Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Of Space Stations and Orbits

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:11

   hey everybody welcome to another edition of calling all devs our weekly Q&A series right to questions from you the star says and backer impose them directly to our developers usually over Skype we're gonna get things started we got two questions for our very own Rob Johnson at a foundry 42 UK Rob how you doing man good Cheers Jared how are you I'm doing well I'm back in the United States you know actually I just realized I think I spent a week in Winslow last week and I never came by your desk I apologize I'm just seeing time well I was sequestered I spent most of the week they hit me on the second floor because I had a terrible terrible cold and they're like we don't want you to get anybody sick so I'm gonna say that's why I didn't visit because I was affecting you it sounds like a good excuse to make

2. 00:00:59

   and not because I spent an entire week running around like a madman I forgot I got two questions we're gonna jump right into it these are submitted by the backers these are voted on by the backers right off the bat is there any plan to make and this person refers to them as age shelters around the moons that that are useful for things like logging out in beds or whatever it almost sounds like like they're asking for rest stops as we know them on earth like little little little little halves around there where you can you log out or or peel your character maybe or or whatnot and this there's nothing that's come through to me yeah in terms of plans for that however and we do have some interesting plans for place born in

3. 00:01:50

   going forward with with the introduction of perhaps soon we're gonna need to look at switching up the player spawn logic in the pu a little bit and one thing we probably look at in future is like the ability to somehow kind of like rent different types of room at the moment when you spawn you know occasion in the PU we're Alliance I'm having enough bedrooms or slots of that location to fit the maximum and we're players that could end up at that location in the universe so for something like age shelters you know if we didn't want 64 or more beds in an age shelter then we kind of need this other sort of spawning logic to come online first and systems in place to allow us

4. 00:02:40

   to sort of map to just one specific bedroom within a spawn location but I'm sure if that if that went into the game went went down well with the backers then there'd be no reason why we couldn't look to them at locations within the universe that support and spawning in such smaller numbers of players in more remote remote locations for example you make a good point with all the sorry everybody's spawn room even though you know they can't decorate any it's it's the first kind of basic form of player housing there's one room for every player on these things if they're not instanced with within the air or in shards on the server so you know for something like this with the current

5. 00:03:30

   design for that stuff it would be like a 64 room like hotel an aged shelter becomes a hotel in the middle of on the surface of hylia kinds like that so it's it's definitely something I was talking with Todd earlier definitely something we're gonna be pursuing you'll learn more about player haps you see them mentioned in a TV quite often I would expect to learn a bit more about player Habs in the coming weeks without giving any specific details but yeah but definitely something I think I think we see how the player hab situation goes and how that develops and then take the lessons we learn from there yeah it should be really interesting to see yeah see where it goes because something spawning is just something that sort of gradually evolved based on based on feedback and how the players of writing you know about various things in the

6. 00:04:19

   past right so it's spawning in grim packs if you're a criminal and now we're doing it more I'm on the last location you sort of flew to although we've added the bad spawn in as well so you can spawn the bad so it's kind of a ever evolving thing as we look to to give you guys playing the game the best experience possible well that's the biggest advantage of running a live environment in the middle of our game development we we don't have to we don't have to figure everything out ahead of time we can take it to a step and then we can put it out for you guys and then you guys can instead of us having to guess you guys can just tell us yeah and show us how this works all right second question for you this week can we get better joystick and gamepad support right now moby glass terminals and MFDs always require you to reach for the

7. 00:05:07

   mouse and turrets are almost impossible to use with stick control because of relative motion I think he's you stuck a second question in there about about about turrets right there I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna take the turrets one cuz that's a bonus question and the third one you see lots of you've seen lots of lots of turret improvements on HTV week after week after week we got our us one gameplay feature team that's one of their main primary focuses so their work is not done and their work is continuing on that stuff so expect to see more and more continued turret improvements including that of the controls in the development goes forward now that's because that was a bonus question one topic per question guys so back to joystick and gamepad support for moby glass terminals and MFDs what do you got run yeah sure that said that's something that's on our radar we're definitely

8. 00:05:54

   going to be looking at improving those parts of the game when it comes to the control devices that you can use for and I think some of the reason in maybe why they've been slightly under supported to begin where there's from a development perspective it can sometimes make a bit more sense to make sure that we've got the features to a position where we feel like we feel like we'd be on sort of prototyping of how these screens and things like that works I want once with once we're kind of comfortable with the actual features themselves working well then we can look to expand the different ways to control control visas so is a big challenge with the gamepad especially in its game all are all that

