Persistent Universe Panel 1 - The Path You Choose

29 January 201501:09:491,809 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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thanks [Music] Dad so I just want to ramble for a couple minutes here before we actually get started on this first panel uh thank you all for coming out um have you in yourself Jason I have I'm about to um so my name is Jason Hutchins I'm a senior producer for the persistent Universe thank you on the panel here we've got uh Tony zeric I think everybody knows Chris and then Mark Skelton hello where's the
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RO all right thank you so uh just before we get started with the panel questions I just wanted to thank you all for coming out and uh if you've got any commentary you'd like to go ahead and put up on Twitter you can do that right now using the old Star Citizen Town Hall hashtag which we just made up a couple hours ago that's the beauty of social media I'd like to personally uh welcome everybody to the Indiana Jones set today um I think there's going to be a big ball coming through the uh the screen so the front row just prepare to got to jump yeah Jake write that down it's great to see so many of you
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out here so uh I don't know how many of you guys are going to p as well I think a few are you doing I can't so dark out here for me um but no it's it's uh great I mean the only thing I'll say for what we're doing uh today it's a little different than what we nor do because we normally have much more of a sort of polished uh demo and presentation what we decided to do this um uh for this town hall is sort of maybe having it a bit more of a sort of Q&A and a debate and sort of show you some of the stuff that we're working on that we're actually going to be properly showing at South by Southwest in about 2 months time so this isn't quite as uh polished or put together but it's much more like seeing a jump Point article of behind the scenes of how stuff what was
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happening but before um it's actually finished so um so hopefully you'll enjoy it um we're going to kind of go into some depth but um um there's some pretty cool stuff because it's all about the persistent Universe which is I think the area that everybody wants to spend many years adventuring around in but I'll let you over to Tony who's the uh uh directing the persistent universe and doing a really great job uh hello uh my first uh Forum like this to where I'm actually in front of a crowd uh it's actually very interesting to see the level of energy that you guys have brought to this thing in person I've seen lots of the videos in the past um that was one of the things Chris uh first showed me I guess a year or so ago um and it's it's it's very different you know from the
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traditional development you know process to where you kind of go off work uh in a you know work in a room throw your product out and then and only then do you actually find out whether or not a lot of the uh design choices that you've made uh were the right ones or not and so uh I just like to say that it's actually very nice to be able to throw bits and pieces uh of the game out well in advance get feedback and then trust me there's lots and lots of readings of the forums and the comments and basically integration of you know all of those uh all those bits and pieces of information back into the final product so I look forward to you know hearing from you guys in the future there you go all right and I just want to spend a couple minutes right before
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we get started on this first panel just to say that we've got another panel later today called the game ideas Forum um it's less of a forum and more of a elevator pitch so get your ideas together you're going to get about 60 to 90 seconds to uh pitch that to us um so think about that in advance and uh we'll be talking about that more at 5:00 uh so for this first panel the uh path you choose we uh spent a little bit of time talking about what we want to talk about up here uh and collected some fan questions and also pulled ourselves to think uh what should we be talking about so that's what we're going to talk about now um the first question we were thinking was how customizable is my
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character uh can I layer my clothing can I select my face my hair my hair color can I wear jewelry can I specify whether or not it'll be thin I like how I have two mics here that's pretty cool um so the answer to that is yes excellent okay um so the next the last few months um we've really been focusing on characters and character customization um we've listened to you guys and you guys want wanted more flexibility with the characters and so did CR so we kind of set down this path of um how do we achieve what you guys want to see um we've been working pretty close with the UK Studio as you know uh
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Squadron 42 guys um they have been setting up a pipeline um for how character customization is going to work as a matter of fact we just had um not too long ago a character Summit in the UK to talk about that which which went really really well um a lot of the things that we're going to do uh are things like layering now um so you can have various um shirts with jackets with pants tucked in untucked in Boots uh untuck your boots things like that uh so a lot more flexibility than we had originally planned um which is good I mean it it forced us to think through the process and figure out the best way to do this um we've uh also done things like um switched out our base mail for a
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complete body scan now what this does is obviously it uh the resolution um and the Fidelity goes way up when you do that uh we have an actual physical scan that we can we can adjust and build around um so we get a lot more um like real world body Matrix that way which is great um also we decided uh so Chris you know had been looking at obviously rise for a little while and uh he wanted something a little higher you know as far as the fidelia of the face rig and to be able to uh to have emotion in the face and so uh we were looking around for a little bit and we started talking to uh thre lateral which is they're actually the company uh one of the companies that was responsible for Rise um they were really interested in the
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Pro in the progress or the um they were really interested in the project and wanted to come up on and help us and it's fantastic because they already had a lot of um technology that they had learned from Rise because they're they were using the same cry engine um base as we were so started working with three lateral and got some fantastic uh Fidelity out of their head rigs so just the Fidelity in the face and the way that the um the the face is structured now and works is is incredible and um and you know soon you guys will be seeing a lot more of that um per the stretch goal uh we got a fantastic uh face scanning and body scanning rig which has been set up uh at the UK studio um right now it's got
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between like 80 and 90 cameras I believe but I think we're going to expand that actually for Fidelity reasons uh I think Chris you just got your head scann not too long ago although he he won't give it to me cuz I don't you know no actually I was trying to find I I um unfortunately all they've all gone home or drinking at the pub right now in the UK right uh but uh no we we uh it's uh it's pretty impressive so I think down the road we'll sort of show you but the concept is that all the character heads are you know we're going to scan the actors that we use in Squadron 42 we're going to scan a selection of character heads for the persistent Universe both male and female and then we're going to allow you to blend between these so you can change the size of your nose or jaar or ears and color of eye eyes and color of hair and all that kind of stuff uh
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and it's at a it's at a extremely high fidelity and so we're just basically trying to and so we're sort of still so we don't really have the stuff to show you the final stuff I think there's sort of a range of motion test that may be was sneaked on around the verse but that's still down the road because we're actually doing there's a whole level of rigging that's about two weeks off in terms of the Fidelity where we're simulating the muscle the secondary muscles that you would have on the arms and stuff so there's a base rig skeleton now which is kind of what you're seeing but the the more subtle stuff is the way the muscles would move and flow and that'll probably be completed in the next two weeks um you know we're also working with Imaginarium in the UK and Imaginarium is the uh the company that Andy Circus started to do sort of performance capture and they sort of do a lot of R&D into how to like capture
