Star Citizen Live: EU PU Gameplay Feature Team

25 March 202200:59:371,530 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:03
hello everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live the eu pu game play feature team i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen a star citizen live before it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we hang out with our developers we sometimes we follow their process see how they work sometimes we throw them to the wolves and answer your questions live on the show this week we have members from our eu pu gameplay feature team hi everybody [Music] uh we've got uh uh we we we've got eric this way uh jacob and torsten um torsten and jacob you've been on the show uh before but every show is somebody's first show so let's take a
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few minutes and introduce yourselves and and and tell everybody who you are and what you do for star citizen uh we'll start with you thorson i'm thorsten and i am the senior systems designer for the eupu feature team and what does the senior systems designer do it's the the every system that runs through us like uh mining and now salvage life support engineering everything that needs to have a proper paper design and some proper functionality associated with it and basically my job is to create or envision those functionalities with still fitting into the vision from from the entire game and when does the venue mergement come
00:01:38
out that is not a question that i can answer all right um jacob uh who are you and what do you do for star citizen hey i'm jacob i'm a gameplay programmer and so i mainly am responsible for the programming of the loot generation system uh and i also maintain the room system as well and how many planets or moons will the next system have that's not a question for me i i'm okay i'm sorry i didn't realize i woke up and i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm i chose violence today uh joining us to the show the first time this his first show and he must think this is crazy and like what did i get myself into uh yarrick who are you and uh what uh hello i'm jarek i'm a game programmer
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like jacob so also programming i do well now i'm doing live support before i've done some that the laser treatment for example and some of the mining gadget work and yeah that's it basically and west hem united in last one the english football cup in what year um i don't know let's say 2003 no yeah i i honestly have no idea i don't even know if that's a real football team or not i just it's something i've heard so uh on the show this week we are talking about eupu gameplay features um these are things like uh refueling loot uh mining uh life support uh uh power management stuff like this um
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there are there are multiple gameplay feature teams in the company um there there's there's this team there's one in the us there's a couple working with for squadron 42 stuff this is all my way of saying that there will be topics that this team can discuss and and and and answer questions on and then there will be topics that seem like it's theirs but it's actually another team with a very similar title in another country or whatever so uh just keep that in mind uh as we answer questions you may get you we made it get a couple that's not my area or something like that um it's part and parcel of the game so we still got a lot to talk about this uh uh this week uh this show was originally scheduled to air exactly a month ago on february 25th uh we delayed it because of the world situation at the
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time but we are back to that end we are still using the questions from a month ago so if any of these questions that we come up with have been answered subsequently uh we'll buy todd pappy on last week's show or something we'll mention that um additionally the time has actually given us the the chance to get some answers to questions we didn't have answers to before so uh we'll see we'll see how this one goes let's start uh let's start with refueling now a lot of the questions that came in from the chat all dealt with uh uh uh refueling in one way or another probably our our biggest uh source of questions because it's been two or three months now since we discussed refueling on isc let's go ahead and start with a a a primer and talk again about how what
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refueling looks like in 317 how it works uh we don't need every detail just just just remind us of the flow here a little bit so first off you need a staff error to review and uh because this is right now our only refueling ship we have we at least have two variances we have the normal starfarer and the starfire gemini and what you do there is you start spawning your ship at any harbor that you are at then you need to open the vehicle maintenance services that you already know how to refuel but now it looks a bit different so we improved that a bit to tailor to the demands of the refueling mechanic and the staff era so now you have two buttons which one is
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the auto button and the other one is the manual button and the auto button just refills your internal fuel tanks while if you click on the manual button it will open a list of all the available fuel tanks and fuel pots so fuel pods are the ones at the outside of the staff era there were the fuel tanks basically you use for for the so you fill them dedicated with whatever you want to pick so you can fill all six of them with hydrogen fuel if you like but you can also fill three with hydrogen fuel and three with quantum fuel and the next step that you need to do is lift off and then basically you are up for the market and there sadly we don't have the beacon system yet so you are reliant on chat communication or
