Inside Star Citizen: The Cargo Show | Fall 2022

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] in 318 the future is bright for cargo for moving away from the simplistic implementation that we had before into something that's more of a real simulation with the new physicalized cargo it opens doors for us to give some new gameplay cargo today is pretty basic you go to a kiosk you use an interface you load your ship it automatically loads getting that ship you drive that ship to a port and then you sell what you bought but there's not a lot of interesting choices there with the current implementation whenever we designed it we did not have the tractor beans that we have now what that meant is that you're not able to pick up

2. 00:00:47

   and manipulate the larger 1su boxes at the time all that you could do was pick up the smaller 1 8 Su boxes but this gave us a problem for piracy and looting in general in that the really valuable things are sold and bought in these 1su boxes and higher volumes but the only thing the player can actually pick up are the smaller ones so what we had to do is a kind of hack and the cargo system such that when a vehicle explodes instead of generating the larger 1su boxes on destruction it actually generates the smaller ones in this kind of gamey magical way so that the player can actually go pick up some of the boxes from the destruction all right let me give you an example the C2 has 696 SCU which equates to

3. 00:01:39

   5568 1 8 SCU boxes that you have to loot but the ship exploding should damage some of those boxes and we want to have about 40 to 50 percent survive that explosion so that's still about 2 000 1 8 Su boxes but then there's server performance issues to consider so what we've actually been doing is tapping that at 10 boxes being generated however on top of that it's an incredibly tedious experience because now that's if you were to do the math about 400 boxes that you have to go pick up and collecting all of those by hand without a tractor beam with the new system we've gotten rid of the 1 8 SCU cargo containers everything is one SCU cargo containers so in the case of uh the C2 with the six uh 696 Su that would be 696 one SCU boxes rather

4. 00:02:32

   than 5000 plus every single one of those boxes is a real entity in the game like any other entity in the game it is tracked in the database as a persistent entity now that we have the new persistent entity streaming architecture and it means that now that there are entities that are persistent they can be interactable so now you can do things like use the tractor beams to pull them out of the cargo hold or put them into a cargo hold it also means that whenever we do shift destruction with the new system we don't have to generate anything instead all that we do is we take the entities that were already created and we just simply detach them from the cargo hold and let them float in space now we still want to have some of that explosive destruction so there's a certain amount of variable amount of that cargo that is destroyed on ship

5. 00:03:21

   destruction actually giving you back somewhere it's actually zero to ninety percent uh but that's calculated every time your ship explodes so what happens then is now we're still now we're actually hitting that 40 to 50 number on average this means that both four players that want to reclaim the cargo that they lost on ship destruction or for pirates that want to scoop up their their ill-gotten gains then they'll have an easier time to get at it and they'll be more value there when they try to do so there's also the new commodity kiosk flow which is a step in the right direction for helping you understand what you're buying and what you're selling and what's available at the places where you buy and sell Commodities there's a new UI it's the new building block UI so it should be a lot easier to understand and gives you a graphical representation as you're buying and selling of how much space

6. 00:04:09

   that you have on the ship that you're buying and selling into 318 is not the uh the end of the cargo refactor there's lots of stuff that we're you know in the design process for right now including manual loading and unloading as well as automatic loading and unloading um we're also looking at some big box cargo missions that separate the the cargo from the hauling professions so that's something to look forward to we have a lot more content coming that use these new features we hope you enjoy it in 318. and as a coded to all of that Chris Roberts actually came by my desk the other day and we talked a bit how it was unfortunate that we even have to allow players to lose 40 to 50 percent of the cargo and we talked and decided that we would try to come up with an interim

7. 00:04:57

   Solution on our path to physicalize damage that would allow us to leave the husks of ships behind on vehicle destruction instead of just exploding them and erasing all the contents this would allow players to explore the ships and find the cargo and physically move it off the husks of the ships rather than just generating a percentage of the boxes on destruction like every other aspect of star citizens continuing development the cargo refactor isn't a one drop and it's done kind of feature and the first implementation much like persistent entity streaming alongside it in the upcoming Alpha 318 is about rebuilding existing functionality within an entirely New Foundation that will now set the stage for the persistent Universe to reach its fullest potential

8. 00:05:44

   and subsequent patches to come and while we're here talking about new technologies designed to be built upon from one patch to the next let's chat us up some rastar the internal tool that we've been developing now that's currently in use placing outposts throughout both the Stanton and Pyro systems foreign is to make the thing easier for the devs to place location at the surface of a planet and in the end they will be used as the system for player to build their phases we have Rasta because the previous system based on prefab was quite uh hard to use and not up to scale for the for the scale and the scope we want for our

9. 00:06:33

   planet density any changes to the planetary generation like for example you just change a canyon you add a canyon to the planet you'll have to adopt every modules at the surface of a planet to be sure they are well aligned with the new terrain and the new modifications of the terrain rasa makes that better by allowing first of all the ability to directly follow the modification of terrain topology so we don't have to refresh anything plus it gives us more granularity and modularity on the locations because she'd be caring about the rasta and all this improvements because that's the way we will be able to give you the

10. 00:07:23

    players the most dense area we can imagine to keep in line and have all the planets all the moons filled with POI and things to do on the surface and maybe later in orbit of this planet and moons citizencon 2951 it changed not much in terms of visual mostly UI rework but features are all there just a lot of internal work to allowed the new build location to fits more and be more productive so now we can have modules and elements that are nested and indented so we better understand what depends on what and we also added the ability to collapse parts

11. 00:08:14

    parts of the tool so to have a better understanding and more focused work on some parts of the tool we also worked on better tools Integrations so now we are able to use the base tools of the editors such as gizmos or roller bar to modify some elements of raster which was not possible previously due to some breaking while doing so and to keep consistency with the with the raster flow but with that changes now most of the in edited tools are usable with Rasta without any risk we also moved the object containers used for raster to streaming object containers to keep in line with the whole streaming process of

12. 00:09:02

    the network system so now we gave the ability for the server to load and spawn and despawn some locations and elements at will to avoid crowding the whole server memory and we also now converted the whole connector system that was presented during the last citizen con to item ports so now again to keep in line with the in-house way we do things and to better integrate some elements such as the Resource Network that will later be available on their locations I'm quite happy with the result of rasta there is quite some work to do on it but the result is surmising and I'm

13. 00:09:52

    pretty sure you're gonna love the location where you will roll out with Rasta so what did we learn this week well we learned that the cargo Factor will physicalize the manner in which we transport Goods in such a way that makes retrieval after disaster or collection after piracy easier and more rewarding than ever before that it's the new foundation for an entirely new trade experience that will continue to develop over subsequent patches that it may yet have some fortunate side effects on vehicle destruction ship husks and Salvage in the not too distant future and that the rastar tool first introduced a last year's citizen gun is already being used to populate the planets of pyro in next year's 4.0 and Stanton in this December's upcoming Alpha 318. now don't forget that this

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    year's Intergalactic Aerospace Expo is right around the corner you can go to the robertspace industries.com website to find out all the details for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee we'll see you all here next week