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the performance on the face side so we're sort of using uh what they you know we're partnering with them and investing in R&D with them and three lateral who Mark already talked about uh there's another company called cubic motion that's involved in sort of that Pipeline and workflow but the ultimate idea would be to have an incredibly uh sort of emotive and and and fluid uh facial animation and also body animation um so uh you you guys haven't seen the results of it yet the stiff um character walking around the hanger is uh definitely not the not anywhere close to the final result uh but probably I would say um when we're showing the social uh module and the F FPS stuff we'll have sort of some of the first iterations of it although the stuff that we're doing
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is going to take Beyond just um what we're going to be showing you guys in March and uh uh you know and April so uh but uh it's all pretty exciting I wish we had some some images to show you of this uh today but uh we we don't we just like to talk and tease you about it um but we were getting ready for the show we were looking at as we were getting ready for this show we were looking at you know various things that we want to show or not wanted to show and for the most P for the most part we decided to show a lot uh however we just hooked up this new map to the new rig and like Chris was saying you know we're going to do the musculature and without the musculature it looks like this kind of hideous rubber man and nobody wants to see that well I think they seen a little bit it because
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it was it was on around the but yeah but basically uh there's just the essentially the sort of the pipeline for the next Generation character has literally um is in the process of being finalized and once the pipeline's finished there's a lot of things that are happening that will all sort of come together and then you'll start to see the results of it in the next few months where we'll actually be able to show you okay here's a laying of a CL here's here's a jacket here's a pair of pants here's a T-shirt and how it layers how it would all move Bel the has been worked out for that it's just a matter of implementing it all um going through some of these other questions uh you know can I layer my clothes yes um can I select my face my hair uh my my color interesting thing about my hair uh we've been looking into alternatives for the way that we do hair now traditionally
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you've seen in the past where um we call them fins which are pieces of geometry that make up like a head of hair and that's that's really old school you know at the moment um we want to go beyond that and do something better we've been looking into couple of ideas um there's this uh there's this process called Trace effects that we've been kind of looking into which is more of a spline based hair you get a lot more resolution out of it um it's still kind of in its infancy we're looking into it um but I'm sure it'll get better as we go and uh but just things like that upping the resolution upping the Fidelity um we're always pushing for that I know Chris is always pushing for that cuz you know he wants the the absolute most um emotive and realistic looking human um that we
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can possibly do so we've been putting time and effort into all aspects of the character customization to to allow for that um some other things uh yes the the color of your face you'll be able to to adjust um can I wear jewelry absolutely I think we're going to absolutely do do that uh thin and fat so here's here's an interesting question we've been going through this um they you will be able to to adjust your character thin and fat now there'll be a maximum and minimum obviously because some of we've been talking about some of the uh problems with the ships you know like you can't yeah you basically have to fit into the you know the pilot seat so you can't be too big yeah I mean you also be you also can't be too small so that's why you know it's
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it's it's kind of like uh in today if you're in the Air Force there's like a there's a range that you're meant to be between to fit into the so we have to sort of otherwise we're going to have to have way too much um variation in all the ships so yeah that Mustang cockpit is worse than the British airlines coach yeah but there will be uh there will be a thin and a heavy and adjustable between them we're definitely setting it up where that's going to be possible so yes um I think all of these are uh are absolutely on the horizon and we are building the base pipeline to allow for all these things to happen tattoos what's that tattoos Yes actually been talking about that too um some of the some of the ship technology um we've
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been doing things like a a second UV Set uh which we've um written code for which wasn't originally in the The Cry engine which that allows for things like tattoos and uh customizable things on ships you know like um you know you know having your own uh um call outs on ships and stuff so that's absolutely going to come it's just a matter of of time and getting that process put into place beards beards yeah I think we we've been talking about it obviously I mean you know I wear beard everybody on this panel well except for Chris wears beard um Chris is the only one who's had it say uh has had his face scanned because of that in order to get your face scanned you have to shave so right you're probably not going to see this in
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the game we have been talking about beards again I go back to like the trace effects thing uh that is a possibility for beards and hairstyles um but again we've been looking into it it's on the horizon it's something that um will happen eventually it's just a matter of um figuring out the best way to do it and thanks for asking by the way yeah beards so where do you uh start the game the game begins at the hanger uh you'll wind up starting the game basically the the once we actually we're probably about two versions away from on the persistent Universe release schedule from allowing you to actually select your starting planet um where you'll actually spawn is obviously within your own hanger um your
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hanger as you already know serves as a kind of inventory repository right now that's predominantly in the form of your ships uh it's in the form of your flare objects uh one thing that we'll be adding uh to your hanger in the very near term with the social module will be what we're calling a Sim pod and I think we've actually got it I think we've actually got an image of that it did yes I believe we it's coming uh yeah so basically this is going to become your new Gateway into Arena commander and the upcoming first-person shooter module um that you should see in the uh roughly March time frame frame um we're eventually going to add a lot more customizability to the hanger that's going to include everything from a room
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system to where you'll be able to add uh you know targeting rooms overclocking rooms entertainment rooms a variety of things one of the things that uh Chris is very big on is allowing players to basically obtain trophies pictures from the different areas that you see within the game there's obviously a tremendous amount of effort going into uh building out some of the visuals and the locals that you're going to be exposed to within the game and so one of the very uh one of the very uh appealing things is just the ability to you know take snapshots obtain a trophy from the top of Terra Prime that says you know I was here and you can actually store that on a little display table within your hanger um we're uh we're going to add uh elevators into
