Star Citizen Live: EU PU Gameplay Features

18 June 202101:01:071,682 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Oh, hello. I didn't see you there. I'm just enjoying my planetary report from the Planetary Society. Shout out. Hi everybody. I'm Jared. This is Star Citizen Live. If you've never seen Star Citizen Live before, it's where we take about an hour out of our end of our week, hang out with some developers, answer some questions, watch how they work, goof off a little bit, try not to get fired. On the show this week, we have members of our steamed EU PU features team gameplay features team. Uh starting with Dan Truffin below. Say hi, Dan. Hello everyone. We've got a Jacob off into the corner there. Hello. And uh Thorsten off to the right here. How you doing?
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Hello. Thorsten, you're you we were just talking before the show. You're actually you you're relatively new to CIG. You started how long ago? 4 months ago? I I I'm in my fourth now. Yes. 4 months ago. I usually have a rule against having people on within the first 6 months. Oh. Oh, that might disqualify me as well. Got some new blood. been here since January myself. Really? Yeah. Well, welcome aboard, guys. Welcome Welcome to your first Star Citizen Live experience. Dan, of course, is is no stranger to Star Citizen Live. He's he's old hat, but a good hat. And I don't I don't know where I'm going with that. It's We're off the rails, anyway. All right. We are talking EU PU gameplay feature team. Now, the EU gameplay feature team works on many aspects of Star Citizen, but not
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all aspects. And we're saying this at the beginning because, as we usually do, we put a thread up on Spectrum to collect a bunch of questions and listed out a bunch of things that the team was responsible for and worked for, and nobody read it. They just the questions were just all over the place, man. Just I mean, good questions. I mean, things I'd like to know the answers to, but just not what this team's working on, guys. So, I don't know. But, we were able to find a whole helping a lot of questions that the team does work on. Plus, we are going to take questions live from the chat. So, if you are watching live on twitch.tv right now, you can submit your questions with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets. We're going to pull that out of the chat. Uh let's start off with Let's start off
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with by talking about the things that you do work on. So, why don't we introduce the the the team and some of the stuff that they do work on so that we can, you know, shape the questions that come in life. Dan, what is the EU PU feature team and what are they responsible for? Um the EU PU feature team is responsible for I'd like to say a lot a lot of things. A lot of other feature teams have very strict areas of responsibility, which is like active feature team. They really focus on the factor and everything the active team do or vehicle feature team. Everything about ships. We tend to take a bit of of everything and a bit of the things that don't fall into those categories. So, you guys saw us do mining. While that you could consider a vehicle feature team, it was something completely working on its own. It worked for FPS. It worked for ships. It worked
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for vehicles like ground vehicles. So, it wasn't falling in any of the other teams. So, we we took it. We made it uh and uh and hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Uh other things that are falling into here are continuations from mining and all the mining gadgets, stuff like this. Um refining stations, any type of refining on a ship. Uh we're also going to be looking into uh things like long distance probing. We're going to be looking into making the Starfarer into a refueling ship. Uh so, again, it's it's not how a ship flies exactly, but there's stuff that a ship can do. It's closer to the gameplay element of that
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ship rather than the second-to-second flight controls or IFCS and stuff like this. yeah, there's a lot of things besides that. We're doing a lot of the work that's going to go into what we call this overarching thing here uh called environmental gameplay. This is These are things smaller things that happen in the environment that make the environment feel alive. How uh one of the tiny little things that we're looking into right now is the laser trip mine. Yeah, it is a gadget and it can be considered a weapon, but initially we're going to be using level designers who place it in various places or mission designers and be able to create a blockage for for the player that the player has to circumvent in a different way or maybe use a crate, push it with a tractor beam into the laser's path. That trips the mine, then you can pass, stuff like this. It allows It's a lot of small
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little things like traps, things like this that allow us to make the world richer and make the player not just walk from A to B. They have to be cautious. This is a hostile environment. It's been rigged by other people. It's been trapped. It's unstable. When you walk in a wreck, you expect that wreck to start squeaking and collapsing on you. When you go into a cave, it shouldn't just be a walk in the park. There should be things that happen. There's things that fall on you. You have to be careful. So, all of this environmental gameplay is is a big umbrella under which a lot of smaller little things fall under. As part of also environmental gameplay, you could call it is is loot generation. How How do we generate loot in the world? We generated minables and harvestables, stuff like this, but we never generated like How do I spawn a shotgun in a in a crate? And how do I make sure that every
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time I open that crate, there's something else in there. It's not the same crate with the same shotgun. It's going to be I don't know. It's going to be money. It's going to be an armor. It's going to be bottle of vodka. It's going to be dirty underwear. Whatever you happen to find when you open a crate. And that also is something that I think we'll we'll be having a bit more discussions because it's one of the subjects we put on the forum and hopefully someone ask some valid questions on that subject. So, again, there's a lot a lot of things that uh make make gameplay work properly and fun for it for the players. Cool. so, as So, what we put a list on the we put a list of topics up on the Spectrum and answered the question from Lethality about whether I was actually
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complaining that people were asking about that. I There's a list. It's just reading, Lethality. That's all I'm saying. I'm just I'm just saying read. If it doesn't say subscriber items and it doesn't say hacking on it. So, I mean, you don't have to know a whole lot, right? It's hard Shout out to Lethality. Shout out to Lethality asking the tough questions. The people care so much about the certain subject. It's very hard for them not to ask the question. And then we'll and and I said, we do this every single week. So, if it's not this show, it'll be next show or the show after that or the show after that. We'll get there eventually. Let's talk about one of the things that were listed on there that a lot of we hadn't actually talked about before, which was long distance probing. So, let's start us off. What is long distance probing? Well, long distance probing is basically
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a system that we want to introduce where players have a ship somewhere in space and they can send out like uh probes and place them anywhere in the same system. And uh those probes will ping and reveal basically objects that are of interest there or anything that might be there. And those objects could be like uh mining places, uh derelict stations, ships, uh anything that we could imagine that you could find there and we could spawn. And yeah, so you find something, then what you have to do there is triangulate. So, you have to bring in the probes into position so you get the more precise signal on that. And once the signal strength is enough,
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uh you can either decide to like uh generate a quantum beacon that you can basically jump to. You could store that information and sell it to other players. Or what we aim to have there is an analysis gameplay where you basically have a signature, unique signature of what you found there, and then you compare it on your ship. So, basically the the drones the probes inspect the um the signature and you sit on your on on your PC on the ship. And you compare the signature with everything that you either bought or you collected yourself in the library. And then you get an idea, okay, this might be a Gladius. This could be an uh a mining field.
