Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Core Gameplay Update

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hey everybody welcome to another episode of calling all devs our our series where we take questions from you the star citizen backer and pose them directly to our developers on this week's show we are talking all things gameplay pillar with our gameplay pillar director mr richard tyra richard how you doing man hello i'm doing very well we got a lot of things to cover today so the gameplay we don't need to go into what the gameplay pillar is and everything but suffice to say that a lot of the core elements that make up squadron 42 and star citizen come from the gameplay pillar the the kind of day-to-day uh player essentially the core gameplay pillar is anything that's character related or actor related um and covers a lot of mixed features such as like

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   fire or physical damage um and radar and scanning for both ships and um on fps so if you look at like the two main feature pillars you have obviously the vehicle pillar and then there's a core gameplay pillar and we kind of coordinate to create you know if we're not doing it they're doing it and if they're not doing it we're doing it kind of thing that's the best way to describe it much better than my way anyway uh so today we're talking about uh some of the features that you're that that that are in development under your pillar right now some are coming uh in the upcoming alpha 315 some will be coming a little bit later you know as they're ready uh let's start off with the ones that people are perhaps most familiar with and are asking about let's start off with player healing uh what can you tell us about

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   where we're at how we're doing uh and what we can expect in the upcoming alpha 315 so player healing is kind of the next iteration of what we classified as actor status so actor status t0 when we released um around citizencon probably about a year ago now i think it was like three nine around about that uh but that that kind of covered uh the first iterations of the statuses that the player covers such as like eating drinking hypothermia you know all of those kinds so this is the next iteration of that which covers essentially injuries so we already have in the game right now uh the player has global health so when you look on your heart you have the little first aid symbol and it says you know it's your global health from zero to 100. um probably what people uh some old

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   backers probably will remember is that we also have the little man and the little man comprises up of the uh different uh body parts on you on you so you've got your arms you've got your legs you've got your core your head and they are actually individual um pools of health but they used to be that and that's why i say about some of the old backers is that used to be the only thing that you you could see you didn't have the global health we introduced the global health widget when we released that say to see zero but the way it works under the hood is that your limbs take damage and to say i get shot in the arm and let's say i i lose five health points in the arm what happens under the hood is it goes okay let's move five health points from the arm and then it removes five health points from the global health and it was always doing this you just never saw it so you only would ever die when your global health got to zero

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   it didn't matter that your limbs could get to zero but it was it was waiting for your global health so if i just kept shooting you in the arm even though your arm might only have 20 health points your global health might be 100 health points so i keep shooting you and your arm is now ruined essentially and then i could keep shooting you and eventually you'd die so there was always the intention that your limbs would basically have these statuses based on their own individual health and then that would tie into this kind of the greater gameplay or the greater healing severe gameplay in your limbs so you can have a traumatic head injury you can have a traumatic body injury you can have let you know leg injuries and arm injuries

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   and the way it kind of works is that we're still using the health system but we're kind of tracking this this invisible number behind the number in the back end which is kind of kind of like body limb wear so essentially imagine if i keep shooting in the arm because we're talking about the arm and you might lose all your health and that's fine if you then med pen up and and heal your arm back up as we do now if you if you haven't given them a lot of time so you're not taking care of yourself you keep getting shot on the arm and you keep getting from the arm basically that wear is going to keep building and building and building it until you get essentially a broken arm and which and we have three uh tears or severities of injury uh tier one or severity one is the highest that's the worst then we've got tier two and then tier three so essentially when you get a tier three injury it's basically going

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   hey you know now you're gonna start suffering consequences of that injury and you can't just get a med pen and go cool i'm just gonna use my med pen your med pen will will heal your limb health back up to full health but the injuries on your arm will give you different effects at different statuses and that's why i'm saying it's the next iteration of active status as you start to suffer from dehydration as you start to suffer from hunger or you know just of hyperthermia or hypothermia you start to undergo these different say so you know your stamina you can't run as far you know you can't sprint as long you know uh we have lowered max health and we have you know all the different eyeball effects that start to come on whether there's the blood vision or whether it's you know the double vision and things like that so or whether you when you're cold you know you start to shiver or if