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all of the hangers and the elevators are going to become your transition point to the prime to the primary city so what you'll wind up seeing in the upcoming social module will be an elevator that's been added to your hanger and you can take that and basically select you know the main uh the uh main Landing Zone level and you and all of a sudden when the door opens you'll have transitioned over into the full-blown AR corpse city you'll be able to wander around but we'll get into that in a little bit more detail uh later in this discussion um one thing uh that will that we just just announced earlier today is the addition of uh some different skins for your buggy and before you get onto that I just want to mention something about the S pod itself so you guys notice the date there on that image uh that's a concept
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that just came in this week and we are um modeling this right now so uh this will be in pretty soon one of the reasons why we're adding the S pod is we want to get away from some of that very gamey user interface of hitting the Escape key to have to get into into the uh Arena Commander right so we want to actually have something you walk up to and have to interact with to make it feel more alive really is what it it feels more like a futuristic arcade game that you're stepping into and experiencing some sort of virtual reality as opposed to you know what we were basically building into the ship like the arcade Mach in and I just wanted to call this out as an example of how early this stuff is that you're seeing today like this is all stuff that's coming this week some of the stuff's a little older that we're still working on but this is all fresh fresh stuff so on to the buggies um actually
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before we jump on to uh away from the buggies jump onto the buggies uh there's there's one other one other large feature it's still still a ways off um but obviously a lot of you know uh we had to put in kind of a stop Gap measure because the number of ships that you can fit into your hanger is limited to five right now and we had played with a few you know different things where we going to expand your hanger horizontally where we going to expand it to different floors vertically and then that winds up becoming very impractical you want to go get a particular ship you got to take your own elevator within your hanger to your sixth floor go get your Hornet then you can finally leave and so one of the things we'll wind up adding in the relatively you know relatively uh near term will be the concept of an automated uh loading hanger such that you may still only be able to have you know five
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ships visible at any one time but as long as you've got one of these autol loading hangers you can go to a little you know uh a little uh display panel and select which ship you want on which pad and bring it up right then just via a whole you know mechanical process um skeleton could probably add a little bit of detail in regards to uh What uh yeah if you guys have seen we were using kind of the um Japanese parking structure I don't know if you guys have seen that but basically it's like a it goes down and and has uh it's kind of a big ferris wheel under the surface and what it does is it basically goes down and and dials in which ship you want and then comes back up and then you have your ship on the pad so obviously I mean if you want to get to a ship quick um that's going to be a really fast and easy way to do
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it um that way you don't have to you know have a million ships that you're uh taking your little buggy too back and forth you know to see so the primary ships that you want to show your friends and stuff you can have five pads worth of them um so we've been talking about this for a while and I think it makes a lot of sense so much more appealing than adding the turbocharged option to the buggy so that you can reach your 27th ship in a row I don't know about that they want to ask them they probably wouldn't mind trying to do an evil con eval and jump over 27 sh in that would be fun a planet to do that that's true yeah the Idris stuff I mean we've been talking about like where do you park the Idris in your hanger or anything bigger than that which wherever
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it wants yeah wherever it wants I mean initially I think we've been talking about maybe you know parking it in in orbit and then taking um jump ships down you know uh but that hasn't completely been worked out yet but I mean that was kind of the premise One does not simply Park a Bingle carrier right exactly yeah there's obviously going to be a a a limit just in terms of you know at at some point we're going to have to have a cut off between what's practical I mean some of the these ships just given you know the mass it makes no sense uh given the overall you know level of realistic Fidelity within the game to actually allow them to be you know sitting on a Planet Side um and so uh I what what is the larger ship we fit in there right now uh I think the retal fits in there
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but I mean I you know I think we've uh that caterpillar I thought was the largest uh we've talked I mean it depends we've talked about having a big landing pad for some bigger ships um that isn't in your hanger that just happens to to be sort of a landing pad out there and then at a certain level the ship will stay in orbit and you'll come down and there'll be a shuttle craft that's sitting in your hanger and that's you basically get into the shuttle craft and that's how you'll go back up to your your big ship so um so we we'll just have to see because the the Idris is twice the size of what it used to be so um big ship yeah that may stay in orbit it may not stay in orbit but but basically that was the the idea would be the bigger ships like the star air and stuff would have like there would be out on sort of a you know a jumbo size landing pad in whatever the space port is on the on the on the
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planet you're on um and um but most of the your ships would be in the hangar and then the really big ones will be in orbit so um so I'd mentioned before uh so the the different skins that were just announced this morning so that you can customize uh so that you can customize your buggy um here's some examples everyone that uh bought a ticket to this event should actually have one of them in your account right now to equip I I I think I think the one that you'll get for this event will be the a gate a gate gray there yeah then yeah I mean the other thing to be poting out is as MK was saying I mean we we now have sort of paint um technology and it's what's used on the variants like the 300
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um like the 315 320 5 350r it's used on the auroras uh so we're actually now going to be starting to do all the skins that we have for the ships that we've I think quite a few people got years ago and have not actually seen them on the ships yet so we'll be starting to do that um basically what has to happen is they have to do a second UV set on the on whatever the item is whether it's the buggy or the ship it takes quite a while for an artist to put the second UV set on but once it's on then you can apply any sort of paint scheme to it and uh it's uh actually happens inside the Shader it's pretty cool um there's a sort of pretty efficient way of storing the the data so it's not massive amounts of uh texture memory um sign distance uh Fields if anyone's interested um but uh but it's pretty cool so yeah we'll so
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for what we'll be happening going forward is now we'll be able to roll out um you know different sort of you know first of all the skins that we've already promised but probably some new ones and at some point uh will allow tools for people to be able to sort of do their own paint job and we've got a fairly efficient way of storing the data so it's not going to be a huge amount I think the paint is it is it a 512 what for the paint job yeah I can't remember what the texture size is uh well it depends on what uh decal you're putting on but most of the decals themselves are are yeah they're like 512 or I'm not talking about the decal I'm talking about the paint the whole paint I think it's a 1024 isn't it I don't know yeah 1024 all right I'm not sure Mark's right but we'll move on uh yeah okay so anyway you can buy these
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you can buy these today and everybody's getting an egg at gray who bought a ticket so thanks yeah so Tony you were talking about uh transitioning to a common area via elevator um when you get into that uh common area or kind of Landing Zone as we call him internally um can you carry a gun into the landing Zone and if so can you use it yeah this is actually this is an interesting one it was one of the first things when I came on to the project uh the the original plan as I understood it was that the landing zones were originally going to be combat free and then there would be uh Segways you could take a Subway to a more dangerous
