Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Ship Docking, Scanning and Cockpit Customization

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:10

   hey everybody welcome to another edition of calling all devs our weekly Q&A series where I take questions from you the star citizen backer imposed them directly to our star system developers usually over Skype it's one of our ways that we do community engagement and let you guys be part of the process so these questions are submitted on and they were voted on each and every week and you can do so yourself on the thread up on spectrum it's called calling all devs March questions thread we're almost ready to start the April thing probably by the time you see this we probably will I will just get to it today we are calling Rob Reiner ger designer out of our Austin what's up here hey Rob hey Tommen I feel pretty good how you doing man I'm doing well thank you for taking my call so promptly yeah no worries man what you got for me this week I've got a question that has come up quite a few

2. 00:01:00

   times over the last few weeks ever since three point ever since 3.0 came out backers have lost the ability to blind quantum jump they will do that in two point six we've had this question come up on our TV a few times that Todd addressed it but we weren't quite entirely certain how we were gonna go forward with it at that point so your question I'm hoping we got a better answer now it says currently you cannot use quantum drive to travel to a point not fixed on the map in the future of the game how will the explorers go to faraway places in which there are no points marked on the map yeah well so eventually we want to have the concept I like shipping lanes being like a more sure bet between places so as you like we want to have a blind jump that allows you to go oh I

3. 00:01:50

   see a nebula so I can go and you know do gas mining out there I can scan off in the distance and then find things and then jump to two different locations and you're obviously limited by your quantum drive and that's what's gonna make larger ships actually able to travel further out and into space and large mining ships can go deeper into space and explore further out into the reaches of the outer rim so it's absolutely something that we want I'm not sure exactly when that's on the schedule but the next thing I know that we're working on as our our future teams going to be doing quantum linking coming up here because I was a popular thing that people wanted next so I would expect to see it sometime in the near future but not exactly sure what gotcha

4. 00:02:39

   I do want to add you mentioned quantum linking popular thing we do have a feature survey up on the website right now quantum linking is not winning the vote at the moment but remember we are going to work on all of those features regardless it was not a vote to tell us which features to work on this was a vote just to inform us which ones were your highest priorities so we can allocate resources to them as necessary and you know maybe the one that's mote that wins the vote you know gets a couple more you know people in the future team but we are working on all those features so yeah understand like that the way we have our feature team set up but they're not always scheduled to release every single corner so some sometimes we leapfrog with features because some things are bigger than you know are three month windows right now so yeah it's it's definitely what we're

5. 00:03:30

   working towards and that's that's the beginning of you know the advancing that the quantum travel featured moving forward here so yeah it's it's exciting because I qualms linking at least for me is is being able to group up and travel places together and then you know the escort and and do some really cool stuff so it's it's exciting but yeah free free jumps are absolutely coming so we were literally talking about that the other day so yeah look forward to getting that anyways thank you so much take care bye bye alright thank you so much to rob reiner gur and now we go overseas to our I'm not gonna say he's my favorite designer I was close to my favorite designer I mean I would see what let's do a ranking

6. 00:04:18

   of our designers you know John crew at a foundry 42 UK let's see if he picks up here hello hi John hi again how are you I'm okay thanks I got a question for you it's kind of an interesting one I was a little surprised it was it was voted up you know every once in a while these threads you know give us one that's a bit surprising to see so many people glom on to an idea this one says I have a jukebox in my hangar and it works so good job there can I have a radio or a jukebox or something in my spaceship right so what we're sort of working on in the background is looking at introducing cockpit flare so you'll be able to put

7. 00:05:06

   stuff in your cockpit they're all going to be items that go on item ports so that you have like we have with all the other items there'll be sizes on it so you can can't stick a full Bennie's machine in your dashboard but you'll have you might have a scaled-down one who knows but that air do you want certainly we're Bob heads that was one of the earlier stretch goals that Wei Ming for those the sort of the the small coffee flour items towards the end of the year and then we'll look at expanding that for the rest of the flour right and was going in the rest of you shape all right cool so things like the the Phoenix were sold with it with it with a I think was a Hartwell piano at one point so these are all things that

