Inside Star Citizen: Alpha 4.0 - Engineering

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   engineering the next major step forward in multi-crew gameplay built on top of the in development resource networking system itself a Harbinger a fire and a new reality for all life aboard spacecraft it's been the subject of Citizen con presentations q&as on Star Citizen live Explorations on inside Star Citizen and frevent discussion by many of the content creators in our community and on this final episode of ISC before Hiatus and we turn all of our attentions towards citizen con we invited Torsten Bastion and G mod to update us once again on the current intention and implementation of engineering and what you can expect when the first iteration makes its way into the persistent Universe Resource Network enables us to actually give you the gameplay that you were always looking for which is having

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   meaningful multi crew gameplay which means that it really makes sense to have multiple people running around on your ship and that wouldn't be possible without the Resource Network so we say the resource network is a system that allows all the items and components that are part of the ship to talk to each other every ground vehicle every base everything that runs in Star Citizen with resources fundamentally Resource Network is a replacement for the pipe system we had in the past that you may have heard

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   about we CH a similar system basically doing most of what we're doing right now with the resource network but in a way that was not as scalable as what we intend to do Landing complete so right now we just have one type of hydrogen fuel but if we want to extend that in the future to having like multiple types that have some specific benefits on the thrusters it's very easy now to add that resource it's just a data setup so Resource Network is the underlying technology for the system to work and Engineering is the game playay we intend to have on top of this technology so that players may experience it your shfe flies because you know the thrusters get fueled the power plants output power that the weapons and the seals and also the thrusters use engineering is all about both maximizing the use you get out of

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   the Resource Network and also so getting the r of network itself going so that you're not dead in the water it's all thing that players will be able to interact with they will have to dedicate roles in their ships so that crew members are assigned to fixing those issues and they can encounter more Dynamic situations that will not happen in the pr systems the goal right now is to have all the components on the ship being physicalized that means that the things that will take damage will be the components that then means that those components are reasons to the failure of your ship we have the power plants which generate the energy your ship consumes you have the she generators which take

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   in some of that energy to convert it to Shield power you have a radar system that allows you to Target the signatures of ships around you you have coolers that generate a coolant resource it is all the weapons that you have it's the Quantum Drive but there are also new components that will be added to the mix and that is the relay with its fuses then there's the Live support generator the biggest thing we are aiming for is switching from your health pool of the bespoke ship to just moving that completely over to the physicalized comp component so damaging the component

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   is damaging your ship I think this is the part where the biggest change for the players happen because there the game play of repair comes in and then you can Revitalize your ship system activ so you can actually use your formerly dead in the water ship after exchanging or repairing the components but we mentioned uh one of the new components which is the life support generator so let's talk about life support the life support does all the task necessary to maintain the life support inside a sa so it's the temperature it's the atmosphere composition it's the pressure inside the room your main responsibility is making sure that there is always enough life

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   support resource produced to maintain a healthy atmosphere in the ship so making sure that all the CO2 that you breathe out is actually converted into O2 again or if you vented a room that the room is filled again if your room is getting too hot it's cooled down again so it's all about managing this resource inside the rooms and uh as already mentioned in the previous episodes it's uh life support management is also a good way to to counter fire another aspect the players have to to counter or react to is misfires on components misfires are something that

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   is already in the game in some form Thruster sges seal generator failure stuff like that or gu expanding it a bit and pretty much the idea is that you know items that are damaged that are too hot or that for example are very old and degraded will start misfiring in some cases that will be that it will take some extra damage in other cases it will but it will stop working for a while other times they will work indefinitely until an engineer comes by and manages to do some repairs and some of the worst cases would be starting a fire or in the case of for example power plants engaging in a critical reactor failure and taking the ship with them there was a chance that if the power plant reaches zero Health it will run into a critical failure and that critical failure then will cause the entire ship to explode it will give the player the time frame to react to that so so either by

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   removing the component and throwing it out of the door and preventing your ship to explode or even countering it by repairing the component and bringing it up to life again for the initial release we have a limited amount of misfires but we are preparing the system or we did prepare the system to scale well for for the future so we can introduce uh multiple misfires and that leads us to damage penetration so damage penetration it's a simplified version of what will be getting eventually with a more physicalized system but essentially what it means is that now certain types of weapons can penetrate through the H of a ship and this is a function of the weapon itself it's penetration values and also of the armor of the ship which

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    can be depleted over time so if you use btics you have a higher penetration which allows you to cut through the armor more deeply and touch the um components inside the ship directly as opposed to this you can uh you also have energy weapons which will be more effective at melting down the armor the goal here is that you first need to bring down the armor health value to get to the fullest potential of your penetrating weapons then you can penetrate the ship and actually damage the components that sit inside the ship and not on the outside of the hall obviously there's degrees to this larger ballistic weapons may have enough penetration against smaller ships that they will be able to penetrate directly but it's you it's it's all of a game of choices and it's going to depend on your ships and your weapons so with damage

