Star Citizen Live: US PU Feature Team

6 August 202101:01:411,910 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:03
hello everybody welcome to another edition of star citizen live uh the uspu feature team i'm your host jared huckabee and joining us on the show this week are three members of our steam uspu feature team uh we've got a lot to talk about today so we're going to jump right into it some quick introductions because everybody's every show is somebody's first show we're going to start immediately to my right here chad who are you what do you do for star citizen yeah hi my name is chad mckinney and i'm a lead gameplay engineer on the uspu gameplay team and what's a what's an engineer do yeah program we make the features in the engine that you know in coordination with design so we actually you know make make the fun stuff is the
00:00:50
way i like to play it okay ben no stranger to inside star citizen but who are you for star citizen live hi i'm ben dorsey i am a senior systems designer on uspu um which means that i do a lot of the planning and coordination and then some of the implementation for a few various things in this case uh features like reputation and then uh content like uh nine tails or jump down too and classic calling all debs rock star rob reiniger who are you and what do you do for star citizen uh hi my name is rob reininger i have actually recently been promoted to the assistant director of the systemic and play services pillar so
00:01:38
it's uh classically working with the uspu team here as product owner of several of the the features that we've done uh getting to work more with our sst team and the mft team here in the future uh so be getting getting quite involved with the simulation here moving forward and uh once again congratulations on your sharks themed office paint job it's it was nice i saw it the other day it was cool still there yeah it's waiting for you when you return to office all right so uh on today's show we are talking uh us features so what does that mean every team in star citizen works on a finite number of features not every team works on every feature in the game we also are on the road to digital citizencon
00:02:25
so there are lots of topics and subjects being held close to our chest right now in preparation for the various panels and presentations that are coming on october 9th so we do have a a a a focus of of stuff that this team is working on that we're approved to talk about today and you know saving other stuff for cis and gone uh we put up a thread up in spectrum where we collected questions throughout the week and let people vote up on the ones they wanted to see answered most uh and one of the biggest topics that was voted up was cargo refactor so we're gonna start we're gonna start with some questions on the cargo refactor first um right off the bat why don't we just set the stage here what is the cargo refactor and what isn't the cargo effect what are we actually trying to do here what are we talking about when we say
00:03:12
cargo cargo can be refactored in many ways to help make the game play better we've obviously got the cargo profession that we're working towards but specifically the way cargo worked so in the past here uh until we finished this when you bought something from a shop it got statically placed into your ship's cargo hold and you could not interact with it when the ship exploded we kind of jettisoned out you know smaller versions of the boxes that you could actually grab and take back to your ship which could then be sold at a shop somewhere but this refactor is going to give us a kind of a clean slate as far as how we define what our commodities are there was some some stuff that was just legacy that caused problems that we wanted to fix but the big thing for the players is
00:03:59
that it's going to be physicalizing the cargo within the cargo grid uh it also sets us up for some other stuff that we're going to talk about in a bit you know persistent hangers and just the the cargo gameplay as a whole but from the player's perspective it's it's the physicalization the cargo you not tractor beam stuff off the grid uh you can also track your beam stuff onto the grid you're also going to be able to jettison larger size boxes right so it's not just going to be the small ones anymore we can we can start doing the bigger ones so as far as what i would expect to see in the first iteration of it would be generally that yeah if i could just add to that one thing that i would say is i think or hopefully everyone's noticing that there's all this effort now with loot and inventory that's been coming out cargo is being uh refactored you know just kind of reimagined
00:04:46
in this new world where we have localized inventory what that means is that there are going to be commodities uh in certain kinds of containers that have various compositional contents for the various commodities that you'll want to trade but they'll also be things that are inventory containers as well that can contain actual items and they can nest so inventories containers themselves or entities so this can mean that you can be uh potentially trading and shipping in your cargo grid inventory as well as commodities which means that looting is going to be available for the continents inside of the cargo grids as well and the contents as you move them around that the localization of them is going to become much more important to the future right now all right so as far as the diving into some of the questions that
00:05:36
we're seeing from both the live chat and the spectrum thread here uh right off the bat uh will we be able to take other people's cargos or other people's cargo uh both forcibly and or with permission i'm glad they allowed for both options as well as the saddle bags on the prospector or the mall so there's a couple questions in there so let's do the first one uh will we will we be able to take cargo from other people uh forcibly or with permission that as long as you can access it whether it be through you know their cargo grid getting into their ship somehow if you can disable the ship without blowing it up right and can get in sneak onto their ship you can maybe get off with some valuable packages um so yeah and and i guess one of the things that we kind of missed talking about the the refactor here is that this the the way that the prospector
00:06:24
bags for instance were were set up uh was that they were all kind of part of the ship right it was just an animated pod but this will set us up to allow us to detach those uh for other people to come and pick them up taking them to refineries so that the mining ship can keep going so it is kind of like a all-inclusive you know uh it's just an item like any other item at this point right and whether it's attached to the outside of a ship or placed inside of a ship it's it's it's kind of all that he's kind of cool and so for clarity when that first started even getting discussed within the team within the first five seconds people were talking about like how cool would be to run a heist and break into someone's ship and take their stuff or force them to give you stuff because they you've you've threatened to blow them up if they don't like that is 100
00:07:13
