Star Citizen Live: All About Spaceships - Alpha 3.5/3.6

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:14

   Um Uh where are we? JJ We're not We're not in LA. TV, move the TV in. I'm sorry, guys. This is embarrassing. Get Get rid of the chair. Thank you. Thank you. Did nobody tell you I wasn't coming in today? Oh. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Star Citizen Live All About Spaceships Alpha 3.5 and 3.6, the shortest title we've ever had for a show. I am your host, Jared Huckaby, and as you may have surmised, I'm in the TV this week. Uh we do something kind of like like Hold on. Where's the edge of the box? We're on the TV. I don't know. Uh Joining us for our conversation this week on All About Spaceships are two

2. 00:01:03

   people who probably don't need any introductions, but we're going to do it anyway, and I almost got through the word introductions. Immediately to my left, we have uh uh Grand Poobah of Flight What? Cover. I couldn't remember your title, Dave Colson. Dave, who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? Um I'm a gameplay programmer. I make ship uh ship systems and flight systems for vehicles. Got you. Yeah. And you've got a new title now. What is my title now? Grand Poobah. Oh, yeah. Grand Poobah? There you go. Grand Poobah is what I call anybody when I can't remember what they do. Uh Happy's been called Grand Poobah a few times. John, who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? my name's John Crew. I'm the Vehicle Pipeline Director. And what does a Vehicle Pipeline Director do? Uh so I sort of shepherd all the vehicles from before concepts, from initial design briefs, through concepts,

3. 00:01:52

   make sure everyone's happy with them at that stage, getting them through production, out into the final game, and balanced. Keep looking. Like normally when we do the show from LA, I just spend half the time watching the people who troll you from behind. And now that I'm here, I'm just like "Who are you looking at?" Luckily, Paul Jones isn't here cuz he sits sits right right there and he holds pictures of spaceships up in the background. So, this week's show is all about spaceships. Uh the spaceships that you can currently fly in Alpha 3.5.1, which is available in our live test environment, and Alpha 3.6, which is which is available in our public test universe uh for testing right now. Um as usual, you can submit your questions by prefacing your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets. Uh that'll help our community management team pull it out from all the other conversation. You can submit your questions in one of two

4. 00:02:39

   places, either live on Twitch if you happen to be watching this at the I popularly early time of 8:00 a.m. Pacific, but I didn't have to wake up early for this one. It's only four It's 4:00 here. I've been going all day already. Uh or uh on Spectrum, our bespoke communications platform on robertsspaceindustries.com. Uh now, we did pick up some questions throughout the week for those who couldn't join us uh live. Uh it's also a good chance for people to vote up what questions uh they want to see answered most. So, in no particular order, uh we're going to start with some of the questions from the uh thread while we wait for the ones live to come in. Uh this says "Currently, ships have a maximum range on weapons. Ships have a maximum range on weapons, after which you can't hit anything, and that range isn't very far. What is the plan for longer range engagements? Particularly,

5. 00:03:27

   will we get the ability for larger capital ships to perform orbital bombardment on planet like This is not about Alpha 3.5 and 3.6. You're asking about orbital bombardment from capital ships. What are we going to say? Let's talk about the range part first. So, uh obviously, every weapon has a a range. Um at the moment, it's just sort of a a simple function of velocity times the lifetime of the projectile gives you that. Maximum range Uh uh they They're a couple hundred not hundred uh couple thousand meters at the moment from the size range we're having in game. That's going to change as bigger and bigger ships come online uh and we sort of mold the balance around them as they come in. Um whether that's going to be orbital bombardment is a sort of chicken and egg not chicken and egg

6. 00:04:16

   that's completely the wrong example to use. Uh depends on the thing you're bombarding. It could be a very small planet could be a very big one. It could have 1 km of atmosphere it could have 10,000. Um so it's it's hard to say but those larger weapons will be able to reach significantly further than the weapons in the game currently can. Gator, so as far as the orbital bombardment goes uh it's it's a matter of the situation. It's what capital ship are we talking about? What's the size of the planet you're talking about? How far are you from that planet? What's the status of that planet's atmosphere? It's You can have I love torpedoes down from quite high in the atmosphere of planets onto unsuspecting targets on the ground so Gator, you're wondering what your what your retaliators are there you go. Um from the live chat, how will we access ship components for smaller ships?

