Star Citizen Live Q&A: Invictus Vehicle Gameplay

24 May 202401:05:441,667 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to another episode of Star Citizen live our Invictus all vehicles gameplay Q&A I'm your host uh Jared Huckaby and joining us on the show this week are few uh steam members from the various uh gameplay feature teams uh throughout star citizens and Squadron for use development that work on features related to the spaceships uh and vehicles um it's always hard we used to just say it ships and then we like we started making more ground vehicles and I'm like no you got to call it Vehicles now not just spaceships spaceships just dismiss all the great work of ground vehicles and now I'm already lost in the show before we get started uh I wanted to call out a couple things uh for folks who were questioning some some of the questions and some of the discussion from last week's show and stuff um a lot of the questions that are submitted into our
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threads when we pull questions are things that obviously people want to see people want to know about people are anxiously waiting for it doesn't mean they're actually in active development if a thing is not in what we call Active development which is where a person is literally like their tasks this week are to work on a thing there's usually no new information to give um folks who have followed the project for any uh long period of time will tell you that in the earlier days when we were still all figuring out uh what star seison was and figuring out what weekly content was and stuff we were sometimes quite uh vociferous and loquacious uh with our with our verbiage and now I'm just now I'm just reading it the thesaurus uh basically we would just talk Pie in the
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Sky maybe we'll do this and maybe we'll do this and stuff and it sometimes it can set expectations that are unfair uh to set in people so over the last few years uh you've probably noticed that we we hold things a little closer to our vest if a thing is not in active development we try not to talk about it too much because there's just too much about game development that can change between now and the moment when we actually start to work on it so for that reason you I'm sure you've noticed in our storytelling iscal that we tend to talk more about things that are coming in the next 3 to six months as opposed to things that are coming in the next year to two years and stuff like this so for in the question thread there were a lot of questions like what about personal VIP transport and and stuff like this which is not currently in active development or what about e uh what about medical gameplay which is
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while it does involve vehicles to a certain extent is far more an FPS related feature than it is a a a spaceship feature uh we're going to focus the show as we always try to do on the stuff that is currently in active development and the features that folks are aware of and can play with right now things like salvaging and Mining and combat and stuff like that um a good example of this uh there was a question about uh bounty hunting V2 for instance there was a there's a big question was voted up about how how's bounty hunting V2 running along bounty hunting V2 is actually not currently an active development it's been back bured a bit because we've determined that there are other prerequisite features that are necessary to make it work things like uh restraints a restraint system uh Quantum tracking the ability to track people through Quantum travel uh FPS and ship
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scanning we all know that needs additional work and basically the law and security refactor so when those things come online and those things are developed then the eye of development Saron will turn back to bounty hunting Beach too so like this so just a great example of how sometimes a thing is in active development sometimes it becomes not in active development and just a little bit of me at the top of the show wanting to discuss why we sometimes ask certain questions and why sometimes we don't ask certain questions if we're not asking it and we're not talking about it you can generally assume that it's not something that's currently in active development and we'll get to those topics when we get closer to that time just a little bit for me uh all right so with that let's start the show proper uh we have uh four uh Beautiful People some of my favorite people and Elliot Mal
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joining us on the show this week so let's get to meeting them uh sorry just had to you know Elliot I'm sorry you took the hit there so we're going to start with you Elliot hi say hi tell everybody who you are and what you do for Star Citizen hello um mby uh and I am the uh lead Mission designer on the mission design team so I make all those missions that work perfectly for you all of you and at no point do you sit in a corner during beon Belgium and just scroll through teams finding out what this mission is broken that mission is broken and I I don't get arrest just everyone constantly hey you know your mission's broken it's like yep I built it I know it's broken it on purpose uh Yogi tell everybody who you are what you
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do for Star Citizen unmute yourself tell everybody who you are and what you do for Star Citizen I was muted yeah hello uh my name is Yogi I'm a principal vehicle Pro programmer sorry um and I deal mostly with space combat and the flight experience um I'm somewhat of a link between Richard and Torsten um and yeah that's what I that's what I do so I do Cod and designning things uh handle stuff like uh General Flat model development ESP and stuff like that so uh all these complaints when something is broken usually also go to me not Mission related though fair enough I like that the link between Richard and Thorson so let's go to Richard Rich tell everybody who you are and what you do um
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yes so I'm basically Richard Toler and I'm um and I'm the lead designer on the vehicle experience M side so it's balance um it's gameplay with vehicles and basically working Yogi and anyone else involved for you know the kind of General vehicle experience to make the vehicle gameplay good in Star Citizen and last but certainly not least Torsten tell everybody who you are what you do for Star Citizen hello I'm toon I'm thead systems designer and I complain a lot that is true he's not wrong he's not wrong and of course as You' seen um all of our major designers and programmers live in the void uh which and we're so glad that you can join us from the void uh this week to take questions so uh just two
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topshelf questions before we get into all the questions from the from the backers this week um Yogi and Rich Master modes is finally this this big thing you work on a lot of things but Master modes this this this this this enormous uh project of yours is finally out in the wild with 323 uh how's that been how's that how's that going how's that make you feel are you done are we walking away from it is this the last thing or what's what happened here how happy are we well um so I I posted about my feelings concerning Master mods about a couple of weeks ago in Spectrum um so in general I'm very happy with the progress and what we achieved because the um the swapping to the master mode check uh meant that we had to update all the ships all in one bulk so um we could not really um uh stretch this out to