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   you you know you you're under a severe pressure so what we have is we have all these different statuses that trigger these internal uh body reactions to you suffering these injuries so with this with the upcoming healing status what we're doing is that you can then suffer this injury now so let's say you've suffered an injury and let's say it's a severity three or tier three so that's the the um the lowest uh severe injury so let's say if your broken arm it's like a fracture so make sure you've got a hairline fracture in your arm so you can still use your arm you can still do it but maybe now you can't hold your gun as firm so you've got a bit more weapon sway uh and so on and so forth so you start to notice me thinking okay i've got this injury now my little man is showing my arm is is red and i'm like and it's showing i've got a tier three

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   it's like okay i need to go back to a medical facility to remove this injury there's no way for you to remove the injuries out on the field you you have that injury you have to then go and get it sorted so you can then go back to a medical facility and your medical facility there are different classifications of the medical facilities we have tier one two and three so a hospital or a physical location is going to be what classified as a tier one facility that's the best facilities you can get so they will always be able to hear everything out and you can see where i'm going here tier two it's the second and third is the worst and the way that we're tearing it up is that tier three can heal anything that is any injuries that are tier three tier two can heal any tier twos and tier one can heal tier tier one and below by the way i always

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    wanted it the other way around but we'd already committed to the tearing so i was like okay fine that's fine i could do a whole segment someday on the way that we tear things in all aspects of our day exactly so essentially what we have is we have this injury so you've got this injury and it's affecting how your character plays the game it's affecting the effectiveness of your character whether that's in combat whether that's well in combat or whether that's in mining or you know how much you can carry or how much you can sprint all the different you know whether you can see how well you can see all of these different things so if you've got a traumatic head injury for example you know you might start to suffer double vision you know your stun resistance won't be as high so if you get hit from force reaction she'll fall over easier things like that so what we're introducing is we have these this severity and then when you get to the

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    tier one severities that's where you've taken significant amounts of damage you've been you've gone down you've been revived all that kind of thing and you're in a situation where like tier one you might have like a multiple fraction where you can't use your arms anymore you might be able to use your arms for like that one moment like if it's your life or death depend on like look i need to get over that wall and i'm just gonna do it great but you're not gonna be able to like climb a 20 meter ladder so if your ship's got a ladder then you're in big problems so this is where we started to introduce the healing and medical gameplay so what we're doing from the healing medical grade play is that we have the multi-tool attachment for the multi-tool it's the healing attachment or so the multiple healing attachment for the mods tool and then we have the dedicated healing gun so the multi-tool itself um will be an improved version of the

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    met of the medipen so the medipen essentially what you'll be able to do with the media pen is you'll be able to use it to heal up your health it won't heal injuries um and you'll be able to use it on other people as well so you'll be able to go and and jab it into other people and help heal up some of their injuries um the multi-tool the what the multi-tool does is it allows you to heal up injury and not injuries it allows you to heal up the health so you can heal up the limb health and your global health and it also allows you to scan that person and understand what is wrong with them because the other thing that we're introducing as part of this pass of the healing act status t1 is the downed state so any time where you would have probably died in star citizen or should i say 99 of times because there is going to be a one percent and i'll explain that in a minute most of the times where you would have died now you would go into the down

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    state and the down state is where you are unconscious you are not dead you are just unconscious but you are slowly dying and that slowly dying might take two hours now at any point when you go down you can choose to release and respawn but when we later down the line we introduce death of a space man and we want people you know and dying is like a real problem you can wait for somebody to come and rescue you so you might have a buddy let's say we're playing together i fall down a cliff or i get shot i go down you can then come and revive me either using a medical pen or using the multi-tool healing attachment so i then i'm i'm you know i'm now no longer below zero health i'm i'm healthy i can now stand up i might have injuries i might not

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    depending on what's taking me down but i'm back in the game so death now has a way for you to be brought back if you receive and this is the one percent if you receive more damage than your entire health bar again so let's say you go from 100 to -100 aka you get shot with an idris rail gun and you're in the eva you will you will go straight to death that's like you know go to jail don't collect 200 that's it so essentially i should not say go to jail because i think you have to go to jail so and that was a monopoly reference for the purposes of very clear it means that you just die and respawn in a hospital or in a location so if we go back down that road so we have this downstate so now people can revive you but let's