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area and um I wind up talking to you know it talking it over with Chris and he liked the idea of basically trying to expand the concept to give a lot more freedom and flexibility to the players um by allowing them to actually uh carry their guns into any of the landing zones um with all of the you know design baggage that that's going to involve in regards to fixing a whole slew of problems you know that come up but the basic effect that we wanted to get uh the ultimate objective was that we're putting a lot of time and effort obviously into building out all of these cities and the first time that you go to one of them it's just going to look absolutely spectacular you're going to be blown away you know the first time you see you know art Corp in person or Terra prime or a variety of other areas um but the problem is you start you know
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uh thinking forward and thinking well the third time the fifth time the 10th time that you actually visit that no matter what we do with the npci to basically look like a living breathing World um when nothing out of the ordinary can ever happen at some point it starts to you know it starts to feel boring it starts you know you lose that sense of you know tension of anxiety that you get when you know the unexpected is possible when you know even even even even if it's unlikely um you know you know combat can occur and so we wound up making the design decision to go ahead and allow guns um and what this is going to wind up doing is uh when you go to a planet in the daytime there will wind up being a variety of security mechanisms in place to prevent this from ever getting out of
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control but that will be scaled according to how much security we want in a given area in some places you know a major Hub a Terra Prime you know something like that um there will be so many security guards there will be you know security cameras there will be automated turrets such and they're and they're so Advanced that as soon as you try to pull a weapon out in a given area you'll immediately be stunned you'll wake up in the uh Hospital you'll be fine $500 and they'll tell you you know quit you know quit being so bad um in in but what we what we like about this though is as opposed to having uh one of the original you know design thoughts was well maybe we would just deactivate all of your weapons when you actually you know uh when you actually landed on the planet and the problem
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with that is we would no longer only be able to you know prohibit combat within the areas we really you know wanted to you know to make secure but that would prevent combat from occurring down the dark alleys where it would actually be nice and so in this case when you wander onto AR Corp we'll wind up having mechanisms to discourage that type of you know player against player uh stuff from getting you know from getting too out of control but at the same point if you arrive on a planet at night you look around there are very few security guards the normal shops that you want to go visit are closed and you're looking to restock your ship and so so you know that there's an arms dealer and he's at the you know he's at the back end of a dark alley and you walk down there and you actually hear a door open you know a
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creek open behind you you will turn around and you will look because the last time you did that and you didn't somebody actually stunned you took all your money and you know and you've remembered that ever since and so in this case what it's going to do is the having the potential for combat is going to keep you on your toes it's going to make you you know always be paying more attention than you would if we just blanket uh restricted it uh in its entirety um there are and I just going to but it's also going to be specific to like Tera you're not likely to get mugged when you're in the nice areas if you go down the blocks down an Alleyway then perhaps someone will try and mug you or if you're on ncks where it's a you know basically a pirate um uh base or sichi or whatever you want to call it then then yeah they'll be much more
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loose and Tumble so I mean I think you know you could probably just like anywhere uh you know you could probably walk around certain areas of cities without a weapon on you and you'll be okay and then you just know if you're going to go to the sort of more sketchy part that you better be ready to to defend yourself yeah absolutely it'll it'll vary from planet to planet it will vary from you know from hour to hour it's like in the middle of the day you know the streets of New York are you know are are very safe um the streets of New York become a little you know a bit less safe at night the back you know the back back alleys you know in New York are probably dangerous you know um definitely dangerous in the middle of the night um and so what you've got is a whole a whole lot of Shades of Gray as opposed to just a Boolean yes you can engage in combat here or no you can't um
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one other thing in regards to uh in regards to uh preventing Griefers because obviously this is the type of thing to where it sounds very good in practice and all of a sudden you get one or two guys that want to screw with the other players and it just you know it's snowballs out of control um and a whole lot of players you know gameplay experiences are ruined um because of a few bad apples and so we've got this concept to where every time you land at a landing Zone whether you go through the public landing zone or your own personal Hangar you have to just like in the real world you have to pass through customs and at Customs there's the concept of whether or not you're actually authorized to carry uh a weapon into that area um this is also where they would turn you away if you've been banished from that planet and so if I were to to wander over you know on a planet that actually had a concept of
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Law and Order this might not apply at all to nxs where you know if you go in you just need to you know mind your own security uh all bets are off but if you're in a place that's actually got you know some level of security you know like I said earlier if if if it's Terra Prime as soon as you go to pull your gun there's going to wind up being an automated turret it's highly accurate it's going to stun you that's it there's no chance um but in a variety of other places art Corp will probably have a little bit lower in turrets they're not quite as accurate they don't actually fire until you know you fire on someone else and then only if they've act if they don't actually have their weapon pulled or they haven't actually fired at you and so if you wind up shooting you know unarmed people in a secure area and you wind up getting caught um then on these planets that have you know this
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concept of Customs what you what you'll wind up having is your license to carry would wind up being revoked such that the next time you actually come to that planet and this would probably persist for some you know for some number of you know real-time hours um you wouldn't be able to carry a weapon and so there's a real penalty applied in terms of I was able to inflict some you know pain or damage or whatever to you know to another player uh but I'm no longer able to do that we've instantly flipped a switch and you can't do that for another 24 48 hours and this actually puts you at a real disadvantage because for the same reasons like now imagine having to walk the streets of New you know of New York plate at night and you can no longer be armed and it's extremely dangerous um similarly uh if you wind up uh and I mean I mean the other thing is
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that we also since we can't have all the players all in the same room at the same time we instance stuff so we matchmaking the instancing so one of the one of the things we will definitely do in the algorithm is we will try to uh sort of separate uh Griefers into griefing pools if that makes sense so you can grief each other if you like to grief each other but not necessarily uh and it's actually quite easy to do like it's quite easy to do I mean the system that we have which is uh you know it works the same way in space but also down on the planets is you basically go in and out of sort of containers which is the instance and so we're always putting you in and out when you go to a new area in space or the same would probably happen in a big location on a planet side where you