yeah on the technical side if i could just like kind of clarify a little bit previously cargo instead of cargo grids were really just some data and some persistent representation and we're changing it to be represented as entities and for anyone that's not familiar with like you know game dev terminology and entity is this really generic term for something that like a player might see in the game so what that means is that um the cargo boxes the um you know those those prospector whatever bag things uh these things are going to be things that we have a lot more ability to allow to stimulate independently so that they can attach detach you can interact with them individually uh so that gives us a lot of leeway to open up new game play opportunities like
00:08:03
actually stealing the sacks and then putting them onto your ship and putting them inside another ship and just getting creative and other players do very interesting things uh but yes just largely a big part of this is just making them actually interactable objects in the world individually as opposed to these like static fixed things yeah 100 definitely seems like uh it's ripe for uh future progress on things like piracy and stuff like that because now these things will be because they're physicalized in the world now now they can survive explosions and stuff like that absolutely yeah and could be damaged right so we want to be able to damage a container that might devalue what's in it or you know it opens the door for a lot of the things that we've said we've wanted to do with cargo over the last
00:08:49
couple years and then sets us up for you know being able to put a volatility system on it or you know it's like yeah cool it reacts to this other thing just because it's near it right like because it's physically yeah degradation uh but because it's physically an item we can start to calculate those things independently of each other which is really nice and for the folks in the chat they're asking about when keep an eye on the public roadmap all when questions are answered by the public as best as we're able to anyway uh let's see what else do we got in the cargo factory in regard to the cargo refactor will there be any lego style or snap to option uh or snap two option to get boxes stacked nice and tidy when manually placed by hand or a tractor beam or anything else so that that was one of the things when we were starting to
00:09:37
to talk about what this refactor means this is a bigger feature that spans more than just the usp team and then much like we're working with the actor feature team on the the personal inventory and the asset manager to kind of help go with that um this is something that we're going to need to work with them on because that's a personal player experience uh thing that you know it's the mining tool or the tractor beam or the the paw tool right so um we will provide the hooks in order for them to to be able to do that we said snapping is almost a mandatory thing that we need right uh so when they're ready it should should have all the hooks they need to kind of just snap it in and uh i think i think the the first thing i would expect to see would probably be tractor beam interaction
00:10:24
on that level and then the the physical placement um probably need a little extra work just from the after movement and you know animation side of things but certainly would be able to use the same data to do snapping yeah technically we're implementing it expecting that coming and it's a planned part the first release of cargo may not include derived interaction and lego style snapping but um the functionality under the hood from the cargo system won't support it okay uh now folks who have been uh who who've been paying attention to social media today have noticed that the star citizen account announced that 314 is expected to go live later today uh talking about 314 one of the one of the new uh um
00:11:12
highlight features of that is our nine tails lockdown uh dynamic event that we've talked to in the past uh ben uh we have a couple questions about ninetales lockdown does this event trigger from in-game actions or is it like xenothreat where it's scheduled and started by the developers uh it is it is started by developers it's not even automatically scheduled that's actually another step that we want to take is allowing it to be put on basically like a calendar and put like a date and time on it um that was supposed to be the next step but uh frankly all that tony has been able to talk about for a past few weeks is actually wanting to make it so it's triggered by things in game potentially that schedule might get a little bit flipped up um but it is definitely intended that eventually some form of in-game actions will cause these to happen be
00:12:01
that increasing the piracy level in an area to the point where ninetales thinks that they have a shot or even just doing missions for them to the point where they get enough resources as an organization to kind of um build up the fleet they need to do these kinds of things and and that's for all world events in the future that is the plan that eventually these are all kind of driven by that simulation of what's going on and player yeah and if you want to know even more about nine tails lockdown check out the segment we did on inside star citizen uh towards the end of last quarter it's available on youtube now one more nine tails question before we move on though uh when ninetales locks down a station or a landing zone will players still passively spawn there uh when joining the pu or does that affect your login locations if it is where you were set then you you
00:12:50
stay there yes i do not do anything to affect you there whatsoever um that's not to say that we never will uh particularly if in some distant future there's a time when they actually take over that station that might have some ramifications to people there that aren't friendly with nine tails but um for now no you will log back in right on that station so there's an opportunity for some uh juicy game starts just log in casually you know have a fun persistent universe experience and you're in the middle of a giant pvp event has some knock-on fun potential gameplay of like i need to hire someone to come in with some big guns and rescue me and that sounds awesome in some ways or terrifying so you know next week's ise actually is all about that merging of pve and pvp uh that we that we shoot for
00:13:38
in the precision universe so check that out uh next week okay um chad one of the subjects that we posted about on spectrum that's like garnered a lot of like perk deers like what what is this procedural character generation so let's start with the basics what is it and what isn't it yeah what is going on here um so this is part of uh i would say a much larger larger initiative of tony's so if you've been paying attention you'll see all these big ideas being thrown about about like dynamic populations virtual ai missions all this stuff and at a certain point uh you have to ask the question of how are these things being populated
00:14:26
where does the content come from and then whenever you start thinking about that you also start to wonder about okay well what about the locations in the game what about just the universe that we're trying to build the number of solar systems we're you know intending to make and quickly we run up on a problem which is that we really just cannot reasonably hand author all of the characters in the game to get the scale that we're looking for and get the dynamism that we're looking for to get the kind of uh i would say kind of persistence that we're looking for and the reaction to the character the players in the game so procedural character generation is uh you know one tool to address this problem and the idea is essentially that instead of hand authoring you know the vast majority of the characters of