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if you are in an organization you either have discord or teamspeak to talk to them to ask for for refueling or offer their refu or for your refueling services and once you've found someone that is in need you basically extend your boom arm then a docking procedure takes place uh you need to set a price for the fuel you can even give it out for free if you if you feel like it and uh then the dock chip goes through the very same process like you did on the station so the ship in need opens again the mobi glass goes into the vehicle maintenance service purchases the amount of fuel that the player needs and you as the staff era owner then get the request
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and what you do next is open the corresponding fuel tank to allow the flow for let's say hydrogen to go through the nozzle and then you open the nozzle and you can control the flow speed there so you have an impact on the time it takes to fill the other ship and once the other ship is filled you are done and both can park their way how do you do euro and jacob did he get it all i saw you guys just like nodding as he was going like checking his work did you did you do all that from from memory or do you have cheat sheet on your on your uh on your monitor i i did it for memory i i played it a lot and so so yeah yahoo and jacob did also play it a lot yeah we played played like the
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recent internal play test sessions all the time uh how has it how has it changed in over over this quarter i mean it was like i said we we showed it very early we showed it in january uh which is earlier than we usually have any of this stuff because you know it was originally targeting for 316 so so we had a little bit earlier but uh so with this extra time how how is uh changed or evolved over this quarter from the system itself not too much so we did only some minor tricks so we uh have now a variable flow speed and that we didn't have back then so now it's a bit you really have to pay attention to the flow speed to not damage your nozzle because there is this mechanic of the safe flow speed to
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the nozzle where if you are above it you will start damaging it and we wanted to emphasize this so we added a mechanic that basically the more pots you have open the more fluctuation you have in your system and that can cause the flow speed to rise so that you damage the ship but the main difference is for definitely the ui so we got a lot of ui work done in the last couple of months and and it shows i'm really satisfied with that and something that we did get which we wouldn't have gotten if we would have aimed for the earlier release is the direct interaction in the backside of the of the staff era so right now you have the direct control screens directly at the
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pots yeah i'm really happy that we got that so now yeah it opens possibilities let's phrase it that way possibilities for like if someone accidentally jumps on your catwalk and then closes the the field steps uh no i'm glad you mentioned the the the ui uh um in some respects i'm a corporate shill so i don't know if i get to have personal opinions about things but the ui for refueling and the and the ui for the new selling mechanic you know both coming on 317 are some of the better uh more informative and intuitive uis that i think we've put out in time i don't think it's any secret that
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i mean ui is one of the toughest parts of any game and and star citizen because we're running a live environment in the middle of our development with gameplay systems that are not finished or complete and ui has always been a struggle and it will continue to be a struggle while we're still in development stuff like this but uh the uis for refueling and and selling both coming in 317 are two of my favorites that we've put out there so if i get to have an opinion i don't know uh let's look for some more refueling questions here how long uh how long will it take in your mind the fi or how long how long will in your mind the final refueling process take of course it depends on the size of the tanks but are we talking about minutes or hours it's depending on the tank size so
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for example we balanced it that the gladius right now is with the standard nozzle and the standard fuel plots roughly 40 seconds so that is like the the ship that we expect to use this mechanic the most and uh yeah well if you want to refuel an 890 jump it will take its time because it has giant tanks and it yeah it's it's not such something that that we can magically increase the number because we we want to stick to like a certain reality there in the sense of a pipe has a certain diameter and it can only withstand a certain pressure and therefore we have this this
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flow rate there as a mechanic and yeah bigger ships will take longer to refuel okay still very much uh in the minutes not hours if everything works the way it's supposed to lens will uh uh so jacob you've been working on uh refueling uh will the ship hanger or the sub attached uh be able to refuel from their parent vehicle i think it's probably like the the merlin or the archimedes uh when attached to the constellation will it be able to refuel in that situation so to be clear i have not personally been working on refueling but uh i wouldn't answer this question before
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passing it on anyway not good just just not uh i tried yeah um i forgot yeah so not right now uh and yeah may probably something that we'll be aiming for in future toast and you can elaborate on that that is correct when i did when i did the promo for the show this morning i i said it was an hour earlier than it actually was i clearly am having some like brain flow problems today all right when a ship such as the starfarer is full of fuel and attacked and destroyed how will the fuel be dropped will it be in little tiny boxes or will it just vanish so because the fuel is part of the fuel