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multiple releases because our uh our data system is not able to have like uh two different tuning values or two different ways of keeping tuning ships balanced um at the same time so we had to squish all the ships and just to be clear we have about 140 different ship records in the game uh so we had to update them all and take the other related teag from from Squad like the new aiming system the ways of the weapons work the gim bling system and so on plus part of the UI update and squish this all into 323 now we knew from we we we knew before that this was like a pretty tough ask to do um because it's just a lot of work um so overall I'm really happy with the with the progress of course there's like there's a couple of like let's say balance issues there's a couple of balance offenders of course
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right um but it was kind of like no no yeah well there's no we don't need to we don't need to say it's perfect like we we never said it's going to be perfect on this release right but it's it it builds a far better Foundation from which we can eate faster going forward um so beond spe2 three what about you rich yeah that's at you know it's about moving towards the better foundation for the future of the game um so it's been really cool to get here um but for us it's just a start of this but it's been a really cool journey I mean this this journey started for us wow like three years ago y I think yeah about three years ago maybe more than that now years yeah I I lost T TR you know so we got together and you know we looked at Star Citizen and went right what do we need to do you know to make the combat experience good but also the GLE
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experience good and we came with lots of things and master Birds was kind of one of the ones that evolved kind of as The prominent feature that we were working on and it's involved so many teams and so much feedback from you know all across the studio so it's been an effort you know not just myself and Yogi but lots of different teams you know lots of different people you know that are W on this over the time um you know that I've been here so it's been really good to see out there it's been a big push at the last minute because as you know you get said we've got so many ships and every single one of them had to be updated to make this work so you know there's a couple of things you know that we didn't catch probably um but that was expected given how many records have changed in the game um but we believe it's a much better foundation and and you know we're excited for the feedback that's coming you know as it's coming in
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you know and also you know for the future as well because it's going to evolve massively you know over the next few releases and of course we'll have more questions about master modes when we get to the combat section of today's Q&A um before we jump into it Torsten Yogi and rich just had their big their big child pushed out in the world you're up next with Engineering in 4.0 how you feeling about your work uh pretty excited to be honest so um we with all the work that we we now are starting to put in and next week we will reach a big milestone where we will just force everyone to use Resource Network in uh in in our game def uh Branch so um yeah will be will be quite exciting
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times moving forward okay so and of course we we'll have some more questions about engineering later on the show let's jump into the backer questions we've separated the questions into a couple different sections for a couple different gameplay features and stuff we're going to start with uh an oldie uh refueling uh refueling and rearming we'll combine the two there uh this question uh from the community simply says how is rearming out in the field supposed to work if we land our fighter in a in a Polaris for instance how do we restock so if you if you run ballistic ammunition uh we will allow you to restock the ballistic ammunition and the way that it will work is you will buy um ammunition containers that then you will use to refill the pool of the ships that you either landed or if you even have uh
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like a capital ship or a bigger ship uh you will be able to put those boxes with the ammunition inside right now it's a dedicated slot but it it's subject to change and then it will basically drag the the ammunition out of it and then uh basically put it to the pool uh one one change that will come with that is um that we will so this is something that is coming sooner than later which is we will unify the the ammunition size and that's just for the fact that we don't want to have you uh bepoke ammunition for example for your bearing Gatling but we want you to share the ammunition between different weapons that that share the same size of ammunition for example a size three Gatling uses the same round size as a size two repeater
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and it uses the same size as a size one repeater so you can plan your your load out accordingly if you just want to buy one type of ammunition for your ship and what about for things like bigger things like missiles and torpedoes that's yeah we already started with that right so the the um tractor beam detach attach was the first step already for that so the the following step are then having these I think I don't know if it was ever put out the images of of the I might be leaking something now but uh there's like we had those missile wrecks uh that the mobile missile RS that you could push into into into Vehicles so these these might also see the the the light of day at some point yeah yeah
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know I don't I don't I don't remember if we've shown those other but that that's been an idea that's been floating around development long enough that we can share that basically the idea of storing Mr rxs inside your vehicles that you can then when the ship lands in something like the place you go and reload and stuff like this um there's also um I have no idea if it's out yet or not but uh uh Tyler will have a post on uh Spectrum later today concerning some of the weapons for the Retaliator and some of the missile counts for the uh uh for the uh Firebird so I don't know what the details are specifically but check that out there's a there's some improvements coming in a 3231 a patch or two again the specifics are lud me right now but there's a but I know that the firebird is getting more missiles than it currently has and the
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Retaliator is getting bigger guns I think so look look look out for that uh if that hasn't posted on Spectrum yet it'll post later uh uh and then trust him for the details not me um are we likely to see missions for refueling um yeah it's something it's something we want to do um but it's it's not it's not it's it's not a simple thing to do there's there's a lot of like Downstream dependencies that we have to rely on for it uh and there's a lot of edge cases you know if we're doing refueling and then you board the ship and you know kill the AI pilot and you've just got a free ship because you sat there like without any fuel um you know these are sort of things we need to catch and protect against we also need like like a
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crazy amount of feedback for the player so that you know that they're like right I'm nearly full or you know hey I need some help or you know maybe maybe we we do like hey here's the first version It's just refueling but then we have refueling but you get pirated you know by some AI Pirates you know the the AI needs to be able to react and communicate with you as the player and and then sort of like tell you about the situation that's currently happening so you can sort of adapt appropriately um so long story short yes just probably not yet because we need a few more things what' you do to araka araka in chat says please don't let this guy do missions he got he got timed out by Night Ridder but go on Night Rider you making friends out there Elliot always everyone loves me um uh while we're sitting talking about