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And then you can still decide to, okay, I I jump there and I look at it or the risk is too high. I I don't jump there. So, that's the rough rundown of of it. I I think what's important here is what we're going to try to introduce here is that uncertainty. You'll be able to see a graph of how it's it's like seeing the drive signature of a ship. You kind of know the um you know the IR and you'll get the curve of how strong each part it is. And you might look at it and go like, "This is looks very similar to uh to an Idris." And you when you jump there, you might have a surprise that it's a lot of smaller ships or fleet or something like this. Or it might look like a hauler that you might want to pirate. And you get there and oh, no. It's actually a an Idris with a lot of its
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stuff being turned off waiting for prey to jump in because their signature, once they turn off some of the things on the ship, might look a lot smaller than than what it actually is. So, it It opens up a lot of exploration for a lot of players. It also opens up a lot of options traps and creating interesting scenarios where you're kind of going like, "Well, let's see what happens and who jumps for the bait here." So, and it's it's up to the players once they get the full analysis and they figure out what that thing is to they can jump, they cannot jump, they can sell the information, they can sell it as, "Oh, I found this very rich asteroid field." And when that person buys it, looks over the analysis data, "Oh, yeah, that looks like an asteroid field." But when they jump there,
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it's not an asteroid field. There's I don't know, it's a booby trap. There's a there's a turret on every rock there and as soon as you jump in, it blows you up. Cuz the guy that did the analysis didn't go all the way to find figure out everything and actually jump there, see himself what what is in that space. So, and what what is important for us is definitely that it's a player skill base. So, the more data you collected, the more precise your predictions are. So, longer you have been doing that already, the more precise your data is, the the higher the value is that you can ask for if you sell that. And the risk reward goes both ways. Let's say you're scanning for something not not scanning something, probing for something and you find and you find the thing and you then you go like, "Oh, I want the last detail. I'm going to spend half an hour getting that." By the time
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you spend half an hour and it might be gone cuz that might be a ship, might be a player, might be a NPC that just goes away. He's not going to wait there forever for you to get all the data about it. So, it's up to you how much time you want to want to invest in that in that analysis part or do you risk and jump or do you risk for it to go to jump away? It's all up to the player. Is this something you guys have been working on alongside, you know, USP has been working on scanning and radar and stuff like this? So, does this work is this work hand in hand? Is this something where you need them to finish before you can really get going? It's a bit separate. It uses the same signatures that we are familiar with, EMIR cross cross-section, but the the system has to be different. We are talking about
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finding things over astronomical unit distances. We're not talking about 50 km or 100 km, which is where our radar kind of stops. And we're talking about we're this is space telemetry. You're looking at the really large chunk of space and you get some data, you kind of think there's something there, then you bring your probes closer and closer, you get a clearer image, you get a closer location, closer, closer till you get that pinpoint precise location where you can jump or you can continue can continue analyzing and figuring out what that thing is before you risk. Got you. So, I I know we're still relatively early days. This isn't I don't think this is even on the public road map yet, is it? I'm not sure if it is, but yeah, it is
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it is still early early. Uh with with without without being too prescriptive, what you said astronomical ranges. Are we are we thinking across the other end of the of the solar system or are we thinking into other solar systems? Where what are we So, it's it's going to be localized to the solar system and even then you won't be able to just go like, "Yeah, do the entire solar system." You'll have to choose it. You'll look on the map and go like, "Well, there's been a lot of things happening here. I'm going to send my probes in that area and see if I narrow down." It might go there, it might be nothing or it might be something you're not don't care about. Or yeah, so it we the probes still have the probes still have traveling time and a
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defined amount of fuel they they can take. So, it's uh that is a restriction, but uh yeah, the goal is that one solar system is basically the entire range of of one probe. So, no going to another solar system with a probe. So, you have to travel to another system and then probe there. Cool. And also what will happen is we'll have different types of probes. So, you might get a probe that has almost the or the entire system, but the precision of that probe is going to be so bad. That's going to just going to be going to give you an overview. So, if you want to narrow it down, you're going to have to use like very precise probes with a very limited range. Got you. All right, cool. And I imagine as we get closer and closer to our first version of this making its way into the PU, you'll hear more about it on ISC and
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stuff like that. So, stay tuned for that. Something else, this actually didn't make the list, so we're going to mention it here for the first time, is something you're working on called atmospheric depth damage. Am I remembering that right? Atmospheric depth damage. What is that? And that is our basically uh diagetic system to prevent players from go getting to the core of like is it Crusader where where Orison is based? So, yeah, so ships will get an attribute which basically defines the atmospheric pressures it can take. So, for example, like well, spaceships aren't built for for withstanding a lot of atmospheric pressures, right? It's more like two from zero to one they can stand and uh
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yeah, for that reason we will introduce the attribute of atmospheric pressure resistance, which basically defines how deep a ship could go into Crusader and then it would start to get damaged. All right. And I'm just going to go out on a limb because I know somebody in chat's going to do this. Does that is there a possibility that also applies to underwater at some point later down the line? Um the system is generic enough that it can do that, but right now we focus on on that and make that work and then we can think ahead. I tried to get him, Dan. I tried to get him. I tried to get him. No, no, fair enough, but it's a valid question, but I think there's more of a problem of do your engines actually function underwater?