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it right now will in the current state it will explode with the staff error and if you so we i already mentioned the screen on the back side of the of the staff era where you control the fuel pots and there's a little button that says detach and the detach means that you can drop those fuel pots and this already gives you a hint of what what our aim here is so if they somehow survive the explosion that means that other ships are able to pick them up again so if you own a starfarer and you just destroyed another sapphire and you wear out of fuel pots that are filled you might be lucky and can pick them up and
00:14:34
attach them to your stuff here but this is not for now this is for the future now imagining starfire gemini is hunting regular starfarers let's move in uh let's look at some mining questions here big rocks or big clusters of rocks in our big are big rocks or big clusters of rocks incoming anytime soon for mining in a group or are there any plans to force multi-crew organized runs in the same spot with multiple travels to clean the location of valuable minerals yeah so about the bigger rocks so that could be a short-term solution to the momentarily like very or
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more or less unattractive multi-crew mining but we have bigger plans for that so we have some ideas of how we can improve uh multi-crew mining in the future so some of the visions that we have is we have some weak points that need to be hit at the same time and even players need to make them explode at the same time so imagine a situation where you are with your with several prospectors targeting the same storm everyone hits the same weak point of the stone and then yeah you have to time it so that you don't damage other pieces of the rock and then the the rock splits and then you can proceed your same goes for for the argo mall then so
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yeah it's it's also and what we also envision there is that we even expand on the functionality of the the mining gadget so for example if you have a rock where where the the weak points are opposite you could use the mining gadget to actually move the weak spot so that you are able to use the argo mode but this is very far off in the future right right because uh yeah we talked about it a little bit with todd last week because the the team's focus is going to be mostly on resource management and live support and stuff for a little bit before you can circle back to some of these other right now our focus is getting all the features done once so you can we can start iterating over them when new menu gadgets come in like this
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will be in the farther away in the future i guess how do you expect the community to use them if we can't scan the majority of rocks now and i know some of those after some of the anastasia scanning is being it was bug fixes that utah talked about being fixed last week yeah i think todd mentioned that already last week when when he we had some fixes in so there are some fixes that that are targeted for 317 and we hope that it fixed the majority of the problems uh but it's it's a very complicated manner so we we hope that it fixed it but we have to see and yeah this one may or may not be outside your wheelhouse if i feel like it's probably not but how do you intend to make and
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balance mining to be a lucrative profession that drives economy is that an euphu gameplay feature team desktop look this person is between ships escorts modules consumables timers etc that seems to be an expensive and dangerous endeavor at the moment yeah that's definitely not on us to decide it's it's on the economy side but yeah i i fully agree so i i'm not a fan huge fan of of quantanium being the only profitable resource uh i have the feeling that it it is something that will change once we have crafting there and player demands and maybe even ai demands there so that that the the values of each item shift but yeah this is not enough to decide yeah i saw you nodding there in
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agreement you got something i'm thinking like in general with those systemic things it's just kind of it's automatically almost gonna grow with time and i feel like those vibes yeah will change naturally over the development you know so uh yeah i can see it only yeah getting better basically but yeah again not up to us i think the the takeaway is that from a from a design perspective uh correct me if i'm wrong on this tourism we we don't want there to be just the one uh thing that's valuable to mine we want it to be valuable for you to mine different things at different times in different places based on market conditions nearby shops etc and rarity so if a material is more rare than another it should also be
00:19:29
worth more uh i i think i think viewers will find if they watch enough of these shows that uh game designers often share many of the same feelings and frustrations as the players of of of the game when something is limited or something is not as fleshed out as as you may wish it is not because people here didn't think to do it it's just time management and resource management and and like i thought like like thorson said right now the idea is to hit everything once and kind of go around the wheel and and make sure there's that there's there's an introductory version of all these features and then go back and and fill these in so it's uh uh i think todd actually said it yesterday uh last week too patience is one of the hard part for the
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developers because we just want to put it all out right now and do it all out but we can't we just can't work on everything at once let's do one more mining question before we move on the this this one's a bit farther out uh torsten uh in regards to mining is the plan still to eventually have subsurface deposits and veins that we can tap into with our miners as stated in both the prospector and land claim q a's yes this is still the plan so once we have the the land claims yes you as the landowner should have possibilities to dig a hole and mine stuff or and that opens the possibility for for other