8. 00:05:55

   will have to be addressed at some point later yep right now our immediate focus the the first iteration if you would is shift customization is focused on cockpit player yes all right I'll probably see you next week then probably all right fine all right thank you John crew next up we're coming back to my home studio here in Los Angeles - none other than Kirk domain we've got two questions for Kirk this week I think are gonna be perfect for him Kirk hey Jared hey doing man good alright I got two questions kind of big easy these are questions that are both related to some so old-school misperceptions about star says you know things that were said in

9. 00:06:42

   previous episodes of around the verse or on or on spectrum whatnot there were maybe misunderstood at the time or things that have changed since then so this is these are questions that we wanted to address for a while they've come up they've been voted up and I think you're the guy for both of them cool all right to start off this person simply puts what about ship to station docking ship to ship docking ship to station docking what's the deal there so ship the ship and ship the station docking were planned for some quite some time unfortunately they're a little bit in the lower part of the backlog so we haven't had an opportunity to work on them but they are in the works and we do plan to not only allow ships to dock with each other but also them to dock on specific ports on stations and this is

10. 00:07:31

    primarily to allow the transport of both personnel and cargo in a by using some physical means to transport those commodities in between those various a Bellini part of that were also until being allowed having ships to dock within the cargo bays in auto-ship so you can have dragonfly's or noxes within the cargo base of some of the medium sized ships and then also have some large ships in in you know super massive ships that didn't have gotcha now one of the reasons people have been thinking that ship to ship docking was somehow not a feature was was was gone from star Susan was because when we redid the Cutlass the Cutlass originally had a docking collar and it's in its first

11. 00:08:20

    implementation when it was sold and then the first limitation was built when we redid it recently the docking collar was removed and people that for whatever reason thought that that was that was symbolic of us removing ship to ship docking and it's entirely what can you tell us about why that was removed so in that particular case it wasn't symbolic of that future going away really it was a really valuation of the design of because itself I mean that docking collar on the floor meant that he lost a lot of valuable real estate for features that we actually have in the game one of them is obviously the storage of a cargo within that area we had that dr. College McEnroe floor we lose a lot of real estate before you know something useful also as the cargo arm starts the Cutlass is more of a deployment vehicle we felt

12. 00:09:12

    that having the ability to store you know really important items for those deployment gameplay and having the access to allow the the put the players that are in the in the rear section of the cargo I'm sorry the Cutlass you know they exit the ship quickly is a function that we already have in the game so it was really a what do we have now and what's useful for the ship gadget so ship to ship docking and ship to station docking still on the docket still planned for development just later on down the line yeah I only did like at the time when we start different money will need to like solve problems like you know is it gonna be weird to have like to to Connie's you know with it but

13. 00:10:01

    they're the top ends connected together and what what that's gonna look like it doesn't matter in zero-g these are all solutions that we'll need to solve and you know palms will see when we start to investigating it but it just doesn't happen yet alright you next question what is the current plan for radar in scanning is it still due to have some type of unrelated minigame or has a more immersive skill based system in device similar in scope to the mining mechanics previously demonstrated okay so the that process is pretty old I can tell you right now that the vehicle features a u.s. vehicle features team is currently working on scanning and it is going to be more immersive it's not going to be a

14. 00:10:47

    minigame it's going to be more closely tied to radar so we have our passive radar that we have in the game and what we're going to allow the players to do is use a ping mechanic so you can you can do a 360 ping or you could do more focus things that are can detect weaker signals and it can also have a greater range will also incorporate things like having the ambient signals so you could have like a star that has a really high DM signature that can obscure a.m. signatures if that's we're looking for while so practicing for IR and then CS so the CS feature will be interesting because you could hide behind like say a planet or an asteroid without its care that particular

15. 00:11:35

    signature so it's all gonna be signature based we are gonna get rid of that golf mechanic what about well that was a prototype first for small ships anyway right so he improved that interface and made it a little bit nicer and there's gonna be some more control using the radar MFP that we're gonna incorporate so that you can determine that that cone and the strength and then it's the so our first iteration of this is going to be that you can do a ping and that'll give some really low low fidelity info back so we'll have like these kind of blobs that you're from radar that will hit up hey there's a couple of things over here the Amun thinking again as you get closer to