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Right. Cuz cuz if you sink like a rock, you won't care about the atmospheric pressure if your engines are working. You're still going to sink eventually. There's no getting out of that. Unless we have a ship that has engines that are built for that, but The good thing is we have a system that can apply pressure damage and it's it's built in a way that it could even create some in the future some some barrel damage effects. So, it is actually aimed to have effects the faster you have a switch of pressure, the more damage could happen or different types of damage could happen. I'm I'm thinking about that Hunt for Red October gameplay now. inside the gas giant Crusader. Um all right, let's talk about loot generation. This is also a relatively
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new topic for a lot of citizens here. Now again, as we get closer to release, we're going to do a full segment and a full breakdown on this stuff. So, we don't need to go into too much detail, but at its surface level, Dan, why don't you introduce us to the idea of loot generation and what we're working towards? the idea came about as we noticed that the active feature team was working on looting. So, the the problem came like they were working on looting, but we didn't have anything to loot. They were thinking, "Yeah, loot from the character you just killed." But that is just a part of the puzzle. We would like to have a a rich world in which if I enter an underground facility, well, there's stuff there I can just pick up,
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I can just loot, I can steal, I can So, there's the legal part of looting where you go there, you find things that belongs to no one, it's yours now. Then there's the stealing part of looting as in this crate of goodies is in someone's house. He is there. If he sees you do it, that's theft. So, that is pretty much and the loot generation pretty much covers the generation of items of various types of items based on tags and I think I can let Jacob talk a bit more about this part because he's doing more of the engineering and how that that works. Uh so, all I can say is that it just pretty pretty much picks from a big pool of items what tagged in a certain way, the ones that match that location. So, if it's a desert medical outpost, I
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expect to find medical things, I expect to find crates that are I don't know, refrigerated so they don't melt if there's a beating heart inside, it doesn't melt in the desert. Uh it needs to have medical brands on the crates and the items inside there need to be branded from any of our medical uh companies. So, all of this stuff gets pretty much we start with the the location and we do we do various spawn points inside that location where like on a shelf it can spawn. We put a point and that's where a crate where we tag, how how big can you be? Uh it can spawn and it we can choose how we do this where I can choose a medical location where I can just spawn military equipment cuz that's what I want, that's what my scenario needs.
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But in general, we want to be very Well, this is a medical location, it has a medical tag. That tag is propagated to that let's say it's an outpost, the entire outpost, all the spawn points get that tag. Automatically everything in there spawns medical things. Now, let's say I have a toilet in there. Generally, we don't want medical things to spawn in the toilet. So, inside that room, I just go, "Hey, you are now a toilet." So, everything gets a toilet tag now instead of a medical tag. So, that will spawn every crate that spawns in there will have to be a toilet specific I might find janitorial equipment. So, when I open that crate the UI will show me, well, there's a mop, there's a whatever janitorial equipment is needed in that area. Is Is this
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Is this like the next evolution of the harvestable system? It sounds like something that can be built right on top of what the work that you've done for the harvestables. One for you, Jacob. Yeah, very very similar in fact. Um in terms of generating the loot containers, it is the same system uh just being used um in a different way. Uh and like Dan was saying it's designed to be very very flexible. The main uh goal uh with the the implementation at the moment is to make sure that we give our level and mission designers all the flexibility they need to create whatever loot situation they want in a particular area.