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cases there as well let's jump into life support uh we haven't we haven't really talked about life support since i don't know when though i think it was our our our la our last count disco episode maybe in 2021 or 2020 i can't remember time is an illusion um start off simply how is life support a few years ago it was mentioned that the room system is finished and it could be easily implemented what's the hold up at how is that support yeah i think it's it's good it's progressing definitely i'm enjoying working on it uh but yeah i feel like the easily part is probably a bit misleading it's it's more than just like room system there needs to be you know
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graphic user interface for all the panels there needs to be controls for the rooms there needs to be integration to research systems so there's like a lot of additional work that we're doing right now and then then also we have the setup for the ships and yeah that's but it is definitely progressing and i'm happy with that with it so far um we do have uh a lot of ships to uh yeah process to to get that in a releasable state so that definitely is a contributing factor uh and the the question saying the room system is finished is not quite accurate either it's constantly um you know it in in development being upgraded um
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to support more new features and things like that it it's try to think of something i could add to that but no that's pretty much it it's it's a big feature and every time we every time we add more ships it just makes your work just a little bit like like like like like one part the project keeps moving the goal post out for you like it's only there's many ships then we keep adding more ships but yeah i i i i think it's a it's a major component uh not just to uh not just for the present day gameplay but it's obviously an essential component to real like multi-crew um you know one of the things
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i mean there's not a whole lot of multi-crew in star citizen right now there's basically you're a pilot and you're a tur you're a turd you're a turret gunner it's like that but uh things like power man resource management and life support and it's like those those are all how we be how we build out uh the idea of true multi-crew here and for me that was always my draw to the to the game like that's what the classic engineer role would be a lot to make that exciting uh in the not too distant future when we have life support i'm also thinking about the fire system uh in development that gives you another thing for other people on on the ship to do other than the pilots is oh we've got a fire on deck three send someone to go deal with that right that interacts with
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life support uh resource management all of that so all comes together the ship yeah and and each time one of these systems comes online that's another place to send damage so you know when ships are being attacked we can send damage to life support and send damage to power resource managements like that so so the the time to live on these ships will you know last longer and stuff and it just it's it's exciting it's one of those the stuff the star citizen multi-crew game play of today will not be what the game plays of tomorrow and it's it's i'm excited to see some true progress towards that is life support still planned to be limited to people to prove is life support still planned to be limited to
00:25:07
prevent people using ships as a clown car uh yeah yeah of course because like the way the way it's supposed to work you like like on iss you have the scrubber it removes the co2 and it has only a certain rate that it can process yeah so if you suddenly get like 20 people inside of a small small ship that's designed for like two people then your life support is gonna start not managing it and you know that the rate of flow of the air for the system will be too slow the co2 will build up and you'll probably die but obviously it's all gonna yeah it needs to be balanced well for the bigger shapes and then the different rooms in the shapes so there's yeah we don't want to put a hard limit on it that is something so we want to have it systemic driven so that means that
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so if you have an aurora and you want to claim it with five people then sure it will work but what you have to do as the person running the aurora you have to replace the skimmer constantly because the skimmer just depletes very very fast because the the because of the co2 production in the room and then yeah sure if you want to decide to yeah every 10 minutes i have to replace the skimmer yeah sure yeah and also also like you have you know life support it's not only doing the co2 it's also like temperature and the pressure and those things will be also hit by too many people breeding in the room because then it's you know the less time for hitting or cooling the room so
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it's gonna be interesting gameplay there to balance what you want in your rooms to the atmosphere to be several people in the chat are listening to your answers and all saying how does any of that work with something like the valkyrie where you're supposed to having a big open side doors and and so how did it how does that work with with some of these drop ships that are designed to have big open spaces to the so one of the things that will have to come along with life support dynamic atmosphere propagations uh fancy name for just air actually moving between things so if you have the doors open you're gonna be getting
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whatever atmosphere is on the other side of those doors if you open the doors in space you're gonna have a bad time for the anyone on there who wants to breathe but yeah you'll be able to fly around and in in a way catch some atmosphere from from the planet that you're in and uh yeah i think that'll have some interesting implications uh in in future for planets with not human breathable atmospheres it'll make your life support system have to work a bit harder once you close those doors to try and clean that up for you and we've seen some ships like the idris or the javelin they have like the the star wars or star trek you know