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would go into The Concourse and The Concourse would be sort of its own own sort of area where there'll be multiplayer and you'd be leaving uh say your hango which is not necessarily the same instance of multiplayer into the concour so we can sort of decide um you know who who you see do you see your you seeing your friends seeing your enemies people of similar skill levels and so that's another sort of tool we can use to uh to kind of essentially make everyone's game experiences as as positive as possible but I mean I think the the the real thing to to to point out is that I would say that there is you know we definitely have uh PVP in the game and uh you know players working together in Co-op but there's you know as we've said there's you know 90% AI to 10% player population so if we have a million people play in the game you know
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there's going to be you know 9 million um you know AI running around simulating in that economy and so because of that you can also extrapolate that you know there'll be a huge amount of encounters that will be AI based right so you know you'll be fighting AI Pirates or if you're a pirate attacking AI Traders or whatever and you'll so there'll be a fair amount of Co-op versus AI right which is what I think if you know you take a look at what everyone's doing right now in the game and Arena Commander you know a fair amount of everyone is playing Vandal swarm and the the sort of single player of the co-op modes uh and then there'll also be the player-to-player options in the game so it's sort of like they'll always so so even though we we'll try our best so like players can't grief other players there'll definitely be like threats and stuff will be legitimate for you to fight you know like so a Mugger tries to
00:36:30
mug you in Terror and you pull your gun in self-defense and take him out that's fine you're not going to get in trouble for that uh so we're going to have lots of opportunities for you to have sort of fun action and tension in places besides just the player to player and we do allow the player to play stuff but I guess what I'm trying to say is that you know when sometimes people think about oh well you're going to have a gun on Planet Side well aren't I going to get griefed by so on and that's really not the the purpose the purpose of the purpose of being able to have the weapons down on the planet side or doing the Eva into a derik shift is really sort of for those sort of environmental encounters um which you know I mean I think you know there's been some really cool fan videos that have been made um about that kind of stuff and it sort of gives you a sense of like kind of what it's going to feel like and so we're pretty committed to sort of making the world feel alive and uh reactive um in in terms of things that
00:37:20
you can do and places you can do so you don't just go down onto a planet and it's a it's basically a glorified 3D um shopping in to face so I think that that's the only thing I was going to add to yeah no and and and that was you know the original you know design rationale is we didn't want to ever have the landing zones turn into something that you've seen a hundred times before and nothing changes other than the Cosmetic effects of the AI so you'd see you know the activities change and you'd see more businessmen because the economy is booming and you'd see you know more Crim criminals when the economy is doing less well but if none of that can ever directly affect you you except in so far as you know commodity prices and the missions and stuff that are available um that's that you're going to lose that entire effect of ever being on edge of ever being anxious
00:38:09
because you kind of screwed around a day ago you shot another player and now for the next 24 hours whenever you land on that planet you're no longer allowed to carry a gun and if you pushed it farther if you actually skirted the rules and a friend of yours he actually got into that planet and he gave you a gun and you tried to continue the griefing well now you just wind up getting you we basically register the fact that you were you had already had your license to carry revoked now you've been uh caught you know griefing you know killing a player in an you know in in a law and order you know type of area again and so now we basically flip a switch and you're literally banished from that planet for the next 24 hours and so whereas you could still grief you would not be able to grief for very long Tony is it true that Mark Skelton has already
00:38:56
lost his Area 18 privileges I don't think I ever had him to tell you the truth he's actually just allowed he's he's on he's he's on hey so speaking of uh speaking of Landing zones in shops uh what are the kind of things we can do on on in shops on the landing zones uh so there there's a lot um I think we've actually got a few uh images to show for uh some of these but one of the uh first shops that you guys will probably wind up getting familiar with is the clothing shop and this will be you know pretty common throughout most of the popular Landing zones uh within the environment we don't actually have any shop art for that so we were just going to show some uh concept art for some of the clothing Can you steal from shops uh yeah actually that's very high on the list and it's part of the reason
00:39:45
why I like that concept of you know this level of gray as OPP opposed to a Boolean um there again it's like I I you always have to simplify for a you know for a relatively brief discussion like this um but I love the concept of having you know cameras within a bar and you have a bartender and basically every time he winds up doing a transaction with a customer $10 is Depo you know deposited into his cash register if you're a clever enough player to distract the bartender and ensure that his security camera is not you know currently it's basically you know rotates and to make sure that it's not actually focused on the cash register at the time you try to operate it you can wind up making money it's it's a is a self go ahead that may be a bad example since we're in we're in a future world that everything's
00:40:32
electronic in cash right I mean even even in today even in today's world most bars and you everyone wants to use credit cards because it's hard to steal from I guess all I'm saying is it's not going to be a cash based business in the in the future it's another kind of mini game there well there there are quite a few things that wouldn't really be there n yeah I I I I would think that you would have the opportunity to steal some stuff I just don't I was just saying I don't think the the stealing from the register is necessarily like probably one thing will Implement gun we don't we don't have physical money in the game guns muggings you know you name it yeah hey Mark let's talk about uh Megan's Concepts here a little bit Yeah so uh so here's some of the uh initial uh Concepts uh where we are thinking
00:41:25
through some of the layering system you see like uh some people have uh like Bas uh shirts with you know um jackets on top and various things uh obviously with the MPCs and stuff um they need to be um environment specific so these specific uh these specific ones I think were for Tera I believe initially uh but you know obviously we're going to mix and match uh you guys are going to be able to wear pretty pretty much what you want um all the carg pans yeah the cargo yeah see those are up there in the left corner That's My Style the maintenance going but uh you know basically thinking through the characters uh we we have expanded our flexibility as far as what
00:42:14
you guys um want uh as far as depth of use and obviously everything that you see uh should be uh character customizable too so you see a fashion on the street you like it you can go to the store and buy it if you like uh I hope so it should be uh but that is a Chris Roberts call but uh we can do the gold shirt the the gold shirt yeah the gold shirt is expensive you got to go to one planet it is hazy one planet and it's like way on the edge of the can I steal you got to go through like 10 wormholes it's like it's like Indiana Jones you got to like go through the temple and watch the you will definitely probably almost die like going to get it so we've got other shops to talk about as well um so what we
00:43:02