7. 00:05:05

   Things like the Aurora, the Arrow, etc. Yeah, so uh all the vehicles in the game have uh components they're all physicalized we don't sort of cheat anything everything has a space which is uh some people don't realize when they're looking at ships and they're like, "Why Why is this huge ship got such a tiny interior?" It's because the components have taken up the rest of the space. Um for obviously bigger ships you access them from the outside from smaller ships you access from the inside. For smaller ships you access them from the outside generally. They're either going to be behind they're always going to be behind panels that open up. Uh we're quite We're doing some development at the moment to decide the best way of doing that. Obviously, if we start cutting up all our ships and putting dozens of panels on the outside, that just blows

8. 00:05:52

   the cost of them. So, we're looking at ways that we can not do that, but still have that game play of I go up to something on the outside of my ship. It opens up without having to have artists cut holes in geometry and you get components out of it. We're talking with the graphics guys, we've got some interesting things we're going to try to do. Not every ship has been converted to the full component system. No. Uh it's sort of a an ongoing process. Any ships that have been built in like the last year or so, you'll see spaces for them in in the ships. And some quite a lot older, but particularly the the single seaters where you can't get into them. We'll be going back and sort of finishing them off and that. Some of the new ships already have uh panels Yeah. A lot of lot of the new ships do. Even even some of the small ones, you

9. 00:06:39

   have the the panel lines sort of ready for when we decide which way to go with the tech to do that. Let's talk about hover mode. With the launch of hover mode, Come on. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Go on. Usually, there's like half a world between us, but I'm sitting right here. Uh with the launch of hover mode, landing a ship vertically in a hangar may have become a little harder than it already was. This too. Can you say when you consider turbulence, drift, etc. Are there any plans for a downward looking camera just like the rear camera currently implemented? It would be ideal to also have crosshairs crosshairs to add the alignment of the ship to the ground. So, the long-term goal, which we can't do in 3.6, um is to actually have the 3D like AR UI that we had in an older

10. 00:07:30

    version. I think it was like SC 2.0, we had that. Um I don't know if it's 2.0. It was like 2.5, 2.6. Maybe somewhere in there. So, the goal is to bring that back, but the problem is that when that first of all, that UI was using different tech and second of all, that UI was built around the sort of known geometry of landing pads that we'd set up. And now the game has planets and different shape landing pads and all sorts of stuff. So that becomes a really difficult problem. And so we need to figure out how to, say like, take chunks of the ground and then render like low res versions of them and stuff like that. Um it's a really difficult problem, but that is the way that we want to do that. So when you go in, when you put your landing gear down, you get this little UI. And it'll give you situational awareness of around you and it'll also give you alignment cues for the center of the the landing pad.

11. 00:08:17

    And there's also the actual factor of uh controlling hover mode because I think actually, like, especially when you're in tight spaces, um hover mode doesn't really show its strengths. Um and so we're currently exploring options of improving how to control hover mode in tight spaces to make, you know, like inside hangars and inside landing bays and stuff being a little bit easier to control cuz right now I think you like you like slightly move and you move way more than you expected. Yeah. Um and it's it's not great. And the the visibility also should mean that you don't need to like look down, like, rotate your ship down to look where you're going. You just have to get there. So not necessarily just a camera that shows you below. We're looking for like an AR, a 3D AR solution so that you can see so you don't just get a 2D

12. 00:09:04

    representation of what's below you. You actually see the terrain, you see the slope, and you see some kind of guidance Yep. to your to your best potential landing area. Um yeah, that that was that's the plan. You got an ETA? Not 3.6. Not 3.6, yeah. another popular question from the the ship thread, what's the current status of ship armor? Uh so all ships have an armor item. It doesn't behave how the long-term vision for armor is. At the moment, it's very simplistic um incoming damage reduction modifier. What It could be increasing if we really wanted to, but that's not really armor. Um so, it really just scales down

13. 00:09:52

    different damage types coming in to give that sort of pseudo armor behavior. Uh in the future, uh we're going to have the physically based damage system, so that will essentially be a layer on top of that um that determines how the projectiles interact with the actual hull of the ship. Uh between now and then, um there's there's things we're looking at doing in in terms of it not just being a flat modifier, but sort of having its own not health pool, but its own sort of properties that at the moment in game, you can go up to a spaceship with a pistol and if you had infinite ammo, you could kill an Idris by just tapping away with a ballistic pistol, which makes no sense, whereas we want to have sort of minimum thresholds, um which is

14. 00:10:40

    what physical base damage would do for us out of the box. It would go this projectile is doing X amount of joules of energy. That's less than I care about, so it'll just bounce off, whereas with the current system, we'd need to go this projectile is coming in doing 45 damage. We only care about damage that is above 90 before it starts chipping away at the health. You don't want armor to be just more health, right? You want it to be different mechanics. health is is not interesting gameplay, the same as shell as shell shield health being just an extra health isn't particularly interesting. Um there's there's lots of ways we can make hull health, armor, and shield all sort of interplay together. hover mode toggle

15. 00:11:27

    Yes, toggle. So, this is this is such a difficult problem. we we've heard like all of the feedback about the toggle. Um, and we're going to go in that direction. But, it's a really difficult problem to solve because um, if we say just added a toggle, right? And I know the intention that whenever one asks for a toggle, their intention is that when you turn off hover mode, you get no assistance, right? So, if you don't do anything, the ship will just fall, right? And then you have to manually like thrust in whatever direction. So, say if your ship is like this, then you just strafe up by however much gravity is, and you'll stay level. But, then if you rotate like this, you'll have to manually like thrust backward. And that'll be kind of a