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missions let's talk about mining missions uh so refueling obviously something we want to do and stuff it it's but what about uh missions related to mining wow the ability to speak here there it is what about mining missions mining missions yes um I mean yeah we want them and we're going to have our first versions of them coming in hopefully soon uh in the form of resource Gathering uh but these are going to be the first iteration which we kind of call like open resource Gathering and this is the idea that like a mining Outpost go I want you know a, seu of iron and then that that's all they say and then you have to go out and collect it you know or I want a th seu of quantanium and you as a player can go mine it and transport it or if you could purchase it from another player or a store you do that or you can pirate
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people for it and bring it in because they they don't care where you've got it from they just need that resource um so that'll be kind of like the idea of the first versions and then later down the line we might get get more spec specific with uh sort of resources that we want where we're like we want exactly this you know these mining things from this area because we have bought the sort of uh land claim there for those rocks and then there's there's all that talk about we've talked before about how the mission system uh could potentially plug into like Quant a Quantum and stuff and when a when a resource is needed you know for a particular station or something it could generate a mission you know for that stuff yeah yeah exactly like this is this is uh what it's static because we
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have to preset up all of the data but the idea is that it's all there so when the sort of Quant uh Quant star Sim whatever it's called system comes and hooks in it'll just take over and start generating these on its own and and balancing these based on like the needs of the universe and you know it will react to what players are doing and that's not to say that missions are the only way like when when these missions come online and stuff and is is there are more Salvage missions and more mining missions that's not the only way to make a living with those professions that's just th those are introductory things to draw people to the profession of the first time that maybe they hadn't considered before and to supplement uh a little more directed uh initiatives to just the open sandbox stuff that you'll always be able to do yeah it's it's something that me and thoron have have
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talked about a few times when it came to uh when thoron first released uh salvaging you know hle scraping um the gameplay came out and then the missions were a way to help expose it to new people so they could see the game playay and find the things a bit quicker so it's a nice way to sort of show you to the world and then let the systemic nature of the universe and let the you know the the actual cost of doing it yourself without a mission come into play when you get more advanced at it um going to do one more Mission question since we just happened to be on here uh are there plans uh for more robust missions that uh cross disciplines uh for instance in here it says it starts off as a mining job then turns into a repair job so that you can then do a salvage job and then transport this whatever yada yada yada
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uh kind of kind of I guess I guess the uh overdrive was was the first kind of beginnings of that multi-discipline kind of stuff uh yeah yeah we we definitely want multi-discipline things um the what we're doing is we're building because obviously as I might have mentioned a few times I build missions modul um so we build a Lo load of Base sort of modules so with our resource Gathering and our Salvage things the idea is that when we get enough of them we'll start stitching bits of them together so you might have a mission where you've got to take out a bounty and then you've got to Hull scrape him and then maybe you've got to steal his component then you've got to like someone wants that component so you get another objective like deliver that component to this person and we plan to have missions that take you through multiple bits of gaml um but all in one Mission um but right now our
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focus is creating the Baseline of all sort of generic type missions that we can think of so the idea of that is that if we build them they can then scale out to you know all the systems that we have planned and it's it's easier to get a widespread of content before we start building into our bespoke sort of things okay and while we're still talking profession stuff uh Torsten maybe um any thoughts about making power plants burn fuel uh with abandoned ships keeping their Shields forever this would be a nice way to address that for salvaging and the like uh yes power plants will consume fuel in the future so it's not um so it's it has been a plan for quite some time already and we are now looking into one when is the perfect time actually to rele release it it's not uh with 4.0 so
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it's not with the initial release of the resource network but uh it will come uh at a later point then and uh the goal there is then that the power plants will consume hydrogen fuel so it's used for the thrusters and the power plants and uh yeah the the the reason is because uh power generators right now create energy out of thin air and especially when we go forward to Base building um we can't do that anymore so we need a we need a resource that is actually consumed over time and the benefit is then in that scenario that is described in that question is once your your fuel runs out once your battery is depleted uh all the systems on that ship will then slowly die and uh yeah you you will be able to
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uh enter that ship without any Shields anymore but also without any life support nice okay um let's move on to combat we have quite a few combat related questions here uh I'll just start off with the big one uh in addition to the the opening we'll often take a bunch of questions and just combine them stuff uh this was really about seven different questions I'm going to combine into one here is balance possible like you mentioned 140 ship records for for master modes is this a pipe dream this Bal is balance actually an attainable thing it's not a pipe dream at all um so yes we had 140 records and we have uh we did a very
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quick uh weapon tuning pass and a little bit of Health pass for some components and ships but um we're also getting a huge amount of data from the players actually playing that stuff um internally when we develop stuff it's sometimes hard to judge whether or not we reach the right um balance because we have a vast array of um ships and and items and all that but when you watch player playing it then you get an idea what's happening um that said as I said like the the current pth that we have on the balance should not be treated as a oh this is now the final product thing uh it's really just a stepping stone because it just sets a little bit the stage for the vastly bigger changes that are coming to um in terms of like uh to 4.0 and Beyond um because there will be new gameplay
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loops and so on um I think a huge step we took right now is actually that we set our intentions very straight right so we know exactly what we want to achieve and now we actually look for for the data sets inside like what what players are actually experiencing right now and we use this these observations to improve the balance even more what you got rich yeah on the overall question is balance even possible do we want balance as in do you want everything to be balanced because we because the kind of nature of balance is the inbalance imbalance that makes sense for me um because because because we've got to capture all the unique characteristics of the ships and that throws them off in