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So, yeah, we can um the the designers can define what we call a loot archetype uh which is a collection of tags that the items should have. Um maybe some tags that they absolutely shouldn't have. Uh and then from this the system will generate a loot pool of all of the items that match that archetype to put in any containers that the designers give that archetype. But, yeah, this will be flexible enough that it can take injected tags from the environment around it like Dan was saying. so, you put one of these containers that's got a weapons archetype uh that just by itself would be able to spawn any weapon. And if you put that in
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Yeah, so a a high-tech place it can get a high-tech tag and then only spawn high-tech weapons. You put it in a pirate place, it'll only spawn pirate stuff. That's the idea, but the real focus is on making it extremely flexible and customizable for our designers so that whatever situation they want they can have. I I I I can see the uh I can see the humorous potential for growing pains as this comes online and and so it's going through and tags, you know, the tags get sorted and expanded out and stuff like this. Are you willing to confirm uh that that we can loot uh beating hearts, Dan? You mentioned that before. No. Yeah, maybe not beating, but frozen frozen as that you would have to you
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could actually sell spare organs, then probably yes. So, if you if you're a hardened pirate and you don't give a a [ __ ] about the lives of humans, you would raid up a a medical facility that they're doing heart transplants, you could steal a heart and take it to your boss cuz he needs a heart transplant. He just gave you a mission to find a heart somewhere. That is a valid mission for us. It's up to up to the players how evil they want to be. I have as a follow-up question from the chat. Uh how much consideration is being put into the depth of loot tables uh to ensure that there is a healthy enough variety? I mean, beyond just setting up the tags, is is this going to be we still we're we're looting the same five items over and over again in a place? That's entirely down to the designers uh
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setting up the areas, setting up the missions. Um it can be as varied as they want it to be. Uh at at at the moment, just early stages of development, we've got 2,600 items uh that can be looted um and yeah, the the designers can use the tags to filter down which ones of them should spawn where, when, why. all sorts. I think I think this is a major difference probably from what what we get to see in other games where you get a loot table as in this chest has this is the loot table, this is the chance that each item has of spawning into that chest. We've gone a bit more different here where it's like based on what the designer puts as in a designer can actually put put on a crate
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just bearing uh green uh pistol. And pretty much that that crate was only going to spawn green bearing pistols if the pistols are tagged correctly with green and bearing and and pistol. Generally, they're they're going to be uh so, we can go those tags can be very detailed again from a color to the actual manufacturer to the type of weapon to whatever we want to say about that pistol. It's a semi-automatic, we can say only semi-automatic weapons in this way. Or we can just leave the containers like, yeah, spawn whatever. It's up to the guys building the system is made in such a way to be very flexible for this. Generally, we're going to try to make it make sense a bit. And uh we don't want beating hearts spawning in underground manufacturing facility. It makes no sense. So, this is up to us to
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filter out the things that don't make sense. Because yeah, otherwise it's going to be silly. It's going to be it's going to look like a circus if you can get I don't know I don't know another like guns in a in a kids playground that you can loot. It doesn't make any sense. Got you. Now, you mentioned that loot generation came about because the actor feature team had begun working on looting. So, this question I may bridge the two, so I don't know if this is for you guys or not, but if an NPC is equipped with armor and we kill them, will we be able to take their armor or will there be a percentage drop system of some other armor uh you know, from the loot tables that we're talking about or whatever? What's the priority there? I don't want to speak for the actor
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feature team because they're doing the the looting from the actor, but as far as I know that don't quote me on this, but as far as I know, you loot what the guy is wearing. Okay. It might not be worth looting because he might be wearing a [ __ ] armor that's super heavy that might not even fit in your backpack. But if it's better than the one you're wearing, yeah, no problem, swap them around. And you get a better armor armor now. Uh if he has a weapon that you need, get get that weapon. Um the the part where we come into this part cuz we don't want to generate what the guy is wearing. It's weird if he wears a sniper rifle and green armor and suddenly it's a pink armor with a pistol. It it makes no sense. It needs to be a one-to-one relationship. Otherwise, we try to be as believable as possible. Otherwise, this makes no sense. When we can come in is the guy if he has a backpack
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or pockets or something like this, we can generate the loot inside those pockets. So, the guy might be wearing really poor armor with a shitty weapon, but maybe we he's an undercover agent and inside he has a high-spec suit for whatever that has no emissions, uh stealth silenced gun and stuff stuff like this. So, inside depends on how that character is tagged. So, he might be tagged for like shitty equipment for on on the surface, but really good stuff in his backpack. Right. Uh I mean, this is an exception. Normally, if they're they have shitty equipment, they're going to have a shitty loot in the backpack. But we generate what's in the backpack, what's in their pockets. Uh we also can generate now stuff for a mission. Is it going to be a key card on on him or a tiny note that you have if you actually bother to open and inspect
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might have a key code that you can could open some things adjacent to him and stuff like this. But that that is stuff we can generate from our loot generation. So, it sounds like we have the potential to do a healthy little mix of things. So, you know, what what what what what you see that would obviously be on there and then you know, stuff that we can hide in pockets and knapsacks and stuff like that. I would like to mention Sorry, Jacob, go. Uh I was just going to say, yeah, it's it's what you see is what you get for the NPCs. If you see it, you can probably take it from them, but if you don't see it in their backpack, then it'll get randomly generated according to all the loot archetypes, etc. Cool. I would I would also like to mention something as scanning comes online. This would be important because you
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might figure out that guy has important loot in his backpack. He might look like a poor guy, but it's he's worth killing. But you have to spend your time scanning him and figure out what he actually has rather than what he loot seems to have. All right. Uh Let's move on to harvestables because I from there um one of the questions we got in the thread was uh will harvestables ever have a benefit other than just selling them? Uh well, right now they have the benefit of selling, which is not much of a benefit sadly. We are working to correct that. Um they need to become more valuable. They have the benefit is that you actually can consume them, some of
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them. You don't want to consume the rent of tongue or something like this. Uh the goal is to start using them for uh manufacturing science. Um once we get to work on those parts. So, once we get to work on those parts, the idea is that we start being able to extract certain materials for them that can be used to manufacture I don't know chemical drugs, explosives, things like this, oils for maintaining your weapon better, maybe removing some of the wear and tear or Yes, various various things where it can improve gameplay. We never envisioned this to be a thing where you just go and you get the fruit and you can sell it for 10 UEC. No one wanted that. We just That's as far as we could go until our priority shifted to something which was
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the more important than it was. But, the system is there to be used once the other uh puzzle pieces fall into place. Like dung dung explosives. Exactly. Stinky bombs. as a follow-up, uh are there any plans for us to be able to grow crops on like a planet or a moon? Yes. I cannot discuss any further, but yes. Fair enough. Let's move on to refining. So, on refining, for refining, uh will this game loop be broken down into different steps of refining or different purities for the end product? Uh basically, get Why don't you give us a primer, I guess, would probably be most helpful. A primer on uh how we're expecting refining to work.
