way
00:44:36
you know God be with you. You can do whatever you want that stuff. I prefer I prefer to always present our stuff as honest and as and as human and like that we make mistakes just like anybody else and we have our share. So does everybody. I think maybe we're just a little more candid about it sometimes. But thanks for pointing out like for us honestly especially these days in DPU uh we tend to you know keep up with or try to keep up with a lot of feedbacks and data even from the community run tool as well right. So, um, yeah, guys keep, you know, uh, shouting and letting us know what is not working and that that's thank you for bringing that up. It's it's not just it's not just the content creators and stuff. Issue council. Oh my god, can you imagine this project without issue council? Honestly like uh uh often I see people thinking that the issue council is not an uh and
00:45:25
what I mean by people I mean outside of the company is not an useful tool. But honestly for us like um having issues with repro videos uh and having directly a ticket in Jira then I can act upon uh immediately asking you know directors oh can labeling uh can we fix this for this release and so on and so forth is super helpful. So keep up the quality of the IC report guys because that's going to help a lot. possible. We've got 15 minutes left. I want to get to some more of these uh questions from the community here. Um this question's word a little bit, but it's basically saying capital ships and atmosphere WTF like like everybody's seen everybody's seen the terrible everybody's seen that Polaris or or or or that Idrris, you know, you're trying to do a line of
00:46:14
mine, you're trying to do a Stormageddon, whatnot or and it's just It's just capitalism and atmosphere. Any hope? That's quite of a ship for Polaris, by the way. Yeah, that's that's pretty good. This is this is basically this was basically the role model for the players. Okay. So, I I know what you want to say. Okay. So, the vertical thing, right? Uh that where where ships do this like nobody wants that, right? CR doesn't want that. Like he had a uh he had a talk with me last week, right? Um so uh but this is also something we probably will only fix with the with a new flight model. I don't want to say oh it's going to be fine in the future but but it is the plan for this right. So right now when you're in atmosphere um we have something called uh thruster efficiency curves and uh the efficiency of your thrusters goes down by about 50% in the
00:47:03
in the highest case. In the future that uh efficiency will be much much lower. So what you can expect that if you have a ship let's say give me a ship with the vetos I don't know cutless right let's say cutless yeah so if you have the cutless right um you can expect that uh when the cutless I mean the cutless is is like a light transport so we will be not be as punishing probably but let's say does the have vetos have yes but they don't work in game but okay cool double okay fine so let's say the eus is landed um then you will get a you will get a a message on the on the headsup display that tells you what your thrust v thrust to weight ratio against gravity is and if that if that ratio is below one you will not be able to take off and this is then um just taking account the the uh the mass of the ship how much it is loaded on it. So if you have have
00:47:51
your cargo full of lead let lead cubes let's say that right then it is possible that you you will not be able to take off. So now possible not a guarantee it's not a it's it's it's you can overload you can overload and then you will not be able to take off. I mean, you may try to to boost because boost gives you like a vertically I think like something like 35% more thrust. You can put more power into your engine. So, you get this natural uh resource network based buff in your engines, but um you will have a hard time just hovering like this, right? And at the same time, because these these are your your strongest uh thrusters, but your your retros are usually a lot weaker than the uh than the other thrusters. So, if you do this, you will eventually just sink down. That's at least the plan, right? So you can expect that larger ships will
00:48:38
be will be harder to fly and to land an atmosphere. We will try to give players helpers so that uh new players don't just like crash land this thing, right? But uh still like there's still there's still physics and like the reason why the ships can hover at the moment at this moment is because they have so much thrust that they can because all they need to do is to be able to hover in 1G or let's say on on Earth, right? When that is when that is not guaranteed anymore, then you automatic automatically have like a more realistic and harder harder uh situation there. And that's coming tomorrow. That's not coming tomorrow. I'm not going to Jared. No. When questioned. No, but seriously, like um uh we're really keen to put this over as fast as possible. But um so the space flight model is done. The aerodynamic stuff is halfway done
00:49:26