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all different kind you know all kind of different kind of directions and we've got to capture that balance to make sure that within the game context the ship fits within the game but every ship needs to feel different and offer different things and have different character to them so it's that's kind of the complex nature of balance and then we have to balance the game with the other features that affect flight you know so you know basically Jer said this is the starting point of the rebalance of the game but then you know with 4- Z it's going to evolve massively you know with the engineering gamepl it's GNA have a significant impact on how the ships are in the game so we're going to kind of reset again there and then we're gonna again we're going to look at the data to see if we're delivering the game play We intend um so it's a jing act you know and it doesn't really ever end with
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a game like Stat system because the game it's a live product you know it's out there it's evolving we're adding features we're changing things all the time so you know from my side the balance is yeah it's not something that will ever be finished it's an evolving thing you know it's a living breeding thing that's exists in the game currently and will carry on to evolve and which is true for any MMO any online game right yeah we were talking I I I can't I won't be begin to try to pronounce his name the the main guy in charge of Smash uh uh had a had an interview this week or last week where where he he said he released he talked about their internal numbers about how the most successful fighter in all Smash Brothers had like a 51% win rate and the least success successful fighter had a 46% win rate so it was really only about
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a 5% difference uh of there and and torist you mentioned that he had a YouTube channel uh that talking where he talks about design and stuff yeah it's basically he he talked about like if if you have a fully balanced game it's basically everything is average and average is boring generally so you always tend to do if you do balancing there's always a peak up or a peak down so it's more interesting for for players yeah worth watching by the way yeah it was like the best best best characters were 51 the worst characters were 45 Elliot Maly was like 38 um swear to God you can't even pronounce his name come on this guy built my childhood but yeah so I I think that the
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moral of that story is Elliot is bad and balance is an ongoing thing that never ends but you never want to make it too homogeneous there will always be some level of intentional imbalance because like life that's what makes it enjoyable and interesting um we couldn't talk much about the bounty hunting B2 thing but a lot of that that's ship related is has to do with non-lethal damage so let's talk about non-lethal damage can you give us an update on things like EMP Distortion and overall ship disabling anything that anything involved in not destroying another ship TOS maybe you take that because that's highly related to Resource Network so I thought you wanted to talk about like EMP and stuff but okay um no
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I mean it's like it's it's similar so big the big question uh the big picture hasn't really changed but there will be some specific details with like soft that that to will talk about in two seconds yeah so so we we still keep all the the the uh weapon counters that is Distortion that is EMP and stuff like that where you can uh deactivate a ship uh but like for EMP you first have to bring the shield down so there's some work that comes with it in front uh for Distortion uh we already mentioned it I think it's on the road map now uh with a multitool that you will be able to counter Distortion so that's that's something that we were missing before that Distortion damage has actually a valid counter so um you are not only a Sitting Duck uh when you get fully
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distorted by by someone else uh you will be able to drain that so you will be able to uh make your ship work again but I think the the biggest change that will come uh with uh 4.0 is uh the change to soft death um I don't know if all of you already played the arena Commander experimental mode but that already gives a hint at uh what we are aiming for so right now also in 323 uh live Al in 3231 life um if you shoot a ship if the ship reaches Health zero it will explode or it will go into the soft dat State um but um yeah we are right now actively discussing how we want to change that so we have already some ideas uh so uh one of the big Ideas is tied actually to the
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health or the the the life of the uh Power Plant and um yeah give give also players a a way to yeah maybe fix or escape the soft death scenario there um but uh this is this is as said still an active discussion but the goal is to have it come with uh everything Resource Network reated for 4. and of of course uh we talked about this in ISC but the the experimental modes for uh this season in Arena Commander have to do with you know tuning time to kill and stuff on a lot of these ships yeah correct yes yeah it's it's a huge effort right now that we are going through which is like I don't know if we had heavy iterations time
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especially in the beginning of uh the 3.23 cycle where we had it wrong head it wrong wrong had it even more wrong and then at some point we were heading into a direction we were seeing suddenly uh the time to kill times being in the in the ballpark area of where we want to see them we are still not fully there yet so we are still uh improving it um especially um like it gets really complicated because some ships uh in some ships it's easier to to destroy crucial components versus others but uh yeah we we we are working on the solution for that okay uh um sorry I got somebody in chat suburbanite 101 says
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I've lost all excitement for this game just about a decade ago but he's still here it's a different Gates thanks thanks for hanging in there suburbanite just um more okay here so here's a question uh Elliot uh would you please make a clear distinction between vehicle-based combat missions and FPS ones is this uh is that something we even want to do do we want to mix them up do we that they're asking for it no I won't no I'm joking uh is we we're gonna add in the future when we you know redo the contract manager app we're going to add a sort of section where you can see the sort of gameplay
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you're going to encounter so it say things like you know maybe you need a multi-tool maybe you're going to come up against uh maybe you're going to need like FPS weapons maybe you're going to need a like a powerful ship there'll be like a a section where you can see what it is and the reason that we don't currently make a distinction between the two is because the idea is that in the future like your Bounty that you're hunting might be above like a bunker but then he might land and go inside and then you've got to infiltrate and fight them there's there's a whole bunch of different things that we want to happen so therefore we don't want to make a clear distinction um when there might be no why there might be none you know you might get there start attacking them and then they get in their ship and take off and you've got a transition from ground to space based combat you know there's too clear potential for change we don't