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So, basically, the the ship refining will be drastically different to the like station refinery, where you like on the station refinery, you bring in your materials. You wait for quite some time, and then you get uh the end product. Uh for the ships, it it is an active process. Uh so, the player that is basically running the the refinery ship has to analyze the material that is coming in and then decide on the correct process, where the process could be probably So, imagine like there's a scenario, the the player had picked up like minerals and metals has a refinery, where there is a furnace. And the furnace will destroy
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the the minerals, so that results in the loss of uh the minerals, but the metal would be refined, and it would be of great quality. Um for for the purities part, that's that's not something that we account for in our like uh first iteration. We we now go for like uh yeah, more in the sense of uh yeah, if you are effective, you have less loss of material. Yeah, we'd rather go with the yield rather than purity, because it's easier for us to to track rather than adding a property on each on each uh Let's say you've got gold at 57%, then you mix it with gold that's 75, then I need to average. Well, it's rather get less gold out of the end. You get pure gold, but it's less gold if you don't do it properly.
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So, the system is always working towards the highest purity. It's just a question of what the yield is. Yes. Yeah, we It's similar to how you do with the station refining right now. What goes out is pure, and you can sell it as an actual gold commodity on the market rather than selling it as as um unrefined ore, and then you lose a lot of the profits. So, what what refining kind of aims to do is um close a bit that uh that gameplay loop that we we started right now with mining, and we have to go to the station, and kind of then you sell. We would like to be able to do all of this in the field, where I get five prospectors or a few moles and prospectors, and one refinery ship, and that refinery ship becomes like the hub, where everyone kind of brings I I mine all these rocks, I come to my refinery
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ship, I dump my sacks of the sacks on the on the prospector become ejectable now. With a tractor beam, the refinery ship is able to pick them up, attach them to to their own ports. They are able to scoop all that all that stuff into their into their storage, dump the empty sack, prospector picks it up, goes back to mining again. Now, the refinery ship is running constantly churning. It's constantly running whatever the guys bring, and is trying to not mix not mix them uh minerals with the metals, and kind of separate, and trying to think, well, on this batch, I'm going to run this process, cuz there's higher chance of yielding uh of of getting this material that I'm interested in. Might care might not care about aluminum when I got the grecian in there, or I might dispose of some diamonds if I have some hephaestinite or whatever high high price material. So, it's going to
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constantly there's going to be this choice, where like, oh, if I add this catalyst to this uh this furnace or this tank, I I get what this reaction, I get to extract this and that. So, it's going to be a lot of choices for the players. Obviously, as per usual with all of our systems, things can go awfully wrong. And if you add the wrong catalyst or don't watch the pressure, don't watch timers, then what what's supposed to happen, those stuff the reaction when needs to happen, things might go boom. Or not only go boom, but might you might just lose the material. Might just get a [ __ ] ton of slag. Sorry for my use of funny language. But, that is what it will be. You'll be really annoyed at that point, and you'll use those curse words. So, that's that's pretty much uh the the idea. The goal is to create this gameplay loop, where at this point, we you add the trader, not the trader, the hauler. He's not a
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trader. He will help these mining operation. He will be coming every whatever, 5 minutes, comes, takes whatever was refined by the by the the Starfarer, puts in his cargo hold, goes, sells to the market. Come back, and that creates an entire operation that uh an organization can run for hours, and just like keep churning profit. Uh the the difference is the Starfarer might not be able to refine as good as the station does with like 95% yield, but it doesn't matter, because what you might get 80% or 60%. Doesn't even matter, because what you're transporting is so much smaller and condensed in value, and you don't have to transport unrefined ore and ship by ship, and it takes forever. So, you're transporting very high yield, going there, selling, ship comes back. And this is where the another fun part comes in. You actually
00:35:35
get pirates coming in and preying on this chain. They might destroy the prospector. They might destroy the refinery. They might destroy the the hauling ship that is transporting the refined stuff to the station. And this is where you hire mercenaries or get your organization people to come in and protect your operation. Some will have to fly with the transport ship. Some will have to protect the protect the uh the refinery ship. So, it creates this entire ecosystem, where you have people preying on each other, helping each other, trying to make as much money as possible in as little time as possible, rather than waiting for an entire day for the station to refine stuff. So, it sounds like if we were to really illustrate the differences between ship-based refining and station-based refining, we're talking about a far more active
00:36:23
and involved process for the player on ships. There's no way AFK refining. No AFK refining in any way. You have to pay attention to all the the tidbits of of the refining process, like the temperature. It's like similar to to to mining, but uh a little bit more complex, because there on the refining ship, you have the reactor that could have uh a various amount of methods. So, like as already mentioned, there could be a furnace. There could be uh electrolyte system that could grow or help grow or separate crystals. Uh like you could add in some some uh solvents, like acids, that would help you. And and the entire reactor is built around that. So, you could basically in the end, our goal is to have you
00:37:11
as the owner of the refining ship tailor your uh the the refining process to your demands. So, for example, imagine a situation where you uh or your friend is uh mining, focusing on mining just minerals. So, you wouldn't have a furnace there, right? You would have uh prepare your reactor in a way that uh the the reactor can is more efficient with minerals than with with metals. So, this is basically our goal, that you customize it to your demands. Now, One one more thing tied to that, it's it's you're customized to what you want to refine, but you also you can also customize the idea is to allow the player to customize the Starfarer. Cuz the Starfarer was was a ship that's supposed to do refueling, and it was also supposed to do refining. So, it's