because the fly by Y is not completely done. And what we need on the control surfaces that's left is the ability of AI to use control surface. That's like a relatively complex project. But but I'm I'm confident that we can solve that in the next couple of weeks. And then there is the quantum experience when all these things are done. And that's the first time we can actually let players test this thing in a PU environment. But this is not for tomorrow or also not for like until then. Can we just make it so that if you're in a Polaris or an Idris and you do this in atmosphere, you just instantly go. I can, but then you're not going to be able to slow down very fast anymore. Like No, no, no. I just just teleport the just teleport the pilot right to cla if they're doing this in in atmosphere just uh in that would be what I do and that's why I'm not a designer and they don't
00:50:13
put me in charge of anything. Um citizen uh Rich, you mentioned turrets earlier. Are there any plans to make industrial ship turrets be a viable deterrent or will they remain a mostly useless POS? Slightly subjective uh question. It's very secretive, isn't it? It's possible I'm adding my own spin to some of these things because I have feelings of my own. Yep. So, the whole point of those turrets is, you know, the ships can't defend themselves with guns. So, we've got turrets that, you know, and we want the ships to be able to defend themselves with turrets. Um, we are working on the kind of general turret experience and how kind of powerful the turrets are as well, you know, and we made some changes. Was it last release? Yeah, in general like with the fires. Yeah, we buffed the ammo, we
00:51:02
buff maybe some regen rates for specific ships as well. So, but there is like there's this other thing like the the thing that's we're currently lacking is uh effective medium range weaponry. um right now because a turret that fires projectile just like like it's just just a normal gun projectile. This is a gun projectile. The things like we cannot or we don't want to twist like the projectile after we launched it, right? So, uh what we what we need is like some medium-range um weaponry. Uh we have a plan for this like we would like to try out flack at some point, but it's not ready for multiplayer yet. Um but it can range this gra uh this this um it can so it can be effective beyond the the range where where normal gun turrets are are effective. I mean I guess the question comes mostly from uh oh I have this large ship and I'm getting uh I'm getting shot at by by fighters which keep their distance. Um but the other
00:51:50
thing is like coming to uh more like tors um concerning like the uh armor system and so on. Um, there's also the question of like if smaller ships will actually be a danger for larger ships because we are going to have like uh penetration parameters on the on on on the bullets and we're going to have armor and so on. So, a lot of these weapons that people use at the moment to damage larger ships, they might not be able to damage them in the future. It's like if you have a pistol and shoot at a tank, the tank says, "Okay." Right? So, um, if the ships want to do actual damage on the ships, they probably need to get so close in the future that they can, uh, destroy precisely the subsystems. Um, but that's like this is a little bit outside of like, um, yeah, then that of course provides more utility to some of these heavy fighters
00:52:38
or stuff that are designed to take on the larger ships like the Aries, which um, we we are we are I want to see if we can do at least four more. So, I'm limiting you to one second. 90 seconds. I should not sir because I want to I want to hit more of these things before we go. He's got an airplane he's got to catch. Um u weather is in for two for you know or the next iteration of it. Uh weather affecting ship's ability to fly. Yes, he's in there. You can try it. Larger ship in general should be less affected by weather effects. Uh and smaller ship clearly more. Um and yeah, you can try that defects already. Yogi and uh Ethan uh have been trying to use my flu and testing and trying u already in 4.2. So fly into clouds. Have
00:53:28
fun. Yep. Have fun in clouds. Yeah, big fun. And of course that's that's this next iteration of it. It'll continue to evolve as more weather conditions. Yes. Yes. Especially also with um um you know when we're going to update the uh atmospheric system as well. U clearly we're going to have to adapt everything. Okay. Uh recent changes to missiles and torpedoes. Yeah. Yeah. Are you happy with are you happy with how it's still in PTU right now? Hasn't gone to live yet. Yes. So for the targeting system, we are quite happy in it hasn't been easy to kind of try to find a sweet spot for uh the targeting params of missiles specifically. Uh also uh with torpedoes, the safety improvements to avoid certain unwanted behavior like uh them firing torpedoes too close to capital ships are in place. Uh and we are looking forward to players testing them and stress testing them as well. But in general,
00:54:15