brought for you is the shirt off a guy's bag Can you steal the shirt I guess if you get electronically steal his shirt yeah you can say give me all your clothes yeah you you can hold me up I give me all your clothes and you can walk around his underwear so we it draws the line underwear so you can basically take the I think we Bak the underwear the under baked into the mesh can't go below the skibbies I'm sorry we uh have some concept art here for you actually this isn't concept art this is actually some game walkthr of some various environments that we've got going on here so the first one is the Astro Armada which is a ship seller oops my bad better go back one more
00:43:51
time please play this time for sure so yeah Astro Armada is kind of a upscale kind of a Ferrari dealership uh I mean we're still kind of working on this you guys are seeing whip for sure but uh well it's it's not yeah it's got a bunch more stuff to be done right lighting atmospherics more detail in it this is just literally what behaviors given as a sort of update progress on these locations these are basically all the locations that are going to be yeah these are Planet Side module uh that uh we'll be showing at the uh South by Southwest and then releasing afterwards we're we're aiming to actually have all of the initial half dozen shops
00:44:39
eventually there will probably be you I say eventually we're aiming to probably have you know 9 10 11 you know variations of shops you know different things and stuff uh by the end of this year but obviously over time that list is is going to expand and so a lot of what you you'll see here in terms of shops are these are at the you know 50 60% you know completion stage dumpers Depot is actually uh obviously where you uh buy and sell a lot of uh secondhand you know uh you know scrap materials and stuff like that used parts Etc you can get things that are not necessarily in pristine condition or the latest and greatest but you can get a little bit better prices than you could get at one of the full-blown retail stores but you risk getting locked jaw by stepping on a rusty land
00:45:30
uh yeah and so uh cubby blast this is the personal weapon store this is actually uh one that we're uh doing a lot of work on the user interface right now and that's another thing that we're hoping to deliver with the social module um in late March give or take uh which is the full ability to navigate through the inventory selections for the stores you won't yet likely be able to purchase anything um but you'll be able to get a very good you know sense of how the interface for browsing and inspecting and finding out you know basic you know uh informational statistics on the weapons Works set up the stores themselves where the purchas yeah well I the the way the purchasing is going to work in most of
00:46:17
the stores is you're going to go in with your Mobi glass and you'll look at all the physical stuff and it'll have prices and you'll say I want to buy it you could say I want to buy one or two or three or whatever you want to do you do the transaction over your Mobi glass and then in most cases the item will appear back in your hanger or in your ship or something um and so that that's kind of the so you don't have to like wheel a cart of weapons out of cubby Bo and and that's it's like they deliver them to you after you've bought it and and and that's actually true for a lot of things I mean if you're already wearing you know as many layers of clothing as you can and you buy you know additional clothing and you don't want to sell you know you don't want to swap out what you currently have then the clothing would be delivered to your hanger the same same thing for uh personal weapons you want to buy several different rifles um you want to buy you a large chunk of you ammunition parts for your ship in
00:47:05
general kind of like what I mentioned earlier is like your your hanger is going to become more and more this uh this this large you know uh repository for all of your stuff I skipped ahead to the uh medical unit because of the Rusty Nail comment I couldn't help so on the uh yeah so on the art side of a lot of these um stores uh uh what I'm trying to attack it as um is to give a lot of these stores obviously personality um when you walk in we've got a wide variety of stores everything from corporate chains to like you know kind of mom and pop you know scary gun store owner rednecky I cubby blast is a is not not a chain right cubby blast is notada
00:47:53
um uh is a chain I actually think um dumpers Depot is a chain is Dum Depot is a chain yes uh so I guess you know the idea is on a lot of plets you've got like just like we do you have Best Buy stores around here right or Best Buy stores kind of look the same so there is the chains that you'll sort of see on a lot of planets and then there'll be unique stores uh there'll be on Plants so you know whatever cubby blast is one I think there's some other ones like clothes stores and stuff like that so uh but the idea with um what's happening on Art Corp is it's going to be sort of the first planet side prototype that sort of shows you a variety of stores that you can likely expect in interactions like things like the bar or going to uh you know getting healed up in the the hospital and then from there uh you know it's more sort of art production but that gets the functionality for
00:48:40
everything that we want to do on Planet Side is sort of stubbed in and then we sort of build it from there is is the approach the last environment we have here is the the reason why we put the uh the reason why we put the uh hospital did we already roll through the hospital here yeah we roll through the uh the reason why we put that right after cubby blast is specifically because the hospital is basically where you're going to respawn after you you know assuming you die you know out in space it's going to do fine you know the the nearest uh or you get mugged or you get or you get mugged wake up in the hospital griefed so the last environment bit is the trade Development Division yeah this is basically the shop where you'll wind up uh being able to pick up a a lot of missions you'll be able to find out a lot of uh information
00:49:28
in regards to commodity prices uh one of the do we actually have a shot of the outside no not the outside no um basically uh this this actually doesn't do justice um come come the release of the social module this is actually one of the more attractive uh shops uh I think you're going to see not just because of what's internal to it but because you can actually see ships Landing cargo being unloaded you know outside you can see you know all of the uh outside traffic you know through this me basically right this is the the combination of the commodity exchange and sort of the mission Clearing House you would go in here to get a job okay I want to uh you know here's a job to haul cargo from uh AR Corp to wherever Nicks or something and then you could also go
00:50:16
there to sell and buy uh Goods to for you to sort of trade around so that's that's sort of the commodity broker of uh of of um Star Citizen and and it's also going to be different depending on where it's going to look different depending on where you are that's sort of the sort of big flashy corporate version and again like Tony says it's uh you know this is all very early work in progress is lot of like detail it's still not there the lighting a whole bunch of other stuff but um you know the the the process is it's all sort of the functionality and the the base rooms and all the rest are getting stubbed in and then uh you'll hopefully when in two months time you'll see uh something uh a lot more impressive Tony what kind of jobs can we expect to see in Mission types uh well one thing to keep in mind
00:51:05
uh when we're having like you know any kind of like discussion about jobs is you know I'll use terms like you know a mercenary or Pioneer and things like that but there's no real formal concept of you know an occupation within the game uh what you do is largely dependent upon you know what you want to do what your skill set is and what your ship and other equipment you know allows you to do and the reason why I mentioned that is because there's a lot of uh areas of gray again um between some of these different occupations to where you know in in certain cases uh rescue you know what what I would call the rescue occupation starts to sound awfully similar to a mercenary um where I kind of personally draw the line is uh mercenary missions to me I usually categorize as those that are uh paid gun for hire they involve combat um this
00:51:56
