Inside Star Citizen: Plan and Scan | Spring 2021

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:07

   we actually have three terms in our system we have radar we have ping and we have scanning radar is in a sense your passive detection that is i'm flying around things pop up on my radar and i can see them then you have ping where you have to physically hit a button basically pulsates a ping out into the world and i can see things much further out scanning is the layer where once you see an object you can scan it and retrieve information on it what i like about the current implementation of radar is the dynamic signatures they fluctuate in and out depending upon what you're doing and because of that you could actually go into your like ui and see your ir and em fluctuate that flexibility

2. 00:00:55

   is really cool because you could turn on and off stuff and that changes your signature and your strength and how far someone can see you something we don't like is the uh the absence of any information about how well you're detectable by either other players or ai at the moment for the current implementation of the scanner it's really awesome to be able to scan ships right now and see if they have any cargo especially with the lost system we could determine if they have any illegal cargo it opens up immersion gameplay where i could fly around scan some things and go oh that guy has some illegal things should i be nefarious and try to steal them or should i try to shoot him and give him a warning we want to improve the ping system so

3. 00:01:44

   that it gives you like a rough idea of hey there might be some ships maybe some bounties that you might want to go after and because we'll give you that info uh at a further distance it really allows you to make some uh against player agency and allows you to determine whether you want to even investigate it or not or you want to look in a different direction so that's kind of how our existing system works um you know there's things that were we really really like and of course there's things that we want to improve on and even flush out even further and that's exactly where this new work comes into play with the new radar we've tweaked how things get detected so it's no longer two spheres colliding it's just to put it simply if your signature is overlapping with somebody they're going

4. 00:02:31

   to see you one thing we want to prove is to make sure that we get proper query feedback so you know that if you're in a very high ambient signature area like a gas cloud it could be hidden and therefore make better use of the spaces that we provide in the universe sean tracy liked the idea of you know if you have a bunch of capital ships and a couple frigates that maybe you can't see some of those smaller ships what happens if we had that moment where you could have some ships hide within the bigger ships so when you're far away you're like okay there's an idris maybe i could take it out you get a little bit closer you realize that there's a whole fleet so it's going with that balance of how do we hide things and how do we show things so that we can get big amazing

5. 00:03:19

   moments and even stealth gameplay so with scanning uh we want to increase the granularity of the information you get from scanning so pilot the other players or ai that are going to be on the ship um what type of hormone it has when it's carrying its going back to the other example with the idris with a bunch of ships out there you can scan it and go i know that's a ship what ship is it i scan from afar and go oh it's an idris cool i don't see anybody else because i have to get closer you get closer and you start seeing other contacts pop up you can take a deeper dive into what the contents of that ship are so before you're too far back and you're like okay that's an idris now you're close up and go oh that's an idris with a gigantic gatling gun that shoots auroras doesn't exist but i like to pretend it

6. 00:04:07

   does also we want to expose more interesting information we want to let you know that there's a wanted person on board we want to let you know that maybe there's some volatile cargo on board we want to let you know that there's something interesting relative to your specialization of the ship it also unlocks more stuff for the designers to say this type of scanner is going to be more for medical use this type of scanner is going to be more for criminality or something like that what we're doing with ping is uh for the first time we're going to actually allow you to not only get the blob information which gives you the rough uh you know direction and size of the entities that may be contained within the blob so it gives you like a rough area of where you might want to investigate but

7. 00:04:54

   if the signatures are high enough then you can actually scan the contents of that blob which is something we weren't able to do before you won't see a lot of these things happen all the same time it opens up the doors so that we could push things in through patches and through waves what we're looking for is a fun player experience for finding things ultimately players want to be able to look out in the best into space and then determine hey this is something interesting that i want to do and this is the direction i need to go to go experience that that fun thing um that's what we're working toward as part of our road to invictus this brief primer on the future of radar and scanning demonstrates an essential component in creating a dynamic and engaging sense of exploration

8. 00:05:44

   and danger for spacecraft in the persistent universe in squadron 42 alike and we're going to learn more about how it all works tomorrow on star citizen live when sean tracy and members of the vehicle tech team join us to answer your questions live but up next it's that time let's jump into another sprint report up first let's take a look at some recent progress on hospitals starting with these myriad hospital props like tables for the waiting area and medical trolleys you can expect to see rolling through the hallways there was even a recent concept for this high-tech gurney and when i think about the the push-pull possibilities here it reminds me of the first time i was kicked out of a hospital and the second the team also progressed

9. 00:06:34

   on the gray box for new babbage's emergency drop-off hangar which needs to be cleaned up a little bit one of the various medical rooms the exterior vistas outside the windows and then dropping in some placeholder signage as guides for other artists when it comes time to really dress this place up in addition to the first pass signage first pass greenery has begun and the thinking is already that we need much more verticality with the plants so they'll be trying that next there's also a look at the gray box nurses station in the ward area the team is currently thinking that this will be the first area taken to final art so that it serves as visual guidance for the remaining sections of brentworth hospital ores in general is also coming to the end of gray box

10. 00:07:24

    with this look at the lobby assurance booths and other areas we're gonna we're gonna let you discover for yourself when auras in general here enters final art we expect to see much more of the glass and special lighting effects you saw in our look at the commercial platform arcade last quarter heading now to outer space some of our space gaping artists created some early warm-up tests for the creation of gas clouds that will encompass the jump point from stanton to pyro beginning with the work already created for citizencon 2949 it needed to be updated with all the new technical advancements made since then and better extrapolated out into three-dimensional space so that it can be approached from any direction

11. 00:08:11

    we've not quite got back that beautiful butterfly shape we had but we'll be checking in again later as it further progresses those who have already jumped into alpha 313-1 currently available on the public test universe know that ship the station docking is coming along with invictus launch week later this month and here you can see some of the final lighting passes being done for the various rest stop and security station docking areas now i haven't seen this yet so i'm just gonna watch along with you oh that's cool oh yeah

12. 00:09:19

    following up on some of the armor concepts we saw last week here's a look at the high heat refinery worker that's currently making its way through the character pipeline the text branding you're seeing here is modular so it can represent any company that's appropriate for the location at hand as is the helmet with multiple variations to add variety to the npcs milling about and because it was important not to have any exposed skin in an environment as hot as this there's also a neat way to access the mobi glass so they can still check their messages when needed and last week subscribers got their first look at new armor from tehachapi a brand new small-scale manufacturer that has burst onto the scene and begun taking the markets by storm now you can learn more about this new

13. 00:10:06

    manufacturer and their offerings in the latest edition of jump point magazine [Music] finally let's take another look at the habitation platform of orizon the upcoming landing zone for the gas giant crusader we definitely want to preserve the full reveal of everything that makes up this amazing landing zone for when you first visited in game i think we can maybe share this brief sprint on updating the cypress trees that will find their way throughout the platform and finally back to the hab rooms themselves a much requested feature

14. 00:10:55

    many of the rooms come with windows to the outside world so what did we learn this week well we learned that the next evolution of radar and scanning aims to put systemic tools in the hands of our designers to enable the exploration and discovery of more than just spacecraft and vehicles that hospitals are still the harbinger of new medical gameplay scheduled to come online in alpha 314 and that before all that happens we're on the road to invictus with the upcoming edition of ship to station docking and all the potential that brings here there might even be a capital-sized tour coming check out the schedule on the rsi website if you haven't already for inside star citizen i'm jared huckaby we'll see you all next week

15. 00:12:02

    you