00:15:12
the game uh take which takes a lot of time right there's a lot of very manual markup that's very bespoke um you know for example you know maybe people may not be aware but like if you just take like a random engineer in the game right um there would be like a hundred variants of this hand authored loadouts have been created for them in order to add the kind of variety in the game that you hope to see uh and even still right people notice the repetition right you'll you'll see the same characters and the thing is you you want a certain amount of that you want a certain amount of seeing the same characters in similar scenarios um but at a certain point there's a kind of uncanny valley where it's like okay that person was just walking over there and i always see them over here right
00:16:00
so the idea is that by using a process that's a kind of seated randomness that is designer guided with us with that's rules driven we can kind of work from how do i describe it i would say you can kind of work from like what the world that we want to build is backwards to a set of rules that allow us to generate characters to fill out that world in a way that is a combination of varied and makes sense so this is the tricky bit um for any kind of procedural system you're going to have challenges where if you don't have enough kind of semantics built into the system you're going to have just incredibly varied results they're going to be quite heterogeneous and what it's going to mean is that it's just going to seem like
00:16:46
random it's going to seem like there's no sense to it you get variety but it doesn't seem like there's any sensibility that ties it together once you start constraining that with any set of rules then what you end up as a problem is the opposite you end up with something quite homogenous you know you go look at for example um no man's sky and all the planets where they're using a procedural system to generate you know their 18 quintillion planets or something which is very cool um but at that certain point you see enough planets there's a saminess to it and that's that's going to be true of any procedural system so the trick is how do you how do you balance it to get the variety that you want but still sculpt it to have the kind of um this the kind of threads that are that are taken through the characters
00:17:33
and and so what my work is is to build a system in collaboration with design and collaboration with uh character art narrative all of that to figure out the world that we're trying to build and see how we can encode that into the data for game play and and environmental reasons and then draw upon that in order to generate characters at runtime that makes sense in situations and then the cool part is that these are going to be persistent characters so you'll be able to see them again potentially on the situation or on the locations so you know everything from shopkeepers to security engineers will go through this process and it's kind of just a high level ramble all right so that sounds like what one two sprints worth of work yeah uh we're
00:18:21
thinking about that it's totally not going to be that button yeah this this is huge right and and the cool thing about this though is that it really has kind of caused us to all come together as the different groups within the company to to agree and and you know formulate a a cohesive vision for exactly how all of these things tied together because a lot of times what happens is we go and we build our thing and and works really well and looks really good and sometimes doesn't tie here but this this is going to be you know tied to objective values of the items or how did how does a military guy know what he wants to use well he uses you know things that shoot faster high magazine capacities and we can start to build out a list of stuff that makes
00:19:11
sense for those characters and then diversify them based on you know how much they care about those things um and it's from a character perspective it's really cool because we were we were going yeah we want engineers we want you know tourists and and whatever but now we can actually start thinking about where did they come from they actually had a home planet and that home planet well their their dna is is mixed generally in these ways so now you can get people that look like culturally like they came from some place um wearing clothes and styles from those locations and they could even behave you know prefer items of you know whatever type but that's that's the the type of thing that we're going to be able to build as a result of this and you know i i don't know how much the the public knows about how many character entities we have in the game
00:19:59
but we've literally got like every 18 civilian one through 187 ben shaking his head because he knows like it is it is ridiculous and this will allow us to go we have a civilian and the location that he gets spawned drives some of these choices the the core archetype distinction that some designer set is the you know another bulk of those choices uh what organization may be another layer of choices right so but it's it's a logical you know building up of this character that we no longer have to really like stay on top of so much that oh why is this guy here somebody just copy and pasted him like no no this the the system knows where he needs to go they know it's cold on the planet so he's gonna be wearing something that's warm right we can start to to build all of
00:20:46
this stuff together as a single single experience which is why i kind of threw my hands up in the beginning i was like yes this is this is this is the dynamic game and the beginning of the dynamism that we have talked about for a very long time so it's it's super exciting well for those playing a star citizen drinking game at home that was one bespoke one systemic and uh two dynamics so uh four shots everybody all right uh persistent hangers persistent hangers uh we hear this term and of course the the very first module that was ever released in star citizen's development was our personal hanger system so uh there's a lot of when they when we hear the term precision hangers there's a lot of misconceptions that immediately arise uh going back linking
00:21:36
one to the other so right off the bat our first question is what is the difference between persistent hangers and the personal hangers that citizens are familiar with the idea was at least to my knowledge was that these personal hangers were actually meant to be some place that was in the game you know asteroid hangers were supposed to be on some place like grimhex or wherever um the the rebel in york was supposed to be a microtech hangar right so it's i i would not necessarily look at them as different places but what we're going to provide is is a place that you can customize you can leave stuff and on the floor and when you come back it'll be there it is your place kind of like the halves where you can kind of go and dump stuff
00:22:23
in your hats but but on a much larger scale these these will be things that you can buy they'll be yours you can rent them maybe things of that nature right uh it'll allow players to manage larger scales of cargo things like that you know storage like hangers are pretty big right so you can line some cargo up down one side and then spawn a different ship and then put it on that one um so it's in a nutshell it's it's it's taking that personal hanger and really just kind of transplanting that into the game and allowing the game to persist it uh in whatever state you leave it yeah i mean if i could just add i would say that persistent hangers are kind of a super set of hangers where they include the personal hangers which are now persistent but also we'll include other hangars