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force field walls and doors that helps keep atmosphere and not so it remains to be seen you know what ships will have you know stuff like that and what what may not uh b quartermast says is this live no now last week we did all the thing where i put it on the screen and said it wasn't live but this week i just i thought i'd let people wonder do we have any more life support questions let's see what do you guys have against clown cars um will t0 of life support allow atmosphere management on a per room basis or will it be one atmosphere setting throughout the entire ship uh it's going to be peru we want to go like as recently granularis
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yeah it makes sense for this year obviously so yeah you'll be able to set like the pressure in the rooms you'll be able to set the temperature in the rooms it can be different insurance and like also like that the rate for the scrub being so like it's gonna be like a balance for each room what what do you want this room to behave like and yeah there's gonna be a decent amount of uh like a choice there for a player to do one of our big considerations for this is that while you are going to be able to do everything on a program basis we're going to be making sure to have a good focus on usability uh and again the quality of ui will will help with
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that so that it doesn't feel tedious yeah yeah that's a good point that like there's gonna be like obviously process for like oh just maintain this room in like a normal state for life let's say but then maybe you want it to be like warmer than ever so you're gonna focus the life support on the temperature to keep the temperature higher and like maybe that you don't care about the co2 levels in this room so it's like i think the idea is for the baseline to be very simple you don't really need to do much but if you want to go into these details for some specific purpose you can that's yeah zulu foxtrack foxtrot keeps trying to uh backwards engineer questions about night vision by attaching it to questions about stuff
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that you guys actually work on uh zulu night uh uh was a zulu uh uh foxtrot uh night vision is actually a graphics engineering thing we discussed it uh most recently with uh director of graphics engineering ali brown so i encourage you to check that out uh there's no easy answer but the truthful answer is in that show so check that out it's like i have watched enough 80s sitcoms to know when you're trying to backdoor a different topic into some which we're actually supposed to be talking about i wasn't born yesterday i was born a long long time ago a long time ago well life support systems require consumables that must be restocked i think we already mentioned that so yeah obviously you have the filters for
00:31:34
air for the scrubbing of the from the co2 so you need a special material for that that will take care of so that that's one we'll also have some for like heating up the rooms we also yeah probably a bunch it's gonna be it's gonna be like a a real system inside of the ship that you can you know put things in and yeah make it work there's a follow-up from chat that says will depressure scrolling by will depressurizing uh rooms during combat provide any advantages to stuff can you drawing the air out of a room with if you're if your attackers aren't helmeted i mean possibly you'd get more power
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life support obviously uses power so i guess if you kind of turn it off completely then you'd get more power i'm yeah i like the engineering gameplay of cut power to life support all power to engines yeah exactly if you've got a really huge ship where the life supports taking up a lot of power then that that could be a thing but i think that question was more aimed on offensive uses of life support and yeah you'll definitely be able to turn off the air if you've got borders of course of course you can like heat it up cool it down but we'll be right limited on how much the life support system can actually suck out of that room in a given time well i mean yeah obviously rate limited
00:33:11
and also well once you suck out the atmosphere and you don't put it in the tanks it's gonna be gone you you can bend it outside yeah and then it's lost so you can also have to think about that so that's you know if you have a room in your tanks then it's fine but what about replacing the oxygen with something toxic uh so in tzia we won't have support for like composition of the atmosphere that's not yet a thing but you're open to it later something similar with fire i guess that fire creating excess carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide does make the room it's intoxic but you won't be able to do that on demand in
00:34:00
into zero that seems to be a good bridge into uh a resource management i i don't think you can talk i mean any discussion of life support has to go right into resource management they're they're they're inextricably tied um we haven't we haven't talked about uh resource management since we had that wonderful uh demo with uh dan truffin uh way back when um what can you give us about it before we get into the specific questions here what can you give us a a as a general kind of update where how is it going is it going is it moved since we've we showed it so long ago um yeah there are improvements i mean some things are necessary for life supports to use it yeah that that's what i'm working on actually
00:34:50
so we have like i guess support for it to interact with the room system you have to exchange the gases from the tank with the with the rooms yeah and that's that's all coming together you got anything to add torsion and in addition to the work that the arrow does for the live support we also started working on the proper engineering screens because they they are the same so basically the the live supports ui interface will be just an overlay or a layer inside the engineering screen so every engineering screen is also directly a live support user interface right just because uh it was that halloween episode way back when nobody's seen or
00:35:40