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want to make too clear a distinction yeah exactly I I like what you're saying it's like we could we could give you expectations the mission Giver expects it to be primarily this or primarily that but yeah I think it's important to leave room for for the element of surprise not just from the the story of of of of your mission team and the narrative and stuff but the surprises of the other backers the other players in the verse exactly it t it takes like influence from real life you know you take a job and they're like hey you this is what you're applying for you're only going to do this and 90% of the time you start and you're like they give you so much other a to do at the same time so so no I think that's good I think I think that's a reasonable uh expectation and I think it'll help people a lot you know uh we expect it to be primarily
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this but the vers is the verse um and no handholding no handholding no handholding um why Nerf a call to Arms payout when it was already so meager which which mission is Call to Arms what am I um it's internally it's called sandbox criminal kills it's the one that just gives you money for killing people with crime stats right right right uh players seem to always just want money um so I know right we are reactive um we try to be reactive of mission so we we look at them and we see if they're earning too much and they're you know earning way too much than we like we you know take it back a bit um but now we have the economy team they're actually helping with this so for the they've actually rebalanced this again so
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hopefully for the next patch you'll see a change in the Call to Arms uh payment because before C to Arms was literally balanced by the mission team um and balancing U for our economy obviously the reason we have a dedicated team is because it's so big uh like a funny example kind of funny one of the big reasons that we had to wipe U is because of uh my team and I'll take sole blame because I submitted it um I accidentally managed to make it so that people are earn 4 billion ueec just from Salvage missions um and the economy team when they found out wasn't very happy with me but that's because numbers are absolute Insanity to try and balance so uh Fierce s and several people in chat are like did you just ask what is called the arms uh yeah sometimes when
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I'm on live internet and there's a bunch of lights and constantly running five different calculations on how not to say the wrong thing because people will take it to Reddit sometimes I say the wrong thing and I forget what a thing is called it happens thanks for worrying about me though um all right Yogi you knew this was coming how's Master modes going and what happens next will there be changes oh changes yes of course um I mean the um how how is it doing right now it's it's better than what we had in Live or 323 322 before um in terms of like how successful the change was so far I
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think it's pretty positive um we I mean I can't I can't exactly um say exact numbers but the relationships of kill death ratios on All Ships for examples they have FL flattened out a lot a lot a lot of the times in the past we always had one or two ships which basically were responsible for most of the kills in the game and that's not the case anymore um we also have more players uh with uh let's say more diverse uh levels of um flying and combat skills enjoying the game more so I would count that as a win but there is a huge amount of stuff that is on our list to to do um there's like typical examples like ESP needs to be needs to be uh needs to be improved um the one 1 V1 um dock fighting needs to be improved um there's also a couple of things we want to try out with the
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flight model like uh using an x-shaped velocity space to uh combat the back strafing problem whe whether that works or not we'll we'll see there's um in general we want to improve the combat distances a bit um there will be more stuff happening with the 4. O tuning patch concerning weapon speeds that also might help with the distances um and there's a couple of bucks like the the camera shaking sometimes is inconsistent the uh G4 Zoom effects so sometimes inconsistent um and of course there are like a couple of ships that feel out of whack the one of the Hornets can at the moment pull 35g upwards that is of course not intended um so yeah there's there's lots of stuff um but as I said like it's like overall I'm I'm pretty happy with the current progress uh is it the final state of course not um but there will be more stuff uh happening
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especially with the uh with the Resource Network that will come towards because of course these new feature sets also require some changes in the in the uh in in the flight model or the way we we target certain parts of the ships how about you rich yeah I said know I can Echo you know kind of yoga's comments that you know we're personally really happy with how gone um it's definitely there's definitely going to be more changes um a big challenge of Master birs for us in um in I in terms of release was just how much around Master Mod changed it wasn't just adding Master Mod to the game this was fundamentally you know making some big changes to the aing system and the you know kind of flight model itself as well so we had a lot of changes going in that went just Master Ms this was quite hard to manage um but that's part of the
00:37:27
fun that's that's part the fun and games working on this is you know we're always trying to improve things always trying to change things for the better um and you know we're going to carry on listening to the feedback from the players um you know and also looking at the data as well you know because that's that's that's a big part for us is we need to back up what you know we basically need to be accountable for what we're doing so you know any changes we make they have we've got be able to prove them that they're actually having the impact in the game that you know that we intended um so that's going to be a big part of moving forward with General bance but yeah there's going to be lots more you know there's there's be lots more changes we're going to fix up some of the ships because we definitely missed um some of the ships you know for various reasons you know we changed a lot of ships and there's some ships that inherit certain records from the ships sometimes that can catch us out a little bit um but you know we're basically
00:38:15
working on identifying those ships which we um are in the process of doing and we'll fix those up um and then we'll move towards four you know 4.0 as well where where we basically expect you know another rounded big changes to the balance as well um so yeah so like any other feature I mean obviously since the since the Pu first opened up in 2.0 back in November December 2015 uh we now in 2024 uh obviously every there there's not a single thing that's gone in that hasn't changed that hasn't evolved that hasn't continued to iterate uh since it's first release Master modes is no different uh it will continue to evolve it continue to iterate it'll continue to to uh uh they'll continue to look at your feedback and process your feedback and apply where they think it's necessary
00:39:02