00:23:11
that you could potentially interact with for for other reasons because we're now going to make them something that you own that means that there's going to be some locality type to them and they're going to be situations in the game where you may not have access to a hangar that you actually own at a given location and they're going to be a set of processes in place that still allow you to facilitate certain gameplay loops um so that might mean maybe renting a hangar or having a temporary hangar for a certain transaction um and it even opens the door you know potentially for things like uh hangers associated with characters or missions and things like that um so but yeah rob you know exactly right effectively what we're doing is you know i mentioned before that cargo was being turned into entities and then that allows us to have a certain amount of persistent gameplay associated with them something's true with the hangers
00:23:59
we're gonna now have the ability to simulate them as as entities very similar to ships actually so you know right now in the game you can already like drop things in your ship put ships inside of ships and store and restore them et cetera et cetera hangers are going to start acting a lot more like that and players are going to hopefully you know start thinking of them as something that's like an important part of their their kind of fleet their their their gameplay set right so the the the player hangers that people are familiar with the rebel in york and the and stuff like that uh those are under the um the greater umbrella of prison but when they see the first version of precision hangers show up on the road map and you know eventually make its way into the game uh it is not that right away it is working with the hangars that are there in game today you know the
00:24:47
area 18 ones and the lowerville ones and and creating persistent storage yeah so i imagine uh you're going to choose your starting location very 18 and then the ships that you have at area 18 you'll have a hangar there that comes with your starting you know location selection right and that's that's now your hangar instead of hangar 27 it's you know rob's hanger uh rob's medium hanger whatever um and just like any other have or persistent location you can go there now the the only thing that uh like we're not gonna build like one hanger entrance for every single player that's actually on the server right or or in the game as a whole it's going to be controlled through atc so you're going to contact apc say hey i'm ready to go and and chad can talk maybe about more of the the technical
00:25:36
side of this of how we're going to be bouncing you know players around but basically we're going to take you we're going to move you while you're doing your stuff inside your hanger and then hey i'm ready to go atc gives you clearance that opens up a door doors open you fly out directly into the city and it's all from your persistent hanger space yeah so i'll just go a little bit into detail on that so the idea is that no matter what for now we're going to have the locations that don't have the number of hangers to support even the current player limit let alone whenever we increase that too with server meshing right so for that reason we're always going to have this problem of too many players mapped to too few however we do want to maintain the kind of player experience of feeling
00:26:24
like you do own a hanger at a certain location for even these ones where they're too few and so for that reason we're actually going to pin the players to particular hanger entrances so that in your experience as a player you'll go land somewhere you'll you'll fly away from somewhere it's always from the same hangar at that location physically now there is you know the players may notice that there's going to be a kind of you know magical sensibility to it which because if we have 100 players in the server or whatever or even the current 50 then you know the same players will be using the same hanger entrance and exits you know how's that possible and the reason is because there's magic happening behind the hood where we're magically moving these things around and we're using zones to isolate them from each other um so that you don't see the fact that
00:27:12
they're you know all getting kind of intermixed but the experience for the players is it's one continuous experience in and out now that's for these locations again that have a more limited set we absolutely with the system can expand it to have locations with larger amounts of hangers which would then allow us to do things like individually put down um persistent hangers for players and you know that would probably have to work in accordance with some kind of procedural system for for placing out very large numbers of them and we do you you know i know this comes up a lot of players very aware that we have we have the real estate right we have these huge planets like what are we doing with all this space certainly that's an opportunity but for the for the first out um we're not going to have that you know unique
00:27:59
one-to-one hanger experience for each location instead it's going to be working with the locations that we have now but the system will support um as we make it will support it in the future if we can work in accordance with the environment and level design teams and planet teams to facilitate the other part that would be required to have that kind of experience it's like with anything else in star citizen you bring it to the point of realism then you bring it back to the point of fun and it and it's people who if you physicalized every single hanger for every single player on the thing somebody would have to park you know 13 kilometers out from area 18 and have a 15 minute shuttle ride on the way in just to sell off their stuff and stuff like that so we have to find try to find that mix and match but of course as the game progresses and expands and stuff like
00:28:48
we certainly do have the real estate too to push farther and farther towards that realism so uh like with anything it'll continue to change and evolve uh one of the one more question about precision hangers before we move on to shopping trading and selling and stuff uh will we be able to give player other players access to drop cargo off in our hangars i yeah so what we want to build is this concept of a freight elevator that is tied to whoever's using it so when you use it you see your local inventory stored at area 18 when i use it i see mine so now what you get is the ability for you to bring your cargo out into my hangar loaded on my ship we can collectively work together as a group
00:29:35
to then load the ship up with a series of goods take it to another location and go go and sell it so we thought that was a really important factor to hit um you know players want to play as a group and and putting the bill for you know 18 million uec of goods on a ship is pretty daunting right so it i think it's a it's a huge it's a huge win for players just uh not just for for working together as a multi-cruise ship but also contributing together from a financial point of view of sharing the cost for for trading so i think that's a big one yeah and i think rob's bearing the lead care a little bit um if you're if you're paying really close attention you will have noticed that there was quite a dramatic change to the way that