heard from count discus sense uh we've gained a lot of star citizen backers since then can you just uh can you give us a kind of a general overview i'm obviously don't i'm not gonna ask you you can clearly do it as we demonstrated with the refueling so not the entire loop but uh what what are our goals what are the goals what are the what's the intention that's just the top level of resource management power management however you want to refer to it what are we trying to do here so our goal there is to give the end the all resources distribution of any ship in player samps so we have fuel we have fuel that is consumed by the power plant and by the engines
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and you are in control of how much fuel those engines and the power plant gets and depending on how much fuel the power plant gets it will create energy and you can distribute that energy so for example you could even say okay i don't need any light in my ship so none of the energy energy goes to the the light or the doors so all the doors stay open for the for the full time but all the energy goes to the weapons for example or the shears so this is something that that you will be able to to manage on the fly dynamically any time any day on any ship you will be able to to have full control over the resource distribution of your ship yeah and this follow-up question is
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probably very similar to the life support one uh regarding resource management will content teams need to rework existing ships before this can be implemented in the pu yes quite significantly actually yes because we have some legacy systems that work but are not the ideal way that we intended to have it work so there are some optimizations that we have to do so that it runs performant and that we don't put too much stress on on everything which is already quite stressed so yeah there's a lot to do for on our side so every ship needs to be touched and every item that is existing also needs to be touched the good thing is that
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it's kind of going to be a bit combined i think with the live support so they're because they both use obviously resource system so just like at least it won't have to be done twice hopefully maybe that's that's the big benefit of this system so because we now have the opportunity to start or to to work on life support in parallel with the engineering they all tie together and our aim is also to have them release at the the same time because it's sharing the same ui it's sharing the same systems so it is the same system it just yeah but there's a bit more complicated stuff with with connecting it to the room systems and and so forth so yeah and it's not just uh your team it's it's the ui team it's the
00:38:56
vfx team it's the sound effects team it's it's it's it's it's this is a this is a major major component of of fulfilling that vision of ship life in the star citizen universe and so uh so yeah you guys are here at the vanguard but eventually you know it's going to open up and it'll be an all hands on deck kind of thing it's every team is involved there every team has to do some update stuff on on their systems to utilize the new resource networks so it's yeah like you said every team has to be involved here uh we haven't talked to looting let's let's switch to some looting stuff we know that there are changes to a lewd generation coming in 317.
00:39:48
it would be extremely useful if portable loot boxes would snap to the cargo grid of a ship or onto each other is yeah yeah it would is this planned for the future short answer is yes but slightly longer answer is that the portable loot boxes in general are under a bit of a review there's um there's there's a variety of implications of them from both the balance and the performance perspective they are they are under review but we do hope that in in the future you will be able to stack them on your cargo grid and do anything else you want with them um that is obviously also awaiting the cargo refactor
00:40:40
uh why is there still no scu cargo to loot around derelicts what is needed to put them in the why they're not there uh is a question for the level designers um but as to what's needed to put them in we i'm fairly confident that we have uh everything needed for that on the tech side so it's it's down to level design uh to put them there if they want them decide you know what goes where i'll add a little context to that just jacob doesn't have a sniper dot from the level design team on his uh on his chest uh tomorrow afternoon uh that is part of the the work that uh montreal is doing with their new with the new you know
00:41:28
complete revamp of derelicts from the ground up uh part of what you saw in isc yesterday and stuff is them building out the interiors and all that stuff and and as part of that there will be loot generation spots and stuff like that so that's all part of the new uh the new derelict 2.0 if you will uh for lack of a better term yes i i should add that we have been in constant contact uh with with the level designers including the montreal team uh so yes they they are aware that this is a thing uh that we could do they they are considering it etc we're all working together on this will there ever be items or weapons found exclusively through looting i.e you can't buy them
00:42:15
in stores so that is uh absolutely a yes um i think it was on uh one of the recent uh iscs with samuel molina um who mentioned that yes for 317 we're introducing for the first time different rarity levels of items and loot boxes so yes some of those rare items will not be found in stores and they will be yeah hard to get proportional to their value i don't wanna this is where i'm gonna go ahead and say that there are nine of those pico balls that spawn in the
00:43:04
persistent universe and only nine that spawn on each server as they start and i'm i've been hounding ben dorsey to make them the most valuable item in the p we'll see if we'll we'll see if my peer pressure uh uh wins that or not i actually i don't know if it will probably not people usually just shine me on anybody's ever met me anyway um will hydrogen fuel ever be a lootable item that you can then go back to your ship and use it to refuel yourself that's a bit of a hybrid question between revealing and uh and can you use night vision when you do it come on [Laughter] i'm not answering that um but uh as for