and relevant and proper um and of course fixing all the bugs and stuff like that speaking of bugs chat has been asking about the dupe bug uh uh uh yes the dupe bug is super duper annoying um all I can tell you right now because I'm sitting here live doing a show and I'm not plugged into everything else at the moment is that we have a fix internally it's working on internal builds uh and that that fix will go out in a point patch uh I don't know if it'll be 3 or it'll be a0 2B or whatever like they're still working that out how that's going to be distributed uh but we have a fix uh it's working internally and it will go out uh as soon as everything aligns to allow it to work out as far as anything else around that uh and there's a bunch of subsequent
00:39:49
questions I don't have the answers for those ones so hang tight it's coming um looking at these questions here racing does racing have any future that's the question I would say yes um of course yeah of course of course it has a future well sure there's like I mean we got to sound more confident guys come on yeah rac's got a future racing racing wow racing has a um but but really it's about I mean like the master mode tuning patch um of course affected the current racing
00:40:37
tracks that there are right like the speeds got a lot slower and so on and so some of the tracks we have right now they might not work as they do now um but the level design team for example they also asked hey should we adapt the racing tracks now and we were like let that's we're not completely done with our Master mode change with the flight model development so maybe hold off for like doing extensive change for a while um but racing like I mean we sell racing ships so of course we invested into racing um actually one of the um specifically for the racing from the racing Community we added something to the flat model back then uh that was addressing the lack of certain acceleration when you not using digital input devices and so on right so um yes racing racing is important and we we're not oh Jesus what the hell uh so racing is really important to us um and
00:41:24
actually today I got a question from from uh from K was one of the German oh God podcasters YouTube streamers actually don't know he asked if we could add smoke pods to races uh to racing ships I have not discussed it with anyone but I think the idea is really really great um just putting this out there Rich say more about racing definitely got a future you know because i' well I come from a racing background you know I did I've done a lot of sim racing and I'm I'm a big fan of RAC in real life so you know and that's the key thing with Masters is it's allowing us it's going to allow us in the future to kind of give more freedom to allow the racing variants to excel at racing and that's something we're really Keen for because one of the issues we've had in the past is is it's balancing the combat experience with the flight experience
00:42:13
and the racing experience um if you have a really good racing ship that can use all its guns at the same time and everything it can certainly be the dominant force in combat which is probably not intentional so we're looking at ways where we can balance that so we can allow racing ships like the best handling ships or the fastest in the straight line and then basically you know as Yi said it's about the um it's about the tracks as well you know because the tracks are where you're racing so it's important it's it's important that they're designed around the current flight model you know and as we've read a lot of changes we need to now take a step back and look at what tracks are going to make the most out the handling that we now have in the game gotta um starbuy in chat says Jared is this live
00:43:03
unfortunately no I think it's always good to remind people racing is super important there's a lot of folks here I Know I Know Rich you you you had a question whether you could even make this show because you were you were going to head off to a race this weekend and stuff you didn't know if you could be here and stuff I mean so many people on the vehicle team uh and just development in general are so big into racing and stuff it's it's yes I think it's very close to to a lot of our hearts um just to sum back up you know you know there's we got to figure out the master mode stuff before we spend a whole lot of time doing it but I don't think I don't I would not bet on on on on I don't know what was I trying to say I would just bet that there's enough people here who like racing and enjoy racing and love racing that it's time in the when the the development sun when
00:43:52
the development I of saon you know will return to it that it'll get a lot of love attention I still personally just speaking for myself and yoi you might know where I'm going with this I still hope for a racing Master mode personally well I think the easiest I wouldn't go for racing Master mode because racing if you want to go quickly from A to B this is what navigation mode is for right but we should could should absolutely do something like a racing operator mode where the head up display clears with racing specific information we actually have a stopwatch on the on the on the Hut um players know about this um but this is for example something that we should then just have on by default or having a bigger I don't know like a bigger tvi and giving you expected deceleration times directly into viw and and and stuff like that
00:44:41
that's stuff that's important for the racing experience itself well that's why I'm not a designer and a programmer is um what I like on on the mission side for racing also real quick I'd like to point out rich is being incredibly Mar Rich aren't you like a champion iracer like it was a long long time ago I can't remember anymore there you go yeah Champion iracer so there you go um for Missions um we in the Pu it can be a bit difficult to do racing missions compared to AC because we have the the respawn flow set out for us so it can take you quite a long time to get back to the racetrack where you you know want to do your races so we're investigating ways we can speed that up uh I don't want to speak to any specifics because they might change uh one thing we are
00:45:29
doing is uh we're going to be adding open track versions of the current racing missions that we have um because currently how you unlock the next race track is via completing the first one so what we going to do is just give out a you don't get a reward you don't pay a Buy in here's access to the track we time you like we do in the mission as it is but um you know it's just so you can keep practicing um and then going forward you know we'll have more advanced races but races aren't just in ships you know they they're in ground vehicles uh we have the dayar rally um that the community do and that's that's a lot of fun but they can also extend to on foot races um and recently we prototyped a a race a time trial race in the Escape Route of the prison where we Ed players who could get out the fastest and then award them uh like merits for
00:46:18
whoever got out the fastest um that's awesome um but um we we didn't we didn't feel like it fully fit so we've just kind of like we can do it and you know maybe in the future you'll see it um somewhere in the game but um yeah it was a lot of fun um because we we tried to be sort of suggestive with the direction so if you didn't know the Escape Route um you you could really mess your time up I do well you mentioned the dmar rally I think that's that's that's as good a transition as any to to to one of Rich's favorite topics ground Vehicles You Ready Rich always I love ground Vehicles why do the tanks suck well unfortunately um this is one of the
00:47:07
problems with changing so much is we got caught out by a change um on the back end of the game and this had a negative impact on the tank handling and we just couldn't quite get it fixed in time for the release um it's it was quite a complicated problem um quite was quite an interesting problem as well um I'm not going to go too theils um but I can confirm it is now fixed and the tank is now tank well both tanks are driving light tanks again um which is really good the tanks the tanks are fixed internally not public yes yeah yeah yes yeah yeah so I mean you know we've discovered the era we fixed it um it's gone into our builds um and that'll make its way out there all right uh so what's with all the other wheel vehicles that are sliding and sometimes bouncing