00:30:22
cargo works implied in that ends yes which is that we're not going to be magically spawning the cargo into your ship whenever you purchase cargo instead it's going to be purchased into the hangar and you you'll be calling it from the spread elevator and then manually moving it in and out of the the kind of staging space into the ship right so this is part of you i mentioned before that we're trying to localize the car a little more this is part of that you know we're getting rid of the magic no more no more popping in and out of existence and said they're physical things they have to be moved of course you know in the future this is going to set us up for systems such as maybe drones or npcs that would hire to help you move these things um but for now the idea is that you can move them yourself using the multi-tool or you can bring in your friends
00:31:10
and so you know this is one way in which people that are playing together will have an advantage over players that are just playing by themselves because there's a certain amount of throughput that you'll be able to achieve with a crew which will increase your um financials as opposed to as a single player so it's it's kind of bringing that you know multiplayer interactive diegetic physical gameplay into the cargo system you all laughed at the trolleys you said the trolleys were silly no i'm just chad is already talking about an lti forklift i'll pass it on folks but who knows it's a big deal though and and uh actually yeah we'll talk about it with selling here so all right so um we know that there's a there there's a
00:31:58
there's a big refactor to or a big expansion rather probably more accurate to personal inventory and stuff coming and along with that loot generation and along with that an increased need to be able to sell and trade things off absolutely so um talk to us about what our what what our scope of that is i know it's you know we're not like with most things we ne we don't get to do everything we want to in the first drop so why don't we just start there what is next for selling trading shopping asset managering yeah so that's the big one is uh we're trying to close off some of these game loops right we can go out we can buy stuff we can already sell commodities so that the next logical step was to be able to sell personal items or ship items back to
00:32:47
shops uh just offloading uh you know you bought 57 different ships but you're just like you know i just want to manage you know a smaller set of power plants or whatever that's that's a doable thing now um the the goal is to start with those item types um generally kind of limit them to the types of items that the store will have for sale right and then you know go from there the selling ships back to you know a dealer uh is going to be a future tier right but the the important part is you know when we start going to loot generation you're going to be able to collect a lot more stuff may or may not be valuable but it's it's another form of being able to be rewarded within the game to be able to go and sell it somewhere so that's a
00:33:35
it closes several you know gameplay loops that are either coming online very soon or you know have been there for more than a bit and it also gives us an opportunity to actually uh change our shopping flow in in the kiosk it's going to be in the kiosk i should say uh we're not going to do it at the physical item level uh the the mobi glass level we're going to try and phase out that mobi glass uh ui at some point but the that in in converting it to building blocks we can kind of re-envision that flow a little bit and try and make it a little more user-friendly um selling things in stacks buying things you know in larger volumes um and these these things will all be uh if you buy things they're going to get you know sent to your local inventory if
00:34:23
you sell things you can only sell things from your person from your ships that are in that location from your local storage that's in that location so again kind of leaning into that you know items are localized within the world concept it's going to fall in line with all that um some questions that we got from the chat and thread here uh want to trade want to sell want to buy or some of the more common mechanics in other mmos uh related to all this are are we going to allow players to trade between themselves like with an old style mmo with or what is the app the mode trader app is what's called mo trader yeah uh short answer yes uh absolutely long answer um there's a series of confluence pages
00:35:14
with to be clear the the current mo trader app is not even tier one it's tier zero of what we want to implement for um with just plan after plan for how to expand upon that in in gradated bits um to include player trading there's talk even of having it be that there might be like shipping times on that that you might hire a shipping company then players could be that shipping company so yes absolutely player trading of items between each other is is planned to be supported uh what exact form that ends up taking will be determined when we you know actually start to pedal to the metal on that that next step right as we often stay here even with a wonderfully talented 700 person team around the world we can only work on so many things at any one time and not everything is in active development
00:36:02
so you can't there are no updates to give uh and i'm talking to you bannon merchantman crowd when it's in development we'll tell you okay okay okay with addition to being able to sell loot are there plans to be able to resell a ship purchase with auec uh it would be nice to be able to get rid of entries on aesop for ships that maybe i don't care for after i have purchased them sure i i mean that's the plan right is we want you to be able to sell your ships back if you don't basically anything in the game if you don't want it anymore we want to give the players a way to manage their inventory and cull it down to the things that they care about
00:36:50
um i could even see you know as we we re-envisioned they stop because the aesop's gonna need to change a little bit when we do some persistent hanger work um i could see maybe even just like hey hide this and you know show you know give your the ability to hide certain entries but they're still there right uh all the way to selling them to to do another stuff so it's um you know we want to eventually be able to take ships to junk sites and you know scrap them and you know if you're a pirate right that's a big question in the games like how do i steal something sell this big ship well that's that's pretty uh it's got to be a pretty complicated and you know dangerous thing but that's you know stuff the cr's talked about in the past right so it's uh it's all in an effort to build up towards you know that level of ability to buy sell you know legal goods
00:37:40
stolen goods stolen ships legal ships right it's yeah but yeah what i'll say is that um rob mentioned before that it's it's later it's not going to be the first iteration of selling and that's ships in the game are much more important and for that reason on the back end in the persistent layer we're doing a lot more tracking we use a lot more safety mechanisms regarding ships if you you know because of a bug or whatever lose a weapon or an item or something like that it's not that big of a deal but losing a ship is you know the amount of money that's going into these the amount of time that's going into them is dramatic so for that reason uh we would have to account for that for example in ltp uh and today we don't remove things from ltp