9. 00:06:47

   possible features controllable by that because unlike mouse and keyboard we have a lot less buttons and ways to control to control it it's definitely something we want to do you know we want to be aiming to towards being able to play the game you know just using a joystick just using a gamepad so you can have you know just a just one experience where you just hold them on control device we haven't without having to switch to mouse and keyboard and fumble around just because you've done a certain control action but yeah it's tough it's definitely on my radar we're looking at and getting guys onto these issues over the next few releases I think it's something that comes up in player feedback and on the release

10. 00:07:36

    builds week out now so it's it's definitely you know at the front of our minds yeah I'm gonna amend your steam a little bit I'm gonna say primarily with joystick I primarily will get I don't I don't know that any aspect of starters will ever be completely 100% doable with one controls people and anyone who follows the project is follow the projects from the beginning from the very first hangar module knows that our control scheme has evolved quite a bit many were the many were the times were even just in the iterative patches you know looked like that the the two to zero the two to one of the two to two the control schemes would change even between those tiny iterations and like I just learned what that is one of the challenges of running a live environment in the middle of game development is

11. 00:08:23

    that we are constantly adjusting and working these things out and and when you work on features they won one well not everybody will have a gamepad and not everybody will have a HOTAS or a dual sticks everything we do know that everybody playing star citizen has a mouse and keyboard so it makes sense to as we're developing as we're figuring out where all the menus go and all the options go and now the UI you know fully it gets fully realized in the precision you that of the master keyboard is our is our focus right now during development but Chris has stated many times as of many developers include Rob just a few minutes ago joystick users HOTAS users dual stick users and of course gamepad users will not be forgotten yeah yeah I think case of from a developer's point of view we understand

12. 00:09:14

    that the majority of players are using mouse and keyboard but those the ants are often some of the some of like most passionate players as well so we don't want to under support those just because there's fewer you know fewer of them so they're dead they're definitely just as important serious and well said my father my father my 70 year old father is a dual stick pilot and that also trust me he it's it's if I gotta get one more text about you know it's gonna stick with more buttons and and better control he's in fact I'm realizing maybe he submitted this question cuz he's also check on the turrets just first in some Jerris all right I'm gonna let you go man thank you so much

13. 00:10:03

    thanks Jared take care head speaking to you alright thank you so much now moving on back to LA and our own bug smasher resident box master Mark Abbott we've got a question about ship walking and criminality and stuff and I he tends to work on that kind of stuff mark how you doing man how's it going know what LD criminality criminality it's it's a better piece to be fared that cargo box I found was only because they were dead it fell off a truck and fell off a truck it fell off a truck I got a question for you we've had that the the the crime system that we've had in place since 2.0 has always been an intermediate step we know that you know that that's we've

14. 00:10:53

    talked about it on calling all those before how it's not the implementation of the reputation system and that we want with you know different reputations in different areas and stuff like that recently we put ship locking in there the ability to lock your ship this question states the ship locking mechanics are still not working properly why is it that players defending their property when someone else marches in and takes it are getting penalized for it and what can be done for them rather than just slap a force to our crime stat on and IMAP now well it's that age-old thing where when you try to get out or release you have to do a very basic implementation to do a subset of features and one of those it was if we have a ship we wanted to make sure to solve the problem that someone can't

15. 00:11:42

    just go and run up onto the platform and steal it so we made sure to lock the ship to you and only to you and then as more stuff came on with the group system you know we extended it out to allow other people to take control of it but it's one of those things where you start working with the little system here and a little system here and they don't link together until you throw the problem at a designer and they go okay I see the whole big picture I want to connect it here here him here and here and the good news is we have thrown this issue at some designers and they have picked out a way to solve this but we need some systems like the group system better out faction and how the player reputation system rose and how you get things and how they interact and then how they talk to some ssin so we have all these little pieces that are slowly getting built so

16. 00:12:31

    that we could develop them all on and have them interchange so the big question is it's coming the small question RS to say small answer is we're having these little pieces build the building blocks are coming so that we can get this interchange working we talked a lot about about it on this show in other shows about the advantages of having a live and game environment in the middle of our development one of the biggest challenges is is having to work with these intermediate systems that can't be fully fleshed out before they before they go to the players and then finding the ways of one system on its own works okay one system on its own works okay and then when they combine they they tend to have some unintended consequences and I think that's what the that's what the question here is a alluding to here oh yeah and you know we

17. 00:13:20

    implement little by little because we don't want to break things and we don't want to add some weird complex behavior until we know that those things work before we build on top of it so so while we have nothing to point to directly right at this moment this is one of those times where we all we all we can do is say that we're very aware of it we've got a couple we've got a couple irons in the fire and as soon as some resources free up and some more systems come online we hope to have something else that'll be a much better experience than what you're having right there with the client with getting crime stats for defending your own ship all right mark I'll let you get back to work man and if I find a cargo from a dead guy it's solely mine right I don't think it's gonna stop you hey Jared I'm gonna go get that chicken from you real quick my chicken I'm not gonna show my