could involved anything from you being tasked with destroying you know a particular ship securing an area of space um assaulting a particular space station um and one interesting thing about that is when you accept the mission it's not you know it's not necessarily of the type that you accept a mission and then that mission is gone and no one else you know uh no one else can join in some missions those geared towards you know multiple players um whether you whether you actively join a group or not you may wind up finding that you have the exact same uh objective as other players within the game in other words I I I'm I'm leaning I basically outfitted my ship with a lot of Weaponry I've got you know some
00:52:42
incredible armor and shielding and I'm looking to basically you know make some money by doing uh some you know some combat missions uh I see you know that there's a pirate you know uh base in the you know far reaches of a particular system um I accept the Miss to go uh try to you know quell you know the the the pirate Menace in that sector and so do 12 or 14 or other players and you're paid according to what your contribution to you know uh to that you know to to that is um another uh another thing just on the mercen on the mercenary side uh that they tend to be involved with a lot is what I would call uh more defensive missions basically you know protecting things uh protecting a space station a particular area space this could involve um uh it could involve uh escort
00:53:32
missions to protect freighter that are traversing through uh dangerous you know uh through dangerous Pathways um they also tend to uh do a lot of retrieval missions this could be anything from rescuing a kidnapped politician to retrieving an ancient artifact that's you know that's been stolen maybe it's on a ship maybe it's you know at a particular you know uh on on a particular you know station etc etc um um another uh another occupation that uh is one of my favorites is uh I I I categorize it as rescue and this is you know kind kind of what a lot of people would consider a medic except uh it differ it it differs from a pure Medic in that you're not necessarily always trying to heal people um it's it's more of uh you're looking to help you're
00:54:22
looking to assist but not necessarily in a combat oriented way so this could involve anything from trying to evacuate scientists that are on a space station that's close to a star and that star is now uh that star has now got a lot of uh totally unpredictable solar flare activity that's knocked out their shielding uh parts of the space station have collapsed and so you need to dock manually you need to infiltrate the base uh you need to basically free you know these guys from rooms in which they're trapped at which point they'll jump onto your ship and then you can transport them back to safety uh at the same time these rescue missions might involve uh patrolling an area That's Heavy in battle and uh quickly trying to tractor beam Pilots that have ejected from their ships and again as Chris mentioned earlier it's like these Pilots that are
00:55:08
in the midst of these big battles it's like could be NPCs could be players could be a mixture of both and you're basically trying to pull them into your cargo hold get them back to safety and you're paid according to uh how many of these guys uh you actually retrieve I mean I mean I think I think I mean I think the important thing to point out is that there isn't there's no it's not like in a lot of say MMOs where you pick a role and that's what you're going to be you're going to be a wizard or you're going to be a warrior or something that uh essentially we're going to have lots of different jobs and missions and stuff you can do and it's kind of up to the player what he wants to do with him and also how he's equipped his ship and and he's equipped himself so you know you could you know one day be taking mercenary missions on the next day taking a rescue mission on the next day deciding that you're going to um you
00:55:57
know take a transport mission on and take goods from planet a to Planet B um you know you could then decide that you're you know Bor with all this like law abiding stuff and become a pirate uh you know may be hard to go back into sort of uh you know the uh the well policed areas if you become a known pirate and do some of the other jobs but uh essentially uh you know the idea is we're just thinking of lots of different things for the players to do that um you know it's of the players to sort of decide kind of what roles they want to do and we're also looking at you know doing roles that are sort of non-combat oriented so obviously you know things like mercenaries and bounty hunting uh is all very combat oriented but you know there's other ones that should be less combat oriented like the rescue wands but you know being you know mining or
00:56:45
well so Chris I've got a question for both the panel and the audience we basically have a choice between taking some questions at the end of this panel or hearing more about kind of non-combat and multiplayer oriented professions so questions multiplayer professions I thought you'd say that so yeah tell us more about what you uh you want to talk about like uh how do we get like a multi crude ship have a reasonably fun experience together uh the kind of the mining oh on well mining's there are actually a number a number of different you know again uh occupations uh that will benefit tremendously from having multiple
00:57:36
players Andor MPCs you know working in tandem together uh so to use mining you know as an example um mining is not a m mining is not an occupation that's completely safe the these big asteroids that you're going to be you know injecting you know megawatts of energy into um they contain volatile materials they contain you know compressed gases um there there are a number of ways by which you can wind up you know blowing these things apart as opposed to just extracting the valuable materials that you actually want to get and so the first thing when you actually uh go into an asteroid field that you'd wind up doing is you'd have a dedicated uh scanning operator and his entire uh
00:58:25
purpose is is to basically help you figure out in this vast field of thousands of asteroids which ones have a component you know Constitution that's attractive given what you're actually after given what the prices in that system you know uh warrant you spending your time trying to extract um so you've got a scanning operator you've obviously got the beam operators which are going to be the guys on the ship that are actually directing these mining lasers that are injecting you know these uh uh you know injecting these beams of energy uh into into these as roids in order to uh extract uh fragments that a that a cargo loading operator would then seek to maneuver within the ship and the way by which this works for the cargo operator is he's basically got a repulser and a tractor be and attractor
00:59:14
beams uh attractor as opposed to tractor they're actually a little bit different um in in regards to how we use them within the game uh so the Repulsor beam obviously just pushes something away and a tractor beam uh just pulls it towards you and so if you kind of picture looking out through your cargo hold towards an asteroid um which would be the point of view of your cargo loading operator he would see each of these fragments as they're being you know blasted off and all that he's essentially doing is based upon you know the you know the constitution of each little fragment is he's applying a little Force to basically try to maneuver it into your cargo hold or to push it away um the beam operators actually have uh quite a bit of work to do in regards to monitoring um what's going on so that the situation doesn't
01:00:02
get too out of control we've got an exothermic reaction detector that monitors the amount of energy that's being produced and what that's essentially doing is it's giving you a visual indication of whether or not the amount of energy that you'd expect to see based upon the beam that you're uh injecting into the asteroid uh is is larger than what you'd expect and what that would signal is that you've you're actually starting to generate chain reactions with some of the with some of these materials and that becomes very dangerous because if you've got something of sufficient Vol you know that's sufficiently volatile and has you know a sufficient explosive force and you actually ignite a chunk of it again it's like you can blow this asteroid apart and so you're constantly monitoring how much you know excess energy is being produced you're also monitoring uh seismic activity seismic
01:00:50