00:38:29
so that's a that's you know as soon as you you do something like that you open yourself up to a set of you know bugs that you have to very cautious about on the technical side that you're very confident when you go out and you're not going to start just blasting people's like very persistent data that they've worked hours and hours on so we're being cautious on that part uh and it's it's not that we don't you know know how to do it or um you know don't want to do it it's more that we want to be careful on that one for sure uh let's see let's move into some more general term things for the team here uh will there be more reputation stuff for people on the wrong side of the law uh absolutely uh definitely and and
00:39:17
that's not even i'm not even saying that is like a a far off super distant thing um i literally spent yesterday setting up some data for it uh when it comes out will be a question mark keep your eye on the roadmap as jared is so fond of saying um but the there there is planned support for pretty much any kind of game play in the game with reputation the idea is that what you guys enjoy doing we want to kind of support with that reward um if that means uh hauling cargo from place to place there will be reputation for it if that means uh shooting people along a trade route as a pirate there will be reputation for that both good and bad if that means stealing big benny's machines and going and building weird neolithic monuments on a moon um for some reason i'm sure narrative would have a problem with it but
00:40:06
there might be a reputation for that with some weird organization so yes uh there will be reputation for illegal things for non-violent things for all kinds of things yeah and uh you know we've talked about pyro quite a bit you know this it's a big thing right then that's more of an outlaw system that's going to be you know uh coming online so it's definitely going to be more relevant as we get into that um but uh yeah as for now we're we're focused on uh you know design wise we're building out the structure behind the scenes of how this is going to work in the game and that's actually something we're going to talk about uh in a bit more detail with citizencon so we're excited to show you some plans for that uh adjacent to the cargo refactor we'll get
00:40:55
back to that in a minute will the cargo refactor include a meaningful overhaul of the economy itself for updated profit and investment ratios i think it has to um you know one of the things that we want to do is sell things kind of by the box not like this per unit because it does a lot of different things when we start to go down that road where it takes a certain amount of money to get into a box a super valuable box that's this big um whereas you know i can get into like the really cheap stuff in larger volumes maybe they're really expensive stuff i can only buy in in smaller quantities but i've got to get a certain amount of it in order to it's like buying a lot size on the on the stock market right you got to buy it in 100 unit lots uh similar principle uh with what we want to do for the cargo it
00:41:43
and it kind of ties to you know the whole sea in these large containers that that we need to have to facilitate those um but it's abs i i don't see how we can't you know do that like it's it's mandatory 100 okay uh let's move back to the cargo refactor a bit when it comes to loading and unloading of cargo in space docking arms for ships and hangars how do you plan to protect the players ship from beco from someone coming on board during a manual loading process and flying away or storing stowing on board stowing away on board uh basically how can players protect during this vulnerable time i think the bigger question is how are you going to protect your ship and your cargo that's being
00:42:31
loaded and unloaded on your ship uh who are you going to work with to make that that a safe thing to me that's that's where multiplayer you gamepl you want to hire some friends eventually we want to have npcs that you can hire uh maybe your reputation's high enough where turrets at the station will actually help protect you right um so you know we you're gonna see reputation being tied into a lot more things as we move forward um and certainly you know we've talked about hiring npcs and working with other players forever right so this to me is is right for that opportunity yeah and if i could add like i think a lot of people might hear that answer and feel maybe a little bit upset um keep in mind that you're not moving the cargo in and out on the landing pad
00:43:21
right we're changing it to be in the hangar right to get into somebody else's hangar is going to be much more difficult atc is going to be monitoring right that are going in and out like you just end up in somebody else's hangar bad things could happen uh if you want to physically walk in there you're going to have to sneak in along with them you can't just decide via some hanger elevator that you want to go to somebody else's you would have to get into the physical hanger with them and then get all the way into their right so there's just a lot less likely that this is going to happen and so for the first outing yeah it's probably going to be a little bit more manual process in collaboration with hec and my guess is that when we go live there is going to be a certain amount of it but it's not going to be like this rampant
00:44:08
problem and then um even if it does end up being like that we can always do things like introduce maybe like a secret security system and maybe that's something you have to opt into you know i don't know see how it goes we'll see how the gameplay turns out let's see what the feedback is um but yeah so it's it's a little bit safer than i think maybe probably i mean and and i i i think one thing that we've kind of blurred the line between a little bit here is that you know the the cargo refactor is physicalizing cargo it's not going to change your shopping flow for that particular feature persistent is where cargo gameplay flow is going to be the the big thing that changes that so when it comes to shops shop still still populated you know while your ships despawned uh you know behind the scenes there it
00:44:56
just means that as a player once it gets spawned on the landing pad you can walk into the ship and take it out if you can get in there it's it's physicalized at that point so uh the persistent hanger work is what's really going to drive this entire gameplay flow of of the the manual loading and working with friends and collaborating on that level and then you will be much safer behind the doors of your uh of your hangers so making things harder to do is is i kind of mentioned like stealing ships like that should be really hard like it should be really hard to get into somebody's hangar like maybe you gotta kind of sneak on their ship and then you know be a stowaway all the way back to get inside their hangar and now now you you can wreak havoc but it's it takes an effort and it's a you know i'm sure players are going to do it i guarantee it
00:45:43