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    penetration and misfires happening that brings us to repair as your fight progresses and components take damage in your ship it becomes the duty of some of your cre members to First investigate what are the issues caused by battle damage and go there to physically replace the parts in your ship so you have your multi-tool so you have the Savage and repair and uh the repair part of it also affects now ship components precisely like what you see in the arena command you will be able to repair items that were fully destroyed you will not be able to repair the item to its fullest so you cannot repair an item that got fully destroyed

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    to 100% Health again so to repair your ship components to the fullest you actually you have to bring them to the shop again and uh do the station or if you did think ahead and brought spare items with you you can simply exchange them to pristine new ones but with the caveat uh it only works just as a reminder uh for size one and size two components size three and above cannot be exchanged uh using the tractor beam detach and attach mode so now that we looked at what your responsibility are in the physical space running around in your ship let's take a look at what you do on the virual part which is power management and Analysis of your ship on the engineering screen so the first thing that you will

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    see is the 3D view of your ship that highlights the location of all the ship components and how they are actually connected where the relay positions are what's the status of the relay are you will see the the Holograms of each component as you can see they have different colors what they are the uh representing is the overall state of the item so an item that is very damaged or it's on fire or it's not getting enough power will be in a critical State items are less damaged are receiving only partial resources or are going through a misfire we have moderate colors and items that are otherwise fine will have the functional or blue colors the biggest change that happened to the

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    engineering UI screen is basically the power management part of it we moved away completely from Slider control for every individual item there is indicator now for fuel this is not relevant for the initial release but it will be relevant for the future next to it you see the power plant the power plant segments gives you an idea of how many power segments you can distribute to the ship items and on the right of each of the power Parts you can generally see the temperature bar if it goes into overheating the item will stop both consuming or producing and it will be completely inoperable until it cools down again so that means that assigning power to your coolers in advance is

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    probably a good idea if you're going into a fight all the items on your ship generate heat so this is where you can see the amount of heat that each item has accumulated and you can see the amount of coolant that you are you producing and whether or not you are also running a deficit so what you want to do is put as much power as you can into the coolers until your items do not overheat but do not assign more resources than necessary because you are running a limited pool of resources the same applies to the life support generator so you have to make sure that you produce enough life support resource that the demand is fulfilled in your ship if your demand isn't fulfilled it will cause some failures here's also notifications panel here the main warnings about the state of the ship will be displayed If an item is damaged doesn't get enough power or is misfiring it will create a warning

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    you will be able to see it as a notification take a look at it go to the item or just remove it so you have an option that allows you to basically log the controls so that you or the pilot which has access to the MFD which shares some of the power management functionality do not conflict with your controls so by locking this you are able to override the MFD settings to only have it being authoritative from the engineering station you are able to take the power assignment you have at a given time and save it locally on your computer meaning that when you fly again with this ship or even if it's not your ship but somebody else's ship you can quickly apply your presets this is very useful in the middle of combat and you can quickly switch to a combat preset where you will give for example more power to seals weapons and thrusters or at the same time uh you may want to have

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    some nap mode preset where you know you you reduce the power to everything and just put it on a bare minimum so there's no degradation or misfires related to power use so you can set a preset on your ship and then jump on somebody else's ship and load it up indeed uh your presets are stored locally so as long as you have access to the screen and you're using the same ship you can apply a preset obviously if the components have changed or you know the ship has a different Loadout the preset might not apply perfectly and you might need to adjust it and but it gives you a quick Baseline on how your power is assigned we hope that with these challenges players will have more valed opportunities to experience the game we'll encounter more situations where it feels relevant and enjoyable to have multi crew gameplay in the ships so that you do not think it's just about filling in the battle positions like the the

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    turrets and pilot seats but it's more invol gamep play to actually manage your ships and try to fix the ongoing situation that occur within them and we also hope that this makes larger Vehicles which are have more interior space both more Troublesome but also more enjoyable to play with we are still working hard to get it done for all of you there are ships that already have the functionality there are still ships that we are working on but overall we are super excited to finally get it into the Pu so the arena command experimental mode was already fun to observe what you can do uh with the entire system and now with having the feedback from that adjust ing the gaml a little from the feedback that we received from you I am really looking forward to to see what

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    you all will be doing with it so what did we learn this week well we learned that there's a sweet new interface for dedicated engineering terminals aboard spacecraft that the first implementation of armor and damage penetration means that the ways that you kill and keep your spaceships alive will fundamentally change and that when this arrives in the Pu life aboard spaceships will never be the same again now that's it for this season of inside Star Citizen while everybody here turns their focus towards the upcoming citizen con where we'll be showcasing the future of Star Citizen Beyond Alpha 4.0 yes it's a show you're not going to want to miss so from the small team that makes every ISC thank you so much for letting us stretch our proverbial Wings this year thank you for continuing to let us share the

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    people and process of game development with you and we'll see you all back here after the Big Show so I can't believe we got this [Music] he rate e