00:37:59
up to the players how many tanks for storing stuff for storing solids, for storing liquids and gas, for storing fuel, or how many reactors does he does he equip on that ship. So, it's up to him how much he wants to store, and maybe the Starfarer is the one that sells, cuz you don't have a hauling ship. And he just comes back, keeps refining, cuz then he needs a lot more transporting capacity. So, yeah, we're trying to offer all these options, and then it's up to the player to play however he sees fit, and what whatever the situation needs. Okay. Uh now, we don't we don't generally do when questions on the show, you know, we we leave the when questions to the Star Citizen public road map. That's all the best and the most accurate and when information that we have is on that road map, folks. Uh that said, the stuff that we're talking about here, the refining, is
00:38:47
this is this theorycrafting of something we're going to work on someday in the future, or is this stuff that's that we're actively developing right now? It's uh it's in design. Uh Well, design is done and approved. Uh it's uh waiting uh an actual programmer to finish some of his current work and to jump on Awesome. So, signed off approved design, just wait waiting for resources to get going. Pretty much. Okay. And it's soon, with a TM, but yeah, fairly soon. We're we're we're not we're not looking in this in years and years from now. It's We're waiting for one feature to finish, and we're going to be looking at it. All right. Uh let's see. We've been talking about refining, you mentioned
00:39:34
refueling. Let's let's just let's slide into the next one. Uh refueling. The Starfarer is probably our most uh obvious that that you know the refueling ship out there, but there are other ships that are supposed to be able to to have this capacity. how how how are how are we thinking refueling's working? Oh, where are we going with refueling? And in what sense? Like um well, I mean are we talking about are we talking about the you know the the the 737s with the little nose cone and somebody comes up and and they and they they attach? Uh what what are we doing? Yeah, that's exactly what we what we are talking about. So, for the Starfarer refueling, which is the one that we are working on right now, is uh that we have a boom arm where the the player in need has to dock to and then
00:40:23
the refueling process can start. Yeah. So. I I I I think I saw the question where it was about like yeah, will we have drone refueling? Yeah, that's not yet the plan of the system. So, the plan is right now to have a very direct system because like from my personal point of view, it's even the more interesting one because like imagine a ship that is docked to the boom arm, you do one slight movement and it's it's something that both players have both players have to pay attention in this process, right? So, it's active on both sides. For the drone part, it would be more passive on one side or even passive on both sides. So. For me personally, this one is the most interesting one. Okay. we have some other follow-up questions
00:41:10
for refueling here. is refuel will refueling be doable in motion or will crafts have to come to a complete stop to proceed? And because we are using right now the the the docking system that we already have. So, like the the Merlin to to Connie docking, we rely on that full setup right now. But um actually it's a good point because we have to pay attention to it. It wouldn't make sense for some ships to uh be dragged basically by the staff Starfarer. So, we have to adapt the rules as it goes, but uh yeah, for for the first situation, we definitely will just have the uh the well-known Yeah, we will use exactly what what the docking system offers. This was a
00:41:58
nice surprise for for us cuz we were looking initially in doing it a bit more simplistic where you just fairly close and there's a fuel transfer, but then docking came online and we're like, wait, but we could just use this and we get this the connection between two ships for free. So, now the Starfarer is going to same as with docking, we're going to try to do this where if you maintain heading and and velocity on the mothership, let's call it the mothership, the child ship can come and attach as basically as long as you're not flying uh this ship is not doing left right, flying up down and it's constant heading and and velocity, you'll be able to pretty much from your perspective, you'll be more or less static. Uh and you just come, you attach to it and then you're basically attached and flying at the same
00:42:46
at the same speed. The problem comes cuz this is a thing we we bumped into and we're like, oh, how do we do this? Uh what happens when someone runs out of fuel? Cuz generally when you need refueling, you're out of fuel. So, that is the moment where you are not going to be able to do in motion refueling because you cannot catch up to the other ship. So, what first of all, what we did was allow the the ship that needs refueling to still move very very slowly. Like um only during the refueling maneuver. Basically, the ship maintains a very little amount of fuel to to get you out of trouble for the refueling process. It doesn't allow you to use that fuel for flying or dog fighting or something like this. But when you once you go into
00:43:33
refueling mode and you're attaching to a Starfarer, it allows you to very slowly drag yourself to that fuel port. Now, uh if that Starfarer was moving at even 100 m/s, you're not going to catch up. So, uh yeah, honestly, in if you're asking whether you're going to see in atmosphere flying through the clouds refueling due in the middle of a dog fight, probably not. Uh at least not in the first version. Yeah, but there's no logical reason why anyone would build a space refueling rig for something like that. It's needed in atmosphere for our F-15 whatever fighters, but really in space where everything is more or less relative to the guy you're
00:44:21
flying with, it needs to be But when have players ever been restrained to what is necessary logically, Dan? Well, I mean, can can can a Starfarer refuel a Starfarer? Then we're going to see some amazing centipede action going. Yes. The the problem is that while you're in refueling, you can only be refueled or refueling someone else. We never thought of it as that. Um maybe that becomes a possibility, but I'm I'm a bit worried if we open that can of worms. I'm pretty sure board gamers are already trying right now. Uh all right. Uh uh speaking of refueling, is there is the refuel refueling is in active
00:45:09