they're going to find a way but i think just the physicalization of cargo is going to be a huge step we've talked a lot today about the cargo refactor and how it links up with the persistent hangers and stuff like this where do cargo decks come into this equation you know we released them a couple patches ago they famously looked great but were less filling as far as the gameplay content uh how do those work into the new picture so the there are hangers at those stations right cargo decks uh are places where you make your purchases uh we we originally um intended that to be where you can kind of drive renting space we've actually since talked about some additional possibilities of how we're going to
00:46:29
manage your overage and and is that a is it capped is it just per unit like you pay for the storage that you you request for maybe that gets way more expensive the more you get closer to certain you know uh levels um that you know small stations may not have a lot of space and once you get up to like thousand scu like man that gets really expensive and it's just not worth it to store that much stuff there so um it's i'd see it maybe morphs a little bit over time here just as far as the the original intent um obviously i i think one of the big points was that you know they're not really connected to the outside so people can't really fly their ships in load it up and go out but that's that's where persistent hangers you know even if you
00:47:16
don't own one there you can request a land one uh pay for it you know like 500 uec to go land and then you go in do your shopping load it on your ship and then go and then that disappears from your your persistence right so again it's it's it's realizing that the gameplay over time uh that that's this is a huge feature um we've built so much in the game already and and we've got to go go back and make sure that what we're building still works within the context of everything that we've got uh inside i'd expect you know there'd be things kind of like that that may need to get tweaked a little bit uh we may be able to use it right out the gate um and then uh does this cargo refactor uh does it include things like the storal boxes for the
00:48:04
aurora and the mustang at all um are you talking about the boxes on the outside yeah yes so the the because they're items it's like a weapon is just attaching to the outside of the ship so it will absolutely facilitate that 10 000 aurora owners just cheered in unison now loading that's going to be interesting right so you're going to get your track to be me you know so that's a different problem but uh uh let's see how much time we got all right with persistent hangers uh will the need to equip ships only with the inventory you have in the hangar or at your current location be implemented at the same time that's actually going to be coming out with these this new inventory uh change that we're doing so
00:48:51
when the asset manager drops the personal inventory system is changing right the the pma will be removed in lieu of the new personal inner thought inventory that you probably see in rich tire and company talk about quite a bit uh the vma will also fall in line with that so the vma will still exist but it'll be altered to only show the things that you have at that location or purchased at that location so you'll see the equipment from all of your other ships that you know obviously everything's like item port size restricted and stuff like that but yeah so it'll be localized there with things like persistent hangers uh the physicalized inventory asset manager all this stuff that we're talking about this coming
00:49:38
how does prison factor into that and being an escapee because because that's the question that's it's how does that factor in it's i guess in what way like getting back to your yeah at what point do you get all of your stuff back because you know when you when you show up in prison everything famously disappears sure well it i think it i think it works even better because we've had to actually hack the the inventory to work around that fact to hide all of these other things that was previously in a global inventory so you just won't have it right like your stuff will just not be at that location so of course you can't access it so when you get back to places where you can it'll be there yeah and i think you know there's still some fine details to work exactly on but probably
00:50:26
you know one way that it could work is uh if you were at a location where you got captured um we just store it there if you're somewhere where there's not really reasonably anything close that you could identify as the location where your stuff is we'd probably just stuff it in your home location um but as i said there's some fine details exactly um to sort and then you know the immediate next question i'm sure that a lot of people are thinking about like how do i know where it ended up right and the answer to that is well that's why we have the asset manager app which is to help you understand where your things are in the world so yeah the uh we haven't really talked about we will talk about this in more detail citizencon but think of asset manager as the global view and your your personal inventory and uh persistent hangars your ships like these are all your local
00:51:13
local places so when you want to know what's on the other side of the system that'll be the asset manager or knickknacks uh who's the actual name of it again i know we're talking about the asset manager at susan gunn so we don't want to go too far into it but uh will it allow for like text-based global search of inventories it's chat yeah so what it will allow is text-based filtering of local results uh at first but not global tax search and the reason for this is because um it's actually much more difficult to implement than you might just naively think you have to consider how you're extracting that data out of the back-end the way that we're implementing the new entity graph
00:52:02
system is to optimize it for the kinds of queries that gameplay does most often and that usually means hierarchical queries and for this reason the way that the data is laid out in the database is not conducive to text-based search instead we would have to have a different kind of caching layer in order to facilitate this which is doable it's it's not that it's not possible it's just that that's not the work that's currently being done we're very focused on server meshing into the graph persistence streaming all that stuff um so the people that we would need to work with in order to support that are tied up with some very important things right now and uh it won't be in like the global search won't be out in the first uh outing but it is something that we've definitely talked about and
00:52:49
we have some ideas now how to and on that note um we actually found that the we put in an item type subtype so that the categories and then subcategories that you would see like in the shop kia so you got your categories across top like oh clothing and then pantries whatever we're giving that level of filtering where you can set up your criteria say yeah filter and then only the stuff in that location that matches that that criteria will show up so it's it's a little more efficient way to go where's my guns where's my clothes where's my uh whatever um but the the text search because we're also limited on how many things we can put or bring into the query uh results each time just because it it'll just take longer and longer for things to load
00:53:37
