Inside Star Citizen: Alpha 3.24 - Hangars and Freight

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   Alpha 324 is currently in testing awaiting its release to Hungry players like you and while ISC is moving onward to covering the ongoing development of the upcoming Alpha 4.0 after that we thought we'd take one last chance to check in with the cargo Guru himself Chad mckenny and get one last look at how personal persistent hangers freight elevators and cargo loading is working this is inside Star Citizen Alpha 324 hangers and Freight let's go [Music] the first thing obviously you spawn into the H you can go out into the main section down at the bottom depending on like you

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   know the the station that you're in meet up with your friends make sure you're in a party together at that point you have lots of options available to you you can either go to an item bank if you want to grab some smaller items which they're numerous throughout the the station including actually in the hab that you're reging the item bank is used to allow players to get smaller items mainly like FPS style items without having to go all the way down to a hanger to use the freight elevator kiosk to pull it up from the freight elevator that's especially useful for things like handguns or undersuits and armor metap pins food stuff that but you just want to quickly get on your person and you don't have to wait for like a huge platform to come up in order to gra it the inventory that the item Bank

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   accesses is the same location inventory that the freight elevator accesses so in fact you can do things like put something into your location inventory via the item bank and then later on decide you want to get it back while you're in your hanger and you can do that via the freight elevator kiosk or any of the other item banks that are in the hangs and while you and your group members are certainly welcome in your new personal persistent hanger questions still abound about what happens when an unwelcome guest sneaks in if someone gets into your hanger there is a trespassing timer that will start ticking after like 30 seconds or so they're going to get automatically kicked

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   out in addition we have change the rules and the hanger to make it allow the same kind of like non- armis Zone behavior that the ships do so we are modifying it to where you can shoot people that even trespass inside your hanger and not get a infraction for it at your home location it will be your personal hanger but if you go to a different place in the verse then that hanger that it's given to you is what we call um a public hanger but you're still the person that like has authority over it so while you do you have the same kind of of rides in many ways these new hangers are your first home ownership in the verse with not only the ability to defend yourself against Intruders without getting a crime stat but also your first abilities to customize and decorate your space as you see

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   fit the personal hangers are kind of the first real ownership in the world for players we've had ownership with the ships which is great you've ble to keep things inside them for some time now and you know kind of customize it that way but this is the first kind of like home the first place in the world that actually is yours and it's allow you to store Furniture you can store boxes cargo if you want to stockpile and be kind of clever with with trading anything that you know any flare anything that you want that will help make it feel like home but it's not the end we have lots of plans for the future you know you've seen things with all the the base building updates and also we've talked in the past about things like um persistent Habs Etc so there's more

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   that's going to be coming along this vein but the personal Habs are the first big step of of ownership in the world for players with Armistice zones now removed from hangers persistence allows players to Now set their most used items out for easy access before any launch you can display your Firearms ship items and more however you you'd like and in future releases Beyond Alpha 324 this will include display cases for armor as well basically almost anything in your inventory you'll be able to pull up bya either the item bank or the freight elevator and then you can directly leave them around in your hanger now you do have to be careful about like if you want to call up a ship leaving things on the platform May block

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   it so that could cause issues however we did expand the size of hangers in order to give you more space in there to do exactly this so we want to make it both easier experience to get in and out of some of these hangers as well as give you more space in order to decorate it and make it feel like your own place in addition to all that another change that we've made is we've reclassified many ships in the game that were previously attributed to small hangers now to the mediumsized hangers so that they are a more comfortable fit as far as landing and then in addition to that also so to make it more reasonable for the maybe the amount of cargo or the items that you're moving in the physicalizing of most items and the addition of freight elevators and new kiosks in Alpha 324 to work with

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   them not only in your hanger but at Mission locations throughout the verse means a fundamental shift in the manner and time it takes to load and offload your ship or vehicle for both manual and automatic loading you're going to be doing something at the moment that's going to be some kind of commodity transfer whenever you go to the commodity terminal to do a transaction you're presented with two different options you can either deliver directly into your location inventory or pick a ship from a list that's at that location and have it automatically packed into that ship for you if you decide to deliver it into the location inventory you'll buy it there's no restriction on what you buy it'll just go directly into it as long as you have Capac in the inventory and the money to pay for it