18. 00:14:10

    supermarket chicken on camera why is jPAS out because I wanted his chicken supermarket cuz I'm a fancy fancy person who eats $7 supermarket chain alright now that we brought my lunch into this thing I'm really gonna let you go mark thank you later later all right thanks so much and now to wrap up this week's show we are going back to Winslow UK in our own Luke Presley grand pooh-bah the persistent universe gameplay Luke how you doing man hey 19 char I'm doing all right when I say grand pooh-bah that means I forgot your title got a question for you this is a this is a this is one that comes up quite frequently we're just going to get right into it cuz I think we got a bit of conversation to go here it says once planets start orbiting their stars whenever that point happens

19. 00:15:00

    that for folks who may not watch every single thing we do that is one of our our goals our wants for star citizen the ability to have you know functioning orbits in the systems how will rest stop stations maintain a meaningful position between two planets between two plants on the trip between Crusader and Hurston yes how will you ever know where the heck they are if everything is rotating I think for now the answer is but they won't maintain a meaningful constant meaningful location between the two planets because these things can rotate so you know I'm so vastly different what we are doing is

20. 00:15:51

    where we've turned to like these Lagrangian points and and these are I'm gonna butcher the signs so please go out and look this up in your own time range points there it's two planets and it's it's a spot between two giant bodies that were the gravitational pull yeah the Sun the Sun and we have huge bodies but example of the earth is we have these five Lagrange points but can I show screens as well all right I'm going to trust you on this it's gonna be a meme or something right okay Florida man incoming in three two

21. 00:16:42

    I don't know it's actual actual later okay okay so this this diagram can do it better than I can try and explain but the yellow dot is a Sun blue dot is in this case Hurston you know loose ada and these points here are like gravity wells like it if you put something there it will stay there and it will rotate with relative to the planet so we're kind of you like you see these used a lot inside biome and it tends to be things like oh you'll find a wormhole there or something like that we tend to use them a lot more like realistically I guess you know these are like be out-of-town shopping mall of our world so you can find rest stops there and various other

22. 00:17:33

    things but also like connect we tend to collect like asteroids and such and so you find clusters of those where and what that means is while okay while you won't get things kept between two planets you know you will get things that rotate like between the Sun and stuff so you will also you always be given lots and lots of points and enough points to get you out of trouble as it were and you'll still constantly have to go okay at this point in the orbit like where is the best place to jump because you know it used to be this one but you know times past them means where we've rotated around and now actually I have to jump to this one to get there quicker so because we don't want to take that out

23. 00:18:20

    with it you know we don't want to just continually give you the easiest way leave it up to you to figure this out but what ministers had never taken the easiest way exactly and so this image I'm showing here is an example of how the Lagrangian points are organized with the current light static layout of whether where these planets are blue points here being the Lagrange points of person yellow points being Crusaders the green points and what you'll see if I skip on to the next one actually like this is if all the planets were aligned along this axis what you see is that you have a Lagrange point behind the planet by in relation to the Sun and one in

24. 00:19:12

    front these of a weak point I believe also that the third one is a weak point as well but the third one down here is on the absolute opposite side of the orbit and then you get the stronger point here about sixty degrees either side of where the planet is and what you can see from this is actually it gives us a really cool gap when it comes to getting stuck if you were imagine you went to a solar system that had one planet and you came out in the wormhole like that was on the opposite side here and the planet was behind the Sun you would be absolutely stuck because you can't jump through the Sun and there's nothing to jump around it but these Lagrange points give us that ability to always be able to jump kind

25. 00:20:01

    of around so yeah so that's what we're going to do like obviously this means that every planet has these five of a points that could have rest stops in them and and then probably like we will have rest stops in them so while you can't jump you can't keep these things directly between planets there'll be enough there to get you where you want to go that's four planets obviously we don't have these things rotate and then we don't have all of them in you know because that's so it'd be twenty points for this because it has four and four planets we don't have all those spinning around so it still needs testing but that's the plan all right that was more than I thought we were gonna get so I

26. 00:20:50

    don't have anything to add on Luke thank you so much I'm gonna let you get back to work okay well that about wraps up this week's show especially thanks to Rob Johnson and Mark Abbott and Luke Presley for taking their time to be here on the show with us this week remember you can submit your questions for consideration each and every week up in the thread up on spectrum and don't forget to vote that's the two-prong plants wit your questions but on your questions we put a new thread up every every month to let new questions more common and a current questions float to the top so so if you voted last time go in there there's a whole new crop of questions yeah I keep it going so for calling all that so I'm content manager for global video production Jared Huckaby look at my hair why is it like this I got like Conan O'Brien hair I don't know what's going on I'll see you next

27. 00:21:37

    week everybody thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library