development right now. Is this because it's a prerequisite for Pyro? Uh it's not exactly a prerequisite. It's something that's going to help Pyro a lot. Pyro finding fuel in Pyro is not going to be as easy as in Stanton. This this is a torn down place. Everyone has left the building a long time ago. All the people that are there and want to sell you fuel either are going to try to rip you off or they're going to you're going to pay everything you have to refuel. So, you're going to be relying on players. You're you're going to be relying on other people to come in with fuel from Stanton and bring it in there and sell it to you at whatever price. So, um the problem also comes with Pyro is like it's very hard to find a station to
00:45:56
refuel. Uh they're far they're far between. So, you might be, oh, I'm in the middle of nowhere now. There's no way for me to get back to that station where I know there's fuel. Hey, can can someone come help me? Someone come help me comes with a with a dose of risk because someone come help me might come with guns. But yeah, this is where this is where you have to trust other players and this is where uh some of our reputation thing is going to come in handy as in you look over who you're dealing with. You go, well, this guy's been killing everyone that moves. I'm not refueling with you. I'm not telling you where I am very much. Yeah. I think it's I think it's safe to say that that while Star Citizen is a you know, it is a massive multiplayer game and it is a multiplayer game. Uh some systems will be a little
00:46:44
more uh uh friendly to the solo players than others. Pyro From everything I've seen and read and heard and spoken about Pyro, Pyro definitely seems like a it's dangerous to go along alone. Bring a friend. Exactly. last question on refueling before we move on. Uh ground vehicles. Are I I I are ground refueling ground vehicles ever going to be a thing? I mean, do they even need gas right now? I don't think so. It's also like I don't think they they they have a fuel right now. Do they? So. But uh the good thing is so, once they would have, we could have a solution to that. It's not a problem. What once we do this, I think we will have to see how
00:47:32
docking between two land-based vehicles will work cuz that influences this, but once they start having proper fuel, I I don't think it's a problem of bringing your refuel your tanker whatever truck next to next to a next to your friend's whatever tank and starting a refuel process. We'll we'll have to see because a lot of this refueling work means standardization of fuel of fuel ports throughout right now what is what was it? How many ships are there? Do you remember how over what? Uh no. It's but I think it's above 160, is it? Exactly. Some some somewhere there. It's in the hundreds. By the time we get this, probably we'll
00:48:20
have vehicles in the hundreds, too. So, that's that's where the the problem comes. The system we can develop fairly quickly and especially if we have ship refueling already done, I'm not worried doing it for land vehicles, but we'll be retrofitting all of the land vehicles to have uh fuel ports. Uh for example, for the ships we're doing this right now for ships and uh we've gone, well, what what does make sense and where does it make sense on every ship? And we found a a very good uh logic here is like if it's pretty much facing forward, where facing to towards that same direction as ship forward and if it when that boom arm comes is in view of the pilot, that is pretty much the best position you can get. So, you always get that view of the boom arm coming
00:49:06
approaching. You can kind of go left left right right right right. Okay, boom, I'm in. Uh and it it's always important to be forward because if it's if it's sideways when you're flying, the ship is very hard to coordinate and touch two points that are not oriented to your forward direction. It's it's a mind-boggling thing unless you rely on the UI, which helps you. But uh if anyone tries to dock some ship that the docking port is off axis, you will know what that means. all right, we we we we've we've touched a little bit on mining, long-distance probing, loot generation, harvestables, refueling, I skipped one. Uh but we did it before refueling.
00:49:54
Refining. Um let's talk about resource management a little bit. We we haven't disclo- Actually, you and I have never discussed. You discussed with Count Disco back around Halloween time. The the beginnings of of resource management when you were prototyping that out. What can you What can you tell us about our current progress, where we're at? Uh there is Yeah, I know that there's there's been a lot of silence on that and for very good reasons. Uh the programmer that works on this has had to go in the bowels of code and refactor pretty much everything with how our SCI work when it comes to how they function, how they generate resources. There's been so much groundwork. We expected
00:50:43
there to be probably about half a year of groundwork. It turned out to be a lot more. This is a thing that will affect everything from ships to vehicles to stations. It's It's an incredibly It touches the core of how our game functions. And I think at this moment we are at the point where we start working on the actual gameplay. I know already there's heavy discussions even this morning. Yeah, this morning or yesterday. There were heavy discussions of how we how we get the tanks on the Starfarer for refueling to transfer fuels between each other and the ship because we want that to use the resource management and distribution. We don't want to build another system just for refueling or another system just for
00:51:32
I don't know putting ammo into into weapons on a ship or I don't know power or all these things. There needs to be one system. All items in the game work with the system. We don't have 10 pieces of code that would need 10 programmers to oversee and maintain. Whenever one breaks, it's a different from the other one. It's one system. If something breaks, you know exactly where to look. So, but we are getting to the point where we're starting to see this being used in gameplay. Um it's still going to be quite a bit till we see a full ship where you can start cutting power, rerouting power, sabotaging, uh if you remove this item or this item runs out of fuel or out of power, this happens. It's We're still a bit out. Again, I don't want to give out I don't I don't want to give out any date cuz I don't
00:52:21
know it. As As you can see, our initial estimation of how much that groundwork of code needs to be was at We estimated half of what it actually was. Right. Uh And but this this is the moment where This is also This is also a good moment because a lot of other programmers can start jumping in on this thing and starting to integrate. Whoever works on weapons needs to integrate this. Well, how how do you get your ammo from a general ammo ammo supply crate? Automatic. How do you power the weapon? Does it need CPU? Does it need all these things? And how do you The shield guy is going to do the same. The guy that builds power supply needs to work with it. So, we can start We're We're at the point where we can slowly start to bring in more people into this as as the groundwork has been has been completed.