so we felt it was better to give you faster results than to create this huge list wait for it to load you know for 15 minutes right and allow you to interact with it um so we've actually i think we've actually turned the the text-based filtering off right now because the the type subtype or the category stuff was so much more efficient we're like let's just let's mix that and give them a little more space to to show items so it's not a question it's just not no no it it was one of the first things i wanted i'm like i want to i want to type you know much like we have in the defense list in the front end right where you can start typing somebody's name and and see them you know pop up in the list like that's exactly what i want as a player and i want to i want to be able to type keywords i want to be able to type you know like sniper or you know bullet or whatever that that's is a game that
00:54:26
manages so much stuff we have to have those quick and easy ways to not just figure out where what it is but where it is and what i need to do to go and get how much of it i got right what quality what shape is it in you know there's a there's a bunch of stuff that will be coming into play much more as we move forward you can send your hate mail to me i had to i had to break the bad news throughout the years it chanted he wasn't calling you naive he was just calling director gunner it was that was directed specifically to director yeah everybody else is fine he just meant director gunner um i don't know why i'm picking on director gunner will reputation affect selling price or taxes on trading or selling loot at some point in the future
00:55:12
absolutely uh absolutely absolutely uh that is one of the core so there's a there's a portion of reputation uh that is like one of our very public very core plans of it is perks um you've got a very small amount of that that you saw with the bounty hunter reputations where you get a little bit more mission rewards as you rank up with a certain organizations this would fold under the the expansion of that into much more varieties and much more interesting perks that's actually one of the simpler ones frankly uh the it might be a specific shop if it's like a little mom and pop store that you've got a really good reputation with that specific person or it might be company-wide if there's like uh garrity defense then you can you know get all of those various stores um but yes absolutely when you're
00:56:00
selling uh and and taxes and all of that could be affected by reputation um in certain areas yeah buying and selling we talked about hiding things behind reputation you know so you got to be x reputation you got to be a private with us in order to to buy our weapons um we also wanted to you know it ties into subscriber flare as well right like we've always talked about wanting to put a subscriber shop in there so guess what subscribers just a reputation that is a bullying on or off you know um and that is kind of like one of the core when when we say like oh this thing will give you x item it generally will more give you access to x items and that's why when you fall below that rank we aren't going to take that out of your inventory because that's just rude frankly um it's that that item
00:56:49
might decay to a point where uh it is broken or needs to be repaired or something you won't be able to get back until you're back in working order until you are above certain reputations or get a replacement until you're above that yeah so and as we move forward uh with the game obviously wear and tear is going to become much much bigger of an influence over over your gameplay like right now we do a lot of things with ships where we basically just give you all brand new you know stuff when you claim insurance but eventually the intent is that like your parts are wearing out so if you lose your rep to be able to buy you know have access to it you may not have to you may not be able to get it repaired by them or uh you may not be able to get another one so it's yeah it's it's i i can't express how fundamental reputation is to our progression system
00:57:39
uh enough it is it is huge and it's going to be tied into as many things that make sense but it's going to be in most of the stuff that we work on it's going to be a factor and as a follow-up to that subscriber for your thing uh we're talking about many subscriber players get lost throughout the course of you know adventuring in the prison universe we're talking about an easy place for people to go back and reclaim the things that they have already yeah i mean that's that's an interesting you know point you know they typically you know with the the players are just doing like character resets and then getting their stuff back right um reclaiming it like we have talked about you know if you lost it maybe at some point somebody could find it right and then it gets returned to your home location where you can go and pick
00:58:26
it up there is talks about how we can do that for some of those key items like the subscriber things or like the the things that you you know paid real money for or um the the special stuff right you know your your special mount or et cetera uh so to speak but yeah that's that's a it's it's it's in the plan i i don't know when that's scheduled or it's an evolution of the shopkins shopping experience for sure and i know next year is going to be much more economy focused as we kind of get the quantum tooling integrated into the game more and more so that's that's what i would like to see that happen but it's all gonna come down to priorities i also should clarify for zen a threat we are going to
00:59:13
directly reward you some stuff at certain reputations after the event is done um but that is something that we do not plan to do long term that's a yeah so that's that's a good point like right now we're kind of doing it in a in a undesirable way where we're going through the the analytics data and going uh who's actually completed this and then and then attributing those things to the accounts these are things that we want people to uh be able to one acknowledge go yep cool i'm going to this place and i get it and i did it and i know that i did it whereas right now the back end just goes yep you got it and there's not a whole lot of messaging you don't really you know um once the inventory is localized your quarter i go get it we've got plans for as well but um yeah so hopefully it'll it'll become more fluid and more
01:00:02
more tangible in-game experiences with with the reward stuff that they're doing now cool well gentlemen that's it it's the end of our show congratulations you made it to the end uh all that's left is for uh chad to show us what that thing in the background is and how it works it's a power key just for weightlifting you're gonna show us sir he doesn't know how it works [Laughter] thanks for spending your time at the end of our week here on star citizen live uh that was that was chad that was rob that was that was that can i point in the corner there you go that was that was ben uh we are gonna we're gonna throw a raid i think we're gonna throw a raid uh to
01:00:49
somebody here uh so uh there is a streamer going now his name uh their name is nyashi uh nayashi uh i don't know anything about this person uh we're literally just picking a person and we're gonna surprise him so uh so um when you when you head over there tell them chad doesn't really work out and uh we'll uh we'll see you next week everybody not saying he doesn't i'm just saying i've never seen him use it that's awesome i've never seen him use it i've not it just sits back there it's like he's swole dude they checked them like before the camera like he's like oh yeah dude those legs are like power lifter legs man he's got like robot we are off the air right uh yeah sure

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