16. 00:12:22

    them or as you focus your ping and start really like kind of honing in on that that area of space that you want to do it more focus can on the the more the stronger signals that you get back from that thing will result in greater resolution of those targets so you can start flying toward them and as you get closer to them and you get within scanning distance you'll be able to do a really detailed scan and the more time you spend on the scan you'll be able to get more info about that target so in the case of ships will be able to tell things like you know owner or faction ship type maybe things like cargo its armament what stated sin you know how damaged it is we'll also be able to incorporate things like I know that mining is coming

17. 00:13:13

    along online sometime soon and so we'll be able to populate the universe with entities that are mining deposits so we go place them on planets and then part of a ping info they can get back as hey you know there's a there's a deposit of this particular element that you might want to take a look at so as you fly over to it they could do the scan it's okay there's you know you're raining here you wanna do you want to go mind that and you can make deterministic that decisions based on I'll be afore you get back from that first stage opinion in the second stage of scattering that sounds amazing thing I don't have anything dad you hit everything so should be where we're in the midst of working on it now and then where we're hoping to get some some tear of it in

18. 00:14:04

    alright : well thank you so much I'll let you get back to work click okay take care Kirk thank you alright now last and certainly not least we go a run row of desks over to mark abent mark Ament senior gameplay programmer I don't know what its title as these days mark mark how you doing man hey how's it going I don't know my title is I'm gonna say it's its titles man something gameplay I don't know yeah yeah you know I'm often quoted saying your title is where you start in this place it's not where you end what up so I got a question for you I wonder I almost voted on questions it was one of our most footer on questions in February we didn't get to it we got March threat here voted up again when can we expect a more rounded multi-crew piloting

19. 00:14:54

    experience the examples they give our co-pilot ceiling with power shields navigation etc in an effective manner so the good news is we know all about that we have it actually in our big gigantic backlog and our backlog has a bunch of stuff like how we want to give players control like if I'm in a pilot and I have a co-pilot give this guide to hit services oh hey you could have this now and we have even more crazy stuff like how power heat and all that balance stuff could go and it's just a gigantic thing in their backlog but because it's in our backlog it's gonna take time to because it's in our backlog it's gonna take time to get to those things the good news is we actually have a European vehicle team

20. 00:15:43

    now run by a guy named Paul a and he is taking a lot of the pressure off of our end to look into those things so that we cooperating build these things so that we can get to them so to go back to your question of when soon TM yes III I respect your decision to do Paul a instead of attempting to pronounce his last name mad at pronouncing people's names I mean legendary literally bad thanks in the code because I have misspelling things like glaser old so I'm just gonna be safe and st. Paul a he's awesome and we actually had him here him for a week in LA to get him up to speed so that he could take over some of these things yeah this is what this is one of those things happening remember you got the

21. 00:16:30

    folks at home or at work or wherever you're watching this in your car on your phone or whatever the feature service it's up on the website now allowing you to vote right now the the the lutely frontrunner is the item 2.0 feature improvements and stuff and these are the kind of things that will go directly to the sort of thing that we're talking about right now so so we know you know it's coming we're working on it but it's just too early to say like when yeah that's what the question was the question was essentially a one question and we're not going to be able to give you a win just yet but we're on it all right mark we'll let you go man thanks a lot cool guys later day to you well that about wraps up this week's show special thanks to Mark Ament and Rob Reiner ger and John crew and Kirk Tomei for being on the show today

22. 00:17:19

    remember you can spit your questions for consideration each and every week up on the thread up on spectrum by the time you view this there'll be a brand spankin new April thread take your time to submit your questions but also take your time to vote and remember you know scroll down there's a lot of good questions that get lost at the bottom which is why we cycle the thread to every single month but take your time find the questions you want most answered and be sure you you give it that vote so we know we know to get to it so we're calling all devs I'm content manager for global video production Jared Huckaby we'll see you next week everybody thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen a squadron 42 you can subscribe to our channel or you

23. 00:18:08

    can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library