activity is very important in regards to mining these asteroids because some of these materials kind of like nitroglycerin it's like they're not necessarily sensitive to the injection of uh of energy so much as vibration and so there can be materials on the complete opposite side of an asteroid and if you're basically shaking it if you're breaking apart if you're if you're breaking fragments of sufficient size you're call causing little microt trimmers to emanate back and forth through these asteroids and so the the you know the the point is that the mining beam operators are monitoring the beams that are being injected to ensure that you're not going to blow the thing apart the pilot is constantly rotating you around the asteroid to find Optimal locations the scanning beam operator is
01:01:38
basically identifying which asteroids are most attractive the attractor repulser you know the cargo loading operator he's basically maneuvering this stuff into your ship you've got a Refinery operator that's basically in charge of the mechanics that allow uh unrefined ore to be uh converted into pure materials that you can actually sell uh back at the uh back at the major space stations and Landing zones and so this is just a small example of you could do each one of these jobs yourself but it would be extraordinarily slow compared to basically having a well Tred group of five players I mean the idea is if you're doing it with a a group then you'll be able to be you'll be able to harvest more and yield more and if you're doing it by yourself it'll just take you longer because you'll kind have to do all these aspects yourself and
01:02:25
that'll just Tak some time and if you're doing it you can do it in single player just multiplayer working together as a team you'll make more money probably and yeah and and this is something that's true for a lot of the occupations to where you can do it all yourself it you know you can run from Station to Station it will be inefficient at times it will become incredibly dangerous to do that if you're operating the mining beam and your exothermic reaction detector spikes and it shows you oh look the the amount of energy that's being produced is growing exponentially even though you've completely shut your you know shut your uh shut your beam off then what that's doing is signaling you had better get out of there very quickly if it takes you 30 you know seconds to basically switch over into the pilot seat then you've got a real problem and so realistically for a lot of these types of uh group oriented activities um you
01:03:15
don't necessarily have to have an you know all of these roles filled by players there are NPC crew members that you'll be able to hire and of course you know the quality varies depending upon what you're willing to pay them on a monthly basis um so if you wind up getting you know if you get a guy uh really really cheaply then he may make mistakes if you pay a if you get a guy that's extraordinarily skilled and you're willing to you know uh you know pay those higher wages then he's going to wind up doing a much better job of you know of guiding the really valuable fragments that are rejected you know from the asteroid into your cargo hold he's going you know the guy that's operating the refinery is going to do a much better job job of actually you know running a large amount of ore through your Refinery and the most energy and therefore economically efficient manner
01:04:04
possible than a less skilled player or MPC would be able to do again they're asking if the NPCs can learn and NCS will uh the more they do stuff uh they'll get get better so if you get if you have a ship and you have an NPC that's in the turret and you survive you know you win 10 battles or 20 battles I'll get they they will get better they'll be like basically the way the NPCs will run is they'll have very basic stats in the background you know like their morale uh their accuracy um uh you know those you know not probably to the level you would in a in a full RPG but enough that we can sort of uh rate the NPCs I mean we already do it
01:04:54
for enemy Pilots like if fighting uh say the vanal and vanal swarm there's obviously the the boss NPCs of a different level of uh of skill compared to the the Bas grunt ones and so it would be the same that you would basically just have NPCs that if they're your crew for a while and you happen to continue to do better well they sort of get trained up so to speak and it'll also affect because you like Tony I think mentioned before you can you know hire a crew member and they're cheap but they may not be very good or you can hire a more expensive crew member and they they've obviously got higher stats or you can get your friend and basically what you'll wind up having is each one of these things and this is actually kind of a this is actually a pretty critical point that a lot of these occupations will I I I actually call it specialization for each one of these things so you've got somebody who is actually going to be an extraordinarily
01:05:41
Good Pilot given you know the flight you know mechanics that you're going to need to employ for this particular type of job same thing for a Refinery operator it's not going to be flip a switch and all of a sudden your or gets processed you're actually going to have what you know what I call like a mini game basically you're going to have a lot of uh mechanics that you need to manipulate within the game and some players will do that better some of these challenges will be primarily uh you know they will primarily require dexterity other ones will primarily require intelligence other ones will require you know some combination you know of of those two um another occupation that kind of like meets this criteria would be a Pioneer um there there are a number of these occup Pioneer is uh what Tony's calling the Explorer yeah it's it's basically a a Pioneer's purpose is to discover new
01:06:29
objects of interest and this actually factors in with what Chris was saying earlier in regards to a Pioneer would probably be the closest thing we have to you just want to see what's out there I don't really care to exploit it I don't care to fight I just want to find things um and and it's but it's interesting because it's not a one-off it's not a disposable mission to where he just kind of you know lives off in his own uh a lot of the game design is turning out to be very symbiotic in nature and what I mean mean by that is a Pioneer's sole purpose is finding things of interest that might be an asteroid field why is that valuable well because after he discovers it and it becomes common knowledge then the people that actually want to do mining missions utilize that output of a pioneer as an input for them they need a location they need an asteroid field um you know at which they can ply their trade um a Pioneer might
01:07:20
discover a comet that would be extraordinarily useful as uh something for a s scientists to research you can you know uh one of the examples I use is uh the movie Armageddon and you had the space shuttles approaching from the back side of the asteroid that was approaching Earth and you had large fragments uh breaking off and so you can picture a science Mission basically needing to get a a a 30 second you know uh video of the backside of one of these asteroids that's throwing off all these pieces um and so the danger there is you need to be an extraordinarily you know Good Pilot um another thing uh for a uh a a Pioneer would also be uh identifying a deric ships which would be uh of a lot of interest to salvagers and to people
01:08:09
that are willing to put in the time to try to repair these things get them back to port and if you can actually do that you may get a large payday um so there's there there's there's a lot there's a lot of attention being given to these different you know occupations within the game that while there may be a lot of danger whether that's mining or whether that's a scientist that's trying to you know get you know uh a 30- second video from a dangerous you know you know from a dangerous spot on a given asteroid um a scientist that's trying to get a sample of a coronal mass ejection but in such proximity that it's actually you know very dangerous we trying to get precise measurements on a micro black hole um all these things have their own uh dangers associated
01:08:59
with them but they're not of the combat variety and so the the real point there being it's like there there will be a lot of danger both on you know on the combat oriented missions and on the non-combat and it's up to the players to basically choose you know what what they're most interested in doing that is a great segue and a great stopping point because we're out of time for this panel who who here needs a bio anybody yeah me too all right we're going to take about a five minute break folks and we'll start up the next panel uh shortly you didn't even talk about piracy any way Jason you didn't talk about tell you to get talk about piry yeah I know

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