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    say i revive you and you're back but now you've got the worst case uh severity you've got a tier one injury in your legs so you can't even stand up you're in prone you're locked in prone because your legs are shattered so how do you how do you go around and i say shattered as in they're really bad okay so we don't want to get into the details of the medical issues of what you're actually undergoing but let's say they're the worst severity injuries and it prevents you from standing right this is not getting into the details yeah exactly this is the high level yeah but i do want to i do want to remind people that we're going to have a segment on isc about all of this in like august or september so so anyway so so what happens is obviously if you then go into a tier three what we're introducing was introducing these different levels of drugs and this is

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    where you have we'll have medical like pen versions that you can stab into them so if you've just got the multi-tool and you've down somebody it might say oh this person can't stand his legs anymore because the pain is just too great it's crippling him okay i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna stab him with my um anaesthetic pen will have specific law names for them or i can use the dedicated healing gun and the dedicated healing gun is i can scan them and i'll be able to choose which drugs i can then administer to the person who's injured to get them back on their feet now it doesn't heal their injuries it just removes the symptoms and it removes the symptoms so that that person can then get back to a location and medical facility so if you've got a tier three that would be like maybe the cutlass red would be t3

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    you know the 890 jump or the carrick medical facilities that might be like a tier two facility and then the tier one facilities are like the dedicated hospitals the physical locations so you can get back to a medical facility and then go to a medical bed and then heal yourself from these injuries and then you can continue so essentially you know these things aren't going to jump up on you they're going to be things that happen over time like i said it's like a wear in the background that's it's almost like your vehicle's wearing and then what we also have is we have this thing called the blood drug level and that's what is monitored um on your hud as part of all of your active status widgets so this is your suit monitoring the amount of uh basically external uh drugs inside your system and that could be alcohol it could be med pens it could be all

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    these other drugs that we're adding i think we're adding four uh i know that we're adding four bespoke drugs to the system and then you you'll have to balance how much you can apply to them with the dosage because you don't want to overdose them because if you overdose them they'll pass out and then you'll have to decide um you know which ones you want to use and that will give you a timer so you'll be able to understand like okay this is going to give them an hour here and out here that's enough for us to get back to the ship and get back to a hospital location or a medical facility if you have a ship with medical facilities so essentially what we're introducing is the healing profession this is you you're the first responder you this could be without your friend so they've died or whatever or later down the line the whole profession around where death is is going to be really important and obviously with this death comes inventory so you'll lose your

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    your items on death if you if you choose to respawn so this is people will be able to bring you back give you drugs to alleviate the symptoms um that are specific for your injuries so that you can function to get back to a location and if you don't have those drugs you'll then be able to body drag somebody back to your um back to your ship and then you'll be able to take them to a location that has medical facilities and actually drop them off at an emergency elevator and you'll have a synchronized animation of putting them into the medical bed and then basically send them directly to hospital or heal them in a ship if you're putting them in there so that covers kind of like it's the healing game play the healing profession that revolves around you know healing your limbs what the status is you're going to receiving

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    the different um hospital tierings and and then on top of that the one thing that we're adding is is the respawn which is where you're going to be respond so now when you die you won't just respawn in a hab uh you're respawning in a hospital facility uh if you've respawned in that hospital facility um you'll be in a medical gown and then you'll be able to access your own inventory obviously if you've died somewhere outside of a landing zone your gear will be left with your body if you've died in a landing zone for whatever reason um what we're saying is that the security have come and collected you and they've taken you to hospital and they provide you so your gear will be in the room um so you'll be able to then take it with you and you'll also be able to choose which hospital you want to respawn at so

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    if you want to go and choose um you know i want to always respond at microtech you can go and choose and say this is my respawn point where i want to respawn tier 2 and above facilities or ships will only have the ability to respawn so that means tier 3 medical beds won't allow you to respawn and tier 3 medical beds are what's in the cutless red right now so that's going to be a loss of functionality which is what it has currently has but this was always the intention that was always a placeholder solution when we when we added it to the to the pu i think like the start of 2020 if i remark from my remembering correctly so that kind of covers the reason and clearly we want to be able to have major hospital facilities at all of the major landing zones we want to have clinics at truck stops and things like that so essentially you're going around and