00:43:52
the the the loot side of it we've we've been considering um all sorts of features and how they can tie into loot generation um upcoming features existing features we're thinking about what related to this feature could you find in a loot box and where would it make sense to find it and stuff so it's not out of the question that fuel could be one of those things but it does also depend on how refueling continues to develop um particularly with in hangar refueling refueling of ground vehicles those are things that are not fully fleshed out yet so there are not plans right now to have lootable fuel but we are considering lootable
00:44:41
anything let's jump just some general stuff here um historically decompression was a thing with character force reactions and life support atmospheric room containers what's stopping the delivery of decompression and people getting sucked out of airlock mechanics we actually we actually showed an early prototype of that back in 2015 at gamescom yeah yeah um right so we've definitely been uh thinking about that but it's mainly a prioritization and an order of order of business thing um that the people that would be implementing that mainly myself and yarrow are currently
00:45:30
doing live support and yeah other other things so that's definitely on the cards but later down the line um reliant on life support being finished before we start doing that thank you um and yeah again definitely um the the what stopping part still a lot of um other teams uh downstream requirements as well but to get that sort of explosive oh yeah the effects the sounds that everything of course yeah that's again it seems like such a simple thing but then you kind of have to add everything there and you can i think it's it's
00:46:22
back on the the discussion of loot and rarity from the live chat here um do you try anything how to reword this how do many games have like predefined levels of rarity there's like common uncommon rare epic legendary to use the wow model do we have those levels set are are you are you at a place where you can share with us what are the rarity levels referred to as and do they have colors they definitely don't have colors we're we're we're not we're not doing that it would not fit with the sort of level of realism that we're going for we do have some fixed rarity tears of loot boxes um
00:47:12
at the moment uh off the top of my head i think we've got common uncommon rare but what that means not a a global setting uh so what uh how how likely you are to find a rare loot box is not going to be the same in every location and its contents are not going to be the same in every location um something that the designers are thinking a lot about of how to balance uh what crates and what contents you get where yeah and it's also something that we are having ongoing discussions with the economy team about how we balance the amount of value you can get out of containers
00:48:01
also rare for stanton doesn't mean that it's rare in pyro for example so items that you are more likely to find in stanton are probably less likely to find in pyro gadgets yeah that's a very good point so when we talk about rarity we are not talking about stats we are not talking about uh uh this thing is not using it in the traditional wow the model where you know every time you fight this thing it drops a a an epic thing it's we are talking about rarity in the truest sense of its word and how difficult it is to find how difficult it is to acquire and what you're saying is that items will be rare in pyro but not necessarily rare in stanton and then vice versa yeah you know it's it's we're taking it from a holistic
00:48:50
uh story-based kind of you know what would likely be found in these areas what would less likely be found in these areas for a quite literal interpretation of the word rarity yes we have different sort of levels of of system working together for that when a designer sets up a location they decide specifically to that location how likely different containers should be and they can decide how likely certain types of loot should be but then we do have a broad sort of grouping of which items on the whole are more valuable uncommon rare whatever or more it helps the designers to
00:49:39
approach things bit by bit they can do broad strokes and they can get right down to specifics for individual locations yeah so i i just i i want to shout this i want to make sure that this gets really clear out there because i'm looking at what's happening in chat it is not a rarity is not a measure of of the quality of the item and it's like that it is not gear score it is not it is not a purple item it's better than a blue item kind of thing it on microtech you're more likely to find a pico on crusader you're more likely to find in finley on hurston you're less likely to find either one of them because hurston hates those guys you know stuff like that not using that specific example but as a as as literally just an analogy it is
00:50:29
about just trying to make loot seem diegetic and real and for lack of a better term just makes sense what would you expect to find in this kind of thing not to say that there can't be surprises that's what the rarity is now that there can't be surprises there will always be surprises in the world everybody loves a surprise it's about storytelling as most things are at the heart of star citizen is engineering a profession like mining and refueling uh yes but also no so yes on the side the the main difference here is that um for for mining and for refueling you
00:51:17
have a resource or you gather a resource and then you sell it either to a player or you sell it to a trader for engineering it's yeah you you stand around in a ship and you press buttons right so it's it's it's a profession in the in the sense of yeah someone better pay you to do your job else you will mess up their ship and it might not work but uh that's that's it so it is a profession yes yes but there is there's nothing to trade with yeah it it it's another distinction from like the typical classes in an mmo it's it's it's your character can act like a rogue can act like a fighter can act like a cleric can act like a