00:47:55
around all the time my poor gameplay guys were trying to film The the UR of medac for ISC and they're like is it supposed to have like hydraulic bounce yeah unfortunately that was another change that that wasn't really caught in time to fix but it has you know it's also being fixed so um so basically the vehicle you saw as a as a player was actually the server vehicle and not the actual play vehicle of the play physics um so it caused a lot of glitching um but we've corrected that and the ground vehicles are now back to being fairly stable ground vehicles um and it's fair to say you know we're still looking at you know like like improving the gble ground vehicle experience to make it as good as ships because it
00:48:44
should be you know they all vehicles in the game and all vehicles should be up to the same standard so we still you know we're definitely looking at improving the ground vehicle experience still um but we're pretty happy with the you know kind of major physics overhaul that went through with it we just need to make it a little bit more game friendly um you know for our environments which are massive planets with loads of different terrains um I get you uh loading in chat says Jared I beg you do you have any plans for the cluttered UI problem uh these aren't the UI guys uh loading but yes uh was witnessing a a big chat with uh Simon and Bone and and and and CR uh just yesterday and then our big creative and Technical director's chat and stuff it's we're aware uh it's it's been a forever thing so I have no information to give you that was
00:49:31
just them talking about potential Solutions yesterday so I don't know where they're going with it uh but yes but these aren't the guys I just uh what happened to grab livs recently uh this question says that that they've fallen into a bad state that they had previously uh before their last rework where sometimes they just decide to stop hovering fall down and explode this one I'm we're not quite sure it's actually we so we got reports about this like midweek and we started to do our own investigations um across different teams to figure out what's going on because we've changed some of the stuff in the handling but the backend technology hasn't changed but again with a game like sassis and the fundamental game engine is updating all the time and there can be kind of negative consequences on completely
00:50:20
different features because it might use a piece of some of the game part which worked a certain way which now works different way and that could have an impact so it's about figuring out where it's gone wrong um because we're you know we're definitely not happy with the overall kind of gravli experience and we're definitely looking at improving it um you know because that's the key part of racing as well because the gravli racing can actually be really cool you know when it works really well it's it's probably one of the cooler race experiences in the game so we're definitely looking at you know what's gone wrong in you know 323 for gra love yeah uh chat's talking about how basically sometimes it flips over and you hit your head on the ground and falls down stuff so it's I mean I like I said we're looking into it it could be everything from a networking issue to anything else
00:51:07
um uh I imagine I imagine when uh when we find something more we'll we'll communicate it um that said I like this next question um Star Citizen is a lot of things it's PVP it's PVE it's it's it's it's FPS it's spaceships it's stuff like that um it's sandbox it's now it's you know chain missions and stuff coming stuff like this um ground Vehicles can sometimes seem like an afterthought or or or just like an also ran uh so this question simply says what are you what are you doing to encourage ground vehicle usage uh are there any new specific any specific new Mission types for this maybe um so there's been lot of
00:51:56
discussions about ground vehicles in our game and how we use them on the mission side the the main thing we face is that when we balance like when we balance the mission and balance the economy time is a huge factor in it um and if you can do it in a ground vehicle you can do it in a ship a hell of a lot faster so it becomes this thing where we try to make an experience around ground vehicles but then people just do it quicker in a ship so then we have to lower the price to not break the economy and then people just stop doing the mission um we we want to add a benefit we want to add a reason for people to actually use ground vehicles um recently like in the distribution centers there's those massive like gas spheres um and uh the ground tourists will shoot at spaceships but they won't shoot at Ground Vehicles so we we've seen some players using the
00:52:44
uh Tonks to destroy them uh so that they don't have as much resistance um but we also like we we we need some like tools or features that help us encourage um you know a recent uh a recent thing that we was investigating for ground Vehicles was to do with the the copons that just got added to the game was we was having a a debate about how we discover them how the player discovers them and one of the sort of discussions that We Came Upon was that maybe the ground vehicle radar would be the only thing that could find these copion so that if you want to do the mission you'd have to allow to land take your ground vehicle out and use that to try and locate the copons but we wasn't really happy with that so we've kind of uh throwing it out um but yeah we're always looking for new ways um and how
00:53:33
we can encourage it and me and thoron have been talking about ways that we could do it so I'll hand over to th because I'm sure he I actually wanted to to to say like yeah there's there are some things that we already started discussing and that is I think one of the most important parts is that environment matter right so depending on what en environment the mission takes place and it might be worth bringing your your ship or your ground vehicle or even going by foot so for example uh we already have the case where you have to enter a cave and you cannot fly in we have some where you can fly in we have some where a ground vehicle also fits in but in general if you have a cave Mission you the the the way to go into that cave is by by foot but uh we want to expand on that in the future and we W
00:54:21
only we don't only want to expand on that by the how the environment looks so for example uh vast Forest you cannot land with your ship but you can drive into it with with your ground vehicle but we also want to utilize uh the um weather conditions for example right so a strong wind for example will um block your ship from actually Landing safely so it's better to be outside of that strong wind area and drop the the ground vehicle and then avoid uh the the strong wind by by driving in with your ground vehicle or uh with Pyro you might have already seen it in the uh citizen con um demos with the solar flare when when your ship gets hit by a solar flare it's basic it basically drops down because it's turned off so this is also like the dropping from the sky is something that
00:55:12
you would avoid when you would have come with a with a ground vehicle in that situation but there are also other things that are related to the weather like limited side it's better or it's safer to go with a ground vehicle versus a a spaceship and stuff like that so they are plenty of um yeah scenarios that we are currently investigating what we can do to actually make uh ground Vehicles more like usable or like even required for for for Missions cool all right we've got about five minutes left in the show we might go a few minutes over because I want to talk about our last topic here engineering um obviously engineering U you know everybody's you know everybody is rightfully excited for 4.0 pyro and and all that stuff and you and you