we're quite happy. Yeah. Yeah. What what about the thing where they they fire the missile torpedo but they keep moving forward and the and and the the distance. Yeah. So basically how how it's currently working uh it's the safety distance is calculated between the torpedoes that you launch and your ship itself. So if your ship is moving and the torpedo is moving uh and you you're not 1.5 kilometers away from uh from the torpedo the torpedo won't detonate. But however this is not the intended final direction that we want. We are we have already spoke with all these peeps and pet and um team Johnny as well uh for uh some updates on the safety mechanics based mostly on the distance travels of the torpedoes and also some safety from the moment it was launched. Yeah. because that that that's the big change right right now because of this. So it's important to say that uh we wanted to uh try this stuff first
00:55:04
because that was basically the parameter that we had that we had in place actually since a lot of time in order to see how the gameplay dynamics uh are looking and now that we know that this is kind of the the direction that we want to uh dive into uh we can further work. So right now if you follow your torpedo missile it'll and you're too close it'll just never arm and that that sucks. You want it you want it to you want it to start that that distance timer to start from the moment you launch it. And then if you know if you if you choose to get too close to it when it explodes that's on you pilot. That's where we're going. Okay. Good. Um ground vehicles. Why do they suck? Wow. It's very subjective again. Um so we have you know obviously made a big kind of change to the ground vehicles. So we changed the fundamental of physics of the ground vehicles. Um, but that still doesn't mean defined. Um, you
00:55:54
know, they are still subject to the same kind of physics as the, you know, rest of the game. And we do know that, you know, the general collisions don't feel very good. Um, and we do want to improve that. Um, but but also we want to give more purpose to the ground vehicles as well. Um, and that just isn't the ground vehicle itself, it's the guns or it's the torpedoes on the ground vehicle. So, it's about improving those systems as well, so players have more of a reason to choose them. you know, especially as we have more environments in the game that, you know, the main limit where ships can go, they may limit where ground vehicles can go. And, you know, also you may want to use ground vehicles to defend a certain area. So, you know, if you got a ballista, you can have ballistas and you know, protects an area, but that isn't just making that ground vehicle physically good. It's the systems on it. So, torpedoes and, you know, and how that you know, those kind of system generate the gameplay we want. That's why already we tried to bespokely tune the ballista torpedoes and missiles
00:56:43
to kind of fit more uh into the NTRO as well as the Centurion turret. By the way, now the turret has gimbals as well, so it's more ranges, has more ammo to try to enhance the pecularities of the NTR vehicles as well. Uh any any hope for some kind of um throttle control or something on ground vehicles? It is it still just a press and you go to your top speed? Can we I think it's somewhere in some to-do list, but it's uh compared to other things, it's it's relatively low being able to find fine-tune that control and whatnot. Yeah, but this is like uh like in in the in the it is somewhere as a ticket. Uh I think it's my list even. I don't know. Um but it's uh but it's like compared to other things like really low priority. So I wouldn't I wouldn't wait for it for now. All right, folks. That's it. That's our time. Uh thank you for hanging out.
00:57:32
Thank you for uh tuning in to Starson Live vehicle flight and balance. Yogi, Matia, and Rich, as always, thank you for taking the time out of your Thursday to come. Yogi, you literally have a flight. You have you have a taxi waiting to take you to the airport and and and go. Thank you for uh you've got three minutes. I'm doing my I'm doing my wrap-up, but but trying to convince him to do a show, it's like I got to leave for an airport. I'm like, I promise I'll I'll make it in time. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for talking so uh uh in-depth about the the flight model stuff. Um I if jud just judging from the Twitch chat um a lot of f I think a lot of folks are anticipating those things. Uh for folks on the in the various marketing stuff yes alien week does launch today that should launch in roughly twoish minutes. Uh those people are doing that. Uh that's the alien week promotion where all those alien ships
00:58:20
come back and uh the new uh Asperia Prowler uh utility which will have a BTS episode that goes live on YouTube in just a minute and you get to learn all about that. And uh yes, Virginia, it's true. It's more accessible and it's not nearly as um uh wallet prohibitive as the original Prowler. Also, lots of improvements to the original Prowler. You want to check out the Q&A uh for the Prowler utility and we go through a bunch of the improvements we've made to the Prowler uh along with this work. So, uh check that stuff out for Jared. That's been Rich. It's been Yogi. That's been Matia. Uh thank you so much for hanging out with us this week and we'll see you we'll see you in two weeks. No show next week. Bye everybody.

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