00:53:08
All right. So, yeah, and if if you guys haven't seen it, check out It was the Halloween episode for last year where Dan gave a wonderful walk-through of the entire foundation, the the prototype for for resource management. This is the new foundation for I mean, I don't want to say everything in the Star Citizen verse, but I mean, in space like you said, space stations, spacecraft, habitats. you know, ground habitats. It is It is a uniform system that will determine how everything feeds into everything else. And it's it's that systemic system that we've been working towards and building towards and and saying that we've wanted for so long and now it's actually, you know, in active development. So, it's an exciting time.
00:53:55
Uh so, look forward to that. What else do we got here? Let's see what we have going. Um Let's touch on mining a little bit before we wrap up. There have been many updates to mining over the last couple years. Are we done? Is mining done? Is it feature complete? Or is there more coming down the pipe? I I think mining is in a good place now. I mean, yeah, we can keep tweaking. I think we need a tweak of content and the difficulty and bringing in more more difficult rocks that require multiple players with a super high-end gear to break, but also super high yield of of resources from them. I think that is kind of missing from a content perspective. Uh from a
00:54:43
system perspective, when it comes to small Let's not call it small ship mining. It's pretty much medium ship mining cuz the Prospector and the Mole are not that small. Uh we are in a good We're in a good place now where uh the people that were working on this are trying to help now with other systems in other parts of the game. So, we're going I don't want to say put it on hold, but it's going to slow down development on mining. With it done? No, far from it. There's still the Orion. There's still When we get that Orion out and all the bells and whistles that come with it, that's probably when I'm going to say, "Yep, that is that is mining. It's complete." There's still some stuff we can do on FPS mining. FPS mining was released and didn't receive much love for 2 years, more than 2 years, maybe 2
00:55:31
years, somewhere there. Uh it's it's an integral part of the game, but it could use some love. We've We've expanded on the ship mining. We've done consumables. We've done components. We've done gadgets. This does not exist for FPS mining. So, we would like to be able to take that multi-tool and equip it a bit more. I know the actor feature team are also working on a specialized version of the mining tool cuz they're doing the same for for a lot of the tools like tractor beam, tractor beam, and all these things. They're going to get specialized version, more powerful, but they They're not modular where you can just change a an attachment and use it for something else. Sorry, my voice is gone. Probably the actor feature feature guys are going like, "Stop talking about that." that's that's the idea, bringing in some
00:56:18
of that flavor that we have for ships into FPS mining. That is something we can still do now and fairly easily. But there's other things that are way way way more important right now. That's it, guys. We only have one more question left, but it's a question for everybody here. We've talked about resource management, mining, long-distance probing, loot generation, refining, refueling, all that stuff. What is the one thing if you had to pick, you know, it's hard hard to pick favorites between children. But what is the one thing that your team is working on right now that has each one of you most excited for the future? And we'll we'll go We're going to start with that, Jacob, cuz he's been quiet for a little while. What you got, Jacob? Uh I'm I'm going to biased because loot generation is what I've been working on mainly for the past 6 months. So, I'm
00:57:06
excited about loot generation. I'm I'm really looking forward to populating the universe with stuff for players to find. Yeah. Awesome. How about you, Thorsten? Uh also biased in that regards. Yeah. So, I'm a huge Starfarer fan. So, I'm I'm looking forward to finally have it full of more additional functions. But the feature that that actually, I guess, more interesting for me in terms of gameplay is actually the atmospheric depth damage. So, I can see already like like you already mentioned it like the Hunt for Red October situations. So, that that probably will be fun. You're in a dogfight in the in the atmosphere of Crusader and you know your ship has a higher depth
00:57:54
resistance than theirs. So, see if you can drag them down into the core of Crusader with you. Yeah. Dan. I'm I'm going to be different. I'm going to be different. I'm going to choose the long-distance probing stuff. I think that's going to open the game so much. I think the the problem with with Star Citizen right now is we have the planets. We have the moons. There's some activity happening there. There's the Lagrange points. Some activity happening there. But if you look at the space we have in the solar system, that is the 0.00000.1% of the space we use. Once long-distance probing comes in, we'll be able to dynamically spawn uh whatever. An asteroid cluster, a wreck, a bunch of pirates attacking a hauler.
00:58:47
Anything you can imagine. A small station that they're they're producing drugs there or high-end weaponry. We spawn it. It's It's a temporary location. Might be there for this week or this month or this day. Whoever finds it first gets to Well, if they can tackle it, gets to get the rewards. The miners are going to have I'm expecting the mining organization to have a dedicated probing division where they're just searching for things. They're Oh, I found you guys a new asteroid cluster. Everyone just rush there, strip mining, and you make the profit. Whoever finds it first is going to make the money. Whoever finds it last second pretty much makes nothing unless they're pirates and then they find some miners there and then they make some money. So, the pirates are going to have so much fun with this because this is how you find other
00:59:34
people mining, hauling, doing other things. So, there's so much it it pretty much makes the entire solar system space our playground and we can do stuff that we generate, stuff that players do there that others can find, stuff It just brings the entire solar system to life. Dan Trevan really into long distance probing. That's it, guys. That's our show. Thank you so much for taking the time out of the out of your busy weeks. Uh Thorsten, Jacob, congratulations on your first Star Citizen life. Uh hope you survive the experience. Uh folks, be sure you stay tuned uh next Wednesday next Wednesday Wednesday next Thursday is our our our our last ISC of the quarter before we take our quarterly hiatus and it's all about Orison. We're going to We're going
01:00:22
to check out everything that that brings Orison to life from from the VFX to the lights to the to the sights, the sounds, the music and of course, the clouds. So, for Star Citizen live, I'm Jared. That was Dan. That was Jacob over there. That was Thorsten. Take care, everybody. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.