00:52:04
palanova there is no hey suddenly i've chosen a thing i have a label i am this kind of stuff like that so i i think i think that's probably the better way to look at uh professions as a human being who had jobs before i came here um you know it's tr and it's had six titles here even though my job hasn't changed uh trying to trying to label what you are and how you do in life is not always the easiest thing and i think we we take that same approach in star citizen we give you the tools to be a minor on tuesday and be a salvager on wednesday and be a refueler on thursday and stuff like this and it's not one of those is meant to like define you top to bottom kind of thing is that this is my profession it is they're all opportunities for you
00:52:51
to live your life in the verse and for you to swim through as you see fit hmm that's some jean-paul sartier answers today does that he say his name i don't know i shouldn't have even tried to pronounce it i'm not the pronouncer person that's right did i do it well if i did it was it was on accident let's touch some refueling ones before we got to go again uh since it's one of the big ticket items for 317. um will every ship in 317 have a physical fuel port on the top and how will it and how will the second fuel part port be used so no not all ships will have the
00:53:40
physical port to the top so that is part of the gold standard so some ships or ships that are coming are supposed to have it already so it should be already planned for them but the older ships they they need to some of them needed to be added so right now the gladius already has it and on the second part of the question yeah the second port is mainly there for hangar refueling so the top one is just there for for in-flight refueling with the with the staff error and the the bottom one is yeah if you're stationary someone with a hose comes in refuels your ship this way uh how will the development of ship-to-ship refueling change the station and pad refueling we've had
00:54:28
going until now well we did not change the refueling itself but we at least updated the ui which i already mentioned so that is the only impact we have there um will there be an easy way to share your location for for refueling once we get the beacon system sorted then yes yes there will be but that's not 317 certainly not certainly not well i think we just added an answer to this one already where does refueling go after 317 service beacons but also server speakers there are some gameplays that didn't
00:55:15
make it that we envisioned for the reviewing so one thing i think most of you are aware that there is this mechanic of this hidden stash fuel if you are stranded in in space and you completely ran out of fuel so you cannot theoretically dock to the boom arm anymore so you have this reserve fuel that allows you to use this dedicated only with docking to be able to talk to the staff here again this is just in something there because we didn't get the the tractor beam right so there there's supposed to be a tractor beam functionality that can pull you in as well as we envisioned a more direct nozzle control because right now the
00:56:04
nozzle is very static so it's a stiff nozzle but we we also wanted to have some direct control over that and tying to that we also wanted to make it more interesting in flight for the player attached to the staff era so that there's a tension gameplay so if the forces to one side or the other are too high you as the attached have to maneuver against them so this is something that we we also wanted to have there but it didn't make it 400. all right and last question did you enjoy putting together your lego discovery and uh can you implement night vision in order to make it easier
00:56:55
i don't get how night mission would make it easier but it's it's it's a fun lego piece it's a fun little piece it's just what it said all right uh that's it everybody uh thank you for uh being here uh for for for coming back uh after we had to reschedule your show last time um that's been star citizen live the eu pu game play feature team um keep an eye out on the robertsspaceindustries.com uh website uh for information on when 317 uh is heading your way i know it's in uh evocati right now um my understanding at least at this time this is just me being here for as long as i have is that uh wave one ptu is kind of a day by day kind of thing um we absolutely want to get it
00:57:42
out in your hands anything but again it has to reach certain thresholds it has to be worth it has to be useful uh to get it out into those tests and stuff so if it's if it's already at a certain point where we don't need people to tell us it's broken because we already know it's broken there's no reason to push it out so check check back on that for updates on when that happens um uh next week is our uh last episode of isc for the quarter before we go on our hiatus we'll be doing our patch report we'll go through all the stuff that's coming in alpha 317 and uh something that i just realized that i actually can't tell you about because it's a surprise so you'll have to tune in on thursday to find out what that is and then friday back here uh april 1st it's jeremiah and i
00:58:32
it's gonna be dumb you know it's gonna be dumb i don't know what it is yet but jeremiah and i on april 1st it's going to be dumb and uh it may or may not be the last show we do here uh in la depending on uh visa processing time so who knows um we might be here for a couple more weeks that might be the last one i don't know we're all just kind of waiting so four uh jacob um and and uh eric and uh torsten uh i'm jared thank you for uh being here with us this week and uh we'll see you soon bye bye thanks i honestly have no idea what we're doing on april 1st i just realized it was
00:59:19
april 1st when i said that it was just going to be us goofing around but now i got to come up with something don't i yes i know you can still hear me we do this every week people like we can still hear you i know i do this on purpose because i like chaos

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