Power Play | Journey to 4.0 (CitizenCon 2952)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:03

   foreign I'm assistant director for pu content and with the Thorson Lyman here today we will be talking to you about something we think it will change the way Star Citizen functions and works and how the players will play the game uh in the future and that is resource management resource management is the underlying system that allows uh items to produce consume and store resources in the game it is the digital representation of real-life cables pipes tanks batteries or anything like this that you can

2. 00:00:52

   imagine it's the foundation of the ships where you have certain resources like Fuel and energy powering certain items on the ship but it's also the system that will lie below any station or any vehicle anything that you can imagine in our universe that actually requires a certain type of resource resource management is not just a system that helps the ships function it is a thing that's integral to the functionality of the entire universe it will be the way uh surface Outpost function underground facilities space stations Landing zones everything in Star Citizen will function using Resource Management so we will start with the smaller vehicles and it will the gameplay for those smaller Vehicles way more interesting than what we have right now and from that we can

3. 00:01:41

   move on to like bigger ships and finally the capital ships will have a real purpose in the world and where it will have a real meaning that you have the multiple roles inside those ships it will drastically increase the time to kill for all vehicles in Star Citizen and it will encourage people to disable ships rather than destroy them missions like Siege of Verizon will increase in scope and scale up a lot more with the use of resource management as players will be able to resources change the way resources are distributed cut power cut certain Fuel and critical Parts in order to progress further in those missions we can suddenly scale a lot bigger than what we have right now and the reasons are that we have more control over the powers of certain

4. 00:02:29

   platforms there and we can introduce some interesting gameplay that facilitates these functions personalities resource management is going to open up the possibility of player structures player owned outposts on planet or stations in space where the player will have to manage resources bringing fuel do repairs and this will not be something that only caters towards the engineer this will be something that is valuable for everyone in the world of Star Citizen resource management will finally allow players to build their own bases and their own homesteads and actually keep that that Loop engaging and fun and really this is the main thing that makes multi-crew gameplay possible we envision the players taking on roles like engineer mechanic a tactical officer and while you have your engineer trying to

5. 00:03:20

   maintain all the resources functioning and flowing perfectly and all the items in good operation you will have mechanics running throughout the ship trying to change fuses repair various things that have broken down you will have tactical officers moving Shields from one side of the ship to another in order to counter whatever incoming damage you have obviously the pilot is going to be doing his job trying to move the ship out of Harm's Way the Gunners are going to be taking out enemy incoming Fighters or other ships this is how we envision this entire ecosystem just coming together and providing what we hope is through multi-crew gameplay and for all of you out there that are waiting for the idrises and javelins and want to use these ships this is the system that is going to make using those

6. 00:04:07

   ships possible so all that said this is a really important system them four-star citizen but let's dig into the details and see what exactly this is Resource Management can be broken down into several key elements power energy resources life support item maintenance relay handling access control and gravity so let's start with power energy and resources the players can choose to overload items in order to get more efficiency out of them at the risk of burning them out they can also under load items to save some some resources if they don't need the full efficiency of an item the players will have to pay attention to the balance of

7. 00:04:54

   resources power fuel coolant heat generated in order to maintain a well-oiled and balanced ship and overall prioritizing certain items and their resource consumption life support is the most important thing you have to pay attention to in your ships now since atmosphere is finished in all the spaces that you might discover and here the life support system is a key factor here the life support you have to maintain it meaning you have to make sure that the consumables inside the Live support generator are always there to make sure that it can generate breathable atmosphere for you

8. 00:05:41

   or the temperature is actually increased to a human livable Factor so you don't freeze to death or you don't you you are not cooked as part of item maintenance the player will be able to uh control items throughout the ship turn them on turn them off they will be able to remove broken items and replace them with uh new items or sometimes dodgy items depends on depending on their income and we'll be able to control which sub items are installed in those items either as fuses or sub-components that give them various bonuses to to that specific item they will be able to run a repair gameplay and replace broken fuses when the item stops working or

9. 00:06:30

   takes enough enough damage relay handling is the the actual management part that you as the engineer on the ship have has to do you have to do there it's um basically defining these circuits in the most effective way especially for bigger ships so a relay is something that defines which items are connected to each other and what we want to achieve here is allowing you to create the best possible outcome for your ship with Access Control we're introducing ship roles the captain will be able to assign certain roles to each of his crewmates and for example say one

10. 00:07:20

    of the player becomes the engineers the engineer which gives them specific access to certain controls while the the person that is the pilot will not have access to those controls at the same time a gunner will only have access to a specific gun or all the guns on the ship and finally gravity so gravity is the concept that you experienced already in every ship so there's always a ground there is always there's always a down there's always an up and we would like to give you some more control over that so because it requires some some energy and if you want to run your ship more energy efficient we want you to allow to switch off gravity or there might be other use cases where a zero gravity environment is more useful than another one so if it

11. 00:08:11

    wasn't clear by now the scope of resource management touches pretty much every aspect of life in Star Citizen so we're doing a lot of talking but I bet what everyone would like to know is where are we with all of this right now currently we have working in engine prototypes of the following uh systems power gravity life support and the relay Network with a power system we can overpower and underpower items we can set the priorities of item producers and consumers inside the ship and we can set the path of resources inside the ship through the resource relay Network and with the power system we already can distribute the base energy and base fuel throughout the ship so we can make sure

12. 00:09:01

    that each item actually gets the resources they need creating your own resource path is basically defining the roots the or the most efficient rules that the energy all the resources have to take throughout your ship we can also demonstrate many aspects of the life support system including making new players suffocate thank you

13. 00:10:23

    fire expulsion [Music] making new players suffocate

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    venting and filling rooms with atmosphere and making players suffocate again good

15. 00:12:54

    morning friendly Target friendly

16. 00:14:04

    in the last year we've made tremendous progress with the resource management system but with a system that is this big and complex we do not want to rush it we want to just get it right and get it right from the beginning so let's talk about what's next for the resource management system as you can tell resource management is is a huge Endeavor for us so like everything else we'll probably not get everything in the initial release but this is what we're aiming for interactable and accessible items on ships relay gameplay changing fuses on the relays resource balancing defining control groups that will be accessible through the mfds allowing people to create presets for your Resource Network for each ship an

17. 00:14:53

    engineering UI with at least a list or schematic view of your ships external engineering screen for ships allowing Engineers to define the tuning parameters that can be accessed by the pilot with the Press of a button like loading presets and creating presets and after the initial release everything else will fall into place with subsequent patches we started talking about Resource Management about two years ago it is pretty much the evolution of what used to be the old pipe system and uh this has been an interesting journey and finally we're starting to see the the fruits of our labor and we're starting

18. 00:15:40

    to see all the possibilities of gameplay that we can open up to the players in the future it's exciting to work on something that's so Central to the world of Star Citizen and that can impact the gameplay in of so many people irrelevant of what they choose to do in the world of Star Citizen resource management is the most exciting feature that I've ever worked with it's such and groundbreaking feature that will change the entire game from its core I think we never had this opportunity to change the game into this direction where we are heading right now where we will finally have all the tools in place to actually allow meaningful multi-crew gameplay and meaningful

19. 00:16:29

    decisions for all the players where every decision counts this is the the stuff that that makes me makes me really proud of what what we are working on right now thank you for letting us share our progress with you and I we hope you're happy with all this progress and have a nice season gone