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    choosing where you want to to respawn and then obviously that ties in later down the road in terms of like death of spaceman dna integrity which we've we've talked about previously but i won't go into too much detail on that but that that covers the detail that i've talked about here is what's coming uh in the first iteration of healing and the healing gameplayer healing uh we've got other feet we got other features that that are under your gameplay pillar right now uh we've got fps radar we've got hacking we've got a personal inventory where do we go next what can you tell us cool so obviously i think healing was a complex feature so there's lots of things that are going on

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    i know that the community is interested to hear where we're at with that so i think it's good to get that out out there so people can have the say i think in terms of inventory obviously we've talked about inventory already a lot um what we're trying to aim for to go alongside healing is that you know you leave your stuff behind and essentially we won't be having this infinite bag of holding that you do right now with the pma we want to remove the pma so that you're using the inner thought system that we're implementing that you've already probably seen using if you've used the grin rock and going and bringing up your interface uh so essentially the headline situation with healing is that we're going to local inventory so you'll only have access to the things that you've put into the inventory at a landing zone uh if you go into a ship you'll only have access to the things that are inside that ship based off the inventory it's still accessed by location so you have to be

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    in that location then you can access that inventory but the fundamental headline is if you're outside on a planet you only have access to the things that you're carrying that are things that are in your pockets or that are things that you're in your backpack and that's it so and when you die or go to the new downed you will obviously leave your items there if you go and respawn back at a so that that's really the crux of healing obviously that people are already familiar with the um the system itself and the biggest thing is obviously the removal the pma you'll be able to move your items directly on to your character it would with the inner thought um system and also will be as part of that release will be coming with the asset manager so you'll have a mobileglass app to be able to show you all of where your stuff is to be like okay where did i leave the

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    gladius or my gladiator so where was that armor or this gun and you'd be able to go and find them and go okay that was an area 18. okay that's a portal or whatever so that's kind of healing in a nutshell we've talked a lot about the intricacies of healing before but that kind of covers the small slice of it the other two in terms of fps radio and scanning and hacking so i'll cover fps redone scanning first so fps radio scanning um we we are exactly the same as the ship scanning now so or the ship radar and scanning so we we worked with vtt and you know myself and my team we designed the radar and scanning system for both ships and um for fbs we wanted to make sure that it was you know it's using the same systems it has the same promises and same

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    premise so that you know if you have a really large signature it's dampening all the other signatures so i always give the example which is like you know i'm in the shower and my wife's shouting to me i'm like i can't hear you because all i can hear is the shower but she can hear me right she can clearly hear me responding back and she's responding i'm like but i can't hear you so that's what we've implemented as part of it so we have this um gameplay where you can at the cause and effect on the fbs side you'll be able to go in and turn on a generator and maybe hide with that noise um you know maybe you can't hear yourself your emission is low but maybe they can still find you or whatever so there's definitely um some signature people will be gamepl that they have

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    been pinged and you flare up all your signatures so you know when you do a ping what you're actually saying is i'm shouting into the dark but i'm giving away my own location so there's a bit of cat and mouse there where it's like okay i'm gonna i'm going i'm here by my myself do i want to give away my location or do i want to go no actually i'm in a position here where i can flee i'm going to see if there's anybody in there first and i'll ping out those five guys or whoever i'm getting out of dodge whereas sometimes you might do it you're like i haven't seen anybody because somebody's maybe hiding maybe they've turned off all their um you know turn off a flashlight they're not using their guns the one thing to note about the differences between fps and ships which i highlight is that ships passively detect all signatures so the

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    em electromagnetic ir infrared and cs which is cross section those are the three that it passively detects cross sections like visual cross on the fps side of things it only passively detects sound so sound replaces cross-section and then emr is the same and you can only ping for emir and db so your radar when you're just passively walking around only looks for sound so if somebody's you know fired off you know through a grenade use their weapon is running you know it might pick it up and you'd be like oh there's somebody in there that direction but when you're pinged you're looking for all of the signatures and that's when you're giving yourself away and that side of things and then the scanning side of things is pretty much identical to the ship side of things you bring up a scan mode you can scan that person find out all the different information about