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   you can do it at that point it's up to you if youve bought it to get it onto your ship or to move it to wherever or just sit on it so you can just like hang out wait until the prices look good and then later on decide to move it to a different location from there if you decided to manually load it you can load it onto the ship call ATC go to a different location in the game land at a different location go into the Spaceport and then access the same commodity terminal there look at the prices and make a determination about whether you want to sell anything on your ship at that point you can make what we call like a sell order and this is basically like a declaration kind of like a contract that says like I will deliver these goods and you will give me this payment for

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    it when you've done that at that point you can go back to your hanger move the goods off of the ship onto the freight elevator platform use the freight elevator kiosk to put it down into the location inventory you get a little screen that pops up that tells you here's the sell order that you had here's the price that we agreed to you've now delivered everything you know check and then you get the payment that's delivered and the reason why we do that is actually to remove a round trip so this gives a way for players to kind of like skip a step in the flow and help make things a little bit more smooth on the flip side if you just want to deliver it into your location inventory at the new location you can do it like that as well and then once you're inside the Spaceport sell it from the location inventory instead or just

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    sit on it until another point in time on the automatic side whenever you go to buy the GS the ship needs to be stowed at that location at that point the ship will be locked down so you can't call it to fly it off while the loading is in process you have to pay a little bit more in order to fund the the movement by the local services in order to actually move the cargo onto your ship for you once the timer has run out you go down to the asop terminal you can spawn your ship or retrieve the ship from the asop terminal get in the ship all the boxes should be there you can fly off to another place and then do the inverse at a different location the other thing is that you can mix and match these so you can decid to manually load the boxes from your location inventory onto your

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    ship but then automatically unload them or or vice versa it's really up to you about how you want to do it like maybe you decide that you don't mind unpacking it cuz maybe it's a little bit easier once everything's all already in there or you can decide that for certain sizes of of shipments like for a few small boxes you don't mind moving it but maybe for like a really big load and a C2 where there's like a lot of things going on you'd rather just kind of you know use the automatic loading service now what we went out with before wasn't really our intended Behavior Uh because what was missing was some granularity in the loading time determination based on the box size it was always the plan we just weren't able to get to it yet so I know that there

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    were some feedback that some of the loading times seemed to not make sense the this is the reason the reason is that we didn't have the granularity in the system to scale the loading times based on the box size and what that really means is that for smaller boxes per suu you're going to spend more time on smaller boxes so if you have let's say a ship and you fill it up with 600 seu if those are like one suu boxes that's going to take a long time cuz that's a lot of boxes to move but if we're talking 32 suu boxes that's a much more efficient moving pattern that has to be done by the loading services so that's going to be quicker to load and that'll help us tune the system to make sure that we're not overly punishing people with these incredible loading times but we still want it to you know be a reasonable

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    amount of time for the higher loads for us to be able to tune the economy in a reasonable way and also to make sure that manual loading is something that there is an incentive to do of course with these new kiosks and new ways to access your inventory for those of you who have been building your possessions year after year one question was destined to rise above all others search is another one of these things that we always wanted to do now that we've been longer in development trying to close out and and you know finish off some of the the bigger bugs which has mainly been hanger instancing related we've also taken the opportunity to work on um the quality of life Improvement that we wanted to get in particular

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    which is search functionality in the FR elevator kiosk and the item bank now this is going to be the first step where we're starting is it's going to be a name based search on the items but it won't for example search on description names or like color things like that and it will be a fuzzy search which means that you will be able to search for substrings of names so you can for example have helmet and that'll actually pick up a lot of different items which actually have the word helmet in the name or you can look up Helm and still get most of those same or all the same results but maybe a few other things which also include that so I'm really excited about it this is something that I remember talking about implementing sech forever ago when we first originally introduced the inventory and

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    then also the player asset manager Nick Knacks um it's something that we needed backin support for to do properly in order for it to not overburden the backend but we actually got support from the backend team which did a great job getting this in for us so I think this will be a really good feature for the players and Hope hopefully that makes them feel a little bit better about waiting a little bit longer on the patch all in all the upcoming changes to Cargo and the combination of physicalized inventory with personal persistent hangers means the upcoming Alpha 324 is the next major step forward towards players owning a place in the verse and configuring it however they'd like and what else did we learn this week the armis zones are being removed

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    from player hangers which will finally let you load up those gun racks on your ships that the law system will let you stand your ground when someone invariably tries to sneak in and steal all of your stuff and that storage access kiosks are for long-term storage and that decorating your hanger with all of your items is the next step in eventually letting you grab your kit and go without the need for those inventory screens at all for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckaby thanks for letting us share the people and process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week