00:56:00
should be for me we've been talking about in J so long you know my feelings on engineering that's where the birth of multi Cru stuff comes from so that's my big thing uh before we get to these questions let's revisit the scope what should people expect from Engineering in 4.0 so as of now 4 4.0 let's start with life support so we will have life support that uh has the fire system in it so life support is also a valid counter for fire that you will see on your ships uh we will have room propagation so um you opening a door to the outside will basically evacuate all the atmosphere of your ship to the outside we have atmosphere maintenance where uh you as the player
00:56:48
are responsible for um making sure that your life support generator runs uh well enough so that uh there is enough breathable uh atmosphere inside the rooms and uh yeah as already said so the life support generator is a new item that we will introduce and uh the life support generator then will R create a new resource that is the so so right now it's still called life support resource like we are really Rec creative with names um there's a filter uh that is also a new item that is uh added uh as as the the consumable for the life support generator and yeah that's that's just the life support segment of the Resource Network release um talking
00:57:38
about engineering uh here we have uh the power management that will be introduced you were not able to see it yet in the arena Commander mode uh because we were not ready yet so especially UI um is still a lot of work on us uh that we need because we need to get it right it needs to be accessible it cannot be like this High scientific uh method of you basically measuring the jewels that the power plant no we we have to make it accessible for the general play audience but still interesting for those that are really interested in in those uh engineering mechanics um then uh we will introduce the relays uh as the connection point between the items with the fuses so these are already things that you even see in light
00:58:26
in some of the ships that are already prepared so for example the Retaliator already has the reday boxes with the fuses inside and in the uh Arena Commander experimental mode you can actually uh witness their functionality a huge thing for for it is uh so that's more on our side so on the design side is the rebalance of items again so but um we we as already mentioned um we have now with all the pre-work that has been done for 323 we have a very very clear goal of what we want to achieve here and that is we want to really facilitate like the items inside a Resource Network so items should be more meaningful in ships so we have a meaningful difference between item classes for example where there is
00:59:14
a huge difference uh on the look and feel in in terms of gameplay for the civilian and Military components as well as the grades so this is this is our internal High goal for the release that we we have a meaningful difference there so that players choice actually matters here and also what we want to achieve here is that it's clearer the differences so players understand what's the difference between the civilian and an industrial item more easily and it's it's very clear to players what to pick for for the for the the journey they want to take um something that yeah sadly I had a discussion yesterday will not make it for 4.0 uh uh uh so as of now is the batteries so we might push the batteries to a later release doesn't
01:00:03
mean that they won't come it just means they come at a later point because we want to like this is like it it's such a crucial feature and we need to get it right and every time that we can spend on polish is better invested than actually forcing additional features in so we rather would like to spend time in polishing the feature and then just making sure that everything is in I think no one would like that that everything is in there and it's not working uh or it's not working well enough that's that's the best safe I phrasing I could come up I hear you and I appreciate you sharing us sharing that with us obviously uh when ISC comes back uh in about a month um one of the stories will be telling on our journey to 4.0 will be another revisiting of engineering and life
01:00:51
support and stuff like that and you'll get to see how it's all you know working late out there um should I continue because I'm not done okay so there's more there's more that and that is a simple repair so we have uh the repair of ship items that you also can already witness in the arena Commander experimental mode exchange of fuses um exchange of broken items and uh we mentioned that at the beginning of this uh show that there's now a distortion counter and that basically leads to the last bit that we we will introduce with Engine with the resource network engineering gameplay which is malale functions so here we will start with uh three malale functions so the initial release will come with those three which is uh a fire uh damage to
01:01:41
the item and Distortion to the item because we now have dedicated counters to them so that we can actually introduce meaningful gameplay and you're not like just suffering from whatever malfunction the the item will suffer from um but we made sure that the malfunction system is so vast that if we notice that those three are not enough yet that in the later patch or in later releases we can add more uh bespoke Mal functions so we can slowly widen widen the game play because I can tell you it's already quite a lot that you have to manage and learn so it it it will be fun but it will be also a huge learning curve that uh some of us have to go through oh oh cool no it sounds
01:02:41
great I would like it known that through all these episodes this year and the previous years um I I I saw some folks uh giving me credit for asking hard questions or whatever these people are willing to show up every week and they're willing to take the hard questions and my dumb uh like I just did and I it's my day off yeah yeah yeah so it's just it's just whatever praise you guys ever ever ever give to me I pass it on through to the developers who appear on ISC andal uh especially just person wasn't a great example of that it's like no no I got more I want to share and it's like man I love that I love that um and yeah
01:03:31
this is this is my Med pen I tried to Stow it but it keeps reappearing in my hand it's an old bug Bost uh that's it everybody uh thanks for watching our Invictus all vehicles gameplay uhal uh if you haven't checked it out uh look at uh yesterday's ISC where we revealed the the brand new iron Chad from uh Drake interplanetary and got to look inside the current graybox progress of the RSI Polaris uh they're both really really really cool looking and I'm really excited to get both of them in the game as soon as possible uh we're on Hiatus uh so we're going to we're going to take a few weeks off uh from from uh ISC uh few weeks off of uh publishing we'll we'll be filming and recording and creating all the great
01:04:19
stories for 4.0 we don't get any time off uh and I and SEO will take next week off because I have a doctor's appointment on the same day Health's important but we'll be back with the in two weeks um until then uh thank you again to Torsten to Elliott to Rich to Yogi and of course to everybody who always appears on these shows uh like I said can't do it without you I think we're going to do a raid thing probably do a raid thing because it's you know that I do the raid thing so Community folks if you're watching you start the raid thing um thanks for watching um I really like my job and you guys make it possible so thank you for that um and this cool Med pen also I got I got I got a blue one too oxygen and yes chat was right why am
01:05:09
I holding it because I look at twitch chat and I needed to recover from the damage till next time everybody bye e

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