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    them what they're carrying what's their active status what's their org you know do they have a criminal record because you can run their name and and so forth so we have that kind of game play alongside so you can you know correctly id someone if you're bounty hunting or so so forth and then with hacking hacking is um almost as a standalone encapsulated feature so what we have is we'll be basically repurposing the hacking chips that we have right now uh so the hacking chips will will still be around you'll have a hacking chip you'll you'll need to use that and and the way we've we're working with the environment team right now to go through all the locations is where you can hack something in it's essentially you're going and using the maintenance access so let's say you come to a pc or a ship or whatever you're you're plugging into the

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    maintenance assets where somebody would come in and go okay i'm an i.t administrator i need to get into the system so they have you know a skeleton key should say they're putting it in and they're helping fix the problems you've obviously got an illegal skeleton key essentially you're then plugging it in and then that brings the hacking mini game up on your visor where you essentially have to manipulate the 3d board to avoid the ai and collect basically fragments of these of the passcode that you're trying to find and then when you find these passcodes you can then put them in and then that gives you access to whatever that is whether that's opening a door terminal you know terminal access power access elevators whatever you know the content guys decide they want to do and but essentially that's the premise

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    behind it and we have much we have a scaling difficulty across hacking so we have versions without ai where it's just simple and you can just do it yourself then we have versions that are time limited with multiple ai of the board's much more complex and the premise is is that a manufacturer in the world has created this 3d program to help people hack without actually having to script or program so um that's kind of where we're at with hacking and that's obviously we'll slot in to some of the fps features to create some of the more interesting fps missions that were that you know that the guys are working on in the background gotcha uh so that's a lot of stuff coming from the gameplay pillar right now and of course i do want to read it reiterate that uh player healing and personal inventory on our way for alpha 315

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    will be covering those more in-depth on isc next quarter uh hacking will also cover uh as it gets closer to its implementation uh it could be 315 it could be whatever it's when things are ready uh and then uh fps uh radar the same boat when it's when it's ready when all the resources are ticked and it's good to go same deal there um it definitely sounds like a lot of what you said today it sounds like uh it's dangerous to go along or it's dangerous to go alone bring friends uh absolutely i mean to be honest that that is that we're pushing the game towards what chris has always had in his head you know that vision of that game you know anything that we add is is in line with what chris wants to add to the game i mean all of these features uh have been prioritized by chris to add

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    to the game and you know space's space is scary it's dangerous you know you're exploring these these unknown planets or known planets but you know if if you just went to africa or you went to you know an arctic expedition or you were going to you know go on the amazon or anywhere that is that is not just your familiar surroundings you're going to have to prepare for those those environments so you know if is it going to be hot is it going to be arid you know is there going to be bugs i'm going to have to take tablets or you know do i need certain clothing to help me and just as you're going on an expedition on just earth you know we're talking about you know going to all these different planets these different moons and all these different you know cave ex expeditions and you need to you know as part of that gameplay loop you need

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    to understand like you know you're only going to have the things that you take with you and so it's up to you and also you know when you store stuff in your ship if your ship get blows up those are the things that you're gonna you can potentially lose on that ship so you know you're gonna have to have meaningful um decisions and then those those decisions will have consequences and that will create a feeling that you are you know more immersive exploring this universe rather than just like oh i'm in the bottom of the cave i'll just bring up my pma and i have access to whatever i bought thousands of it which is not you know it like playing a game with cheats on it it diminishes what you're trying to achieve and the fun that you're trying to have because the challenge is there for you to overcome so yeah it's good to it's good to start

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    getting some of those gameplay loops in there all right so yeah so that's a lot of things to look forward to we of course are still pushing hard on alpha 314 uh keep your eyes and ears open to the robertsspaceindustries.com website while isc is on hiatus for updates about that rich thank you for taking the time to be here on the show uh no worries we'll see it we'll see you next quarter for the for the isc segments on all these so take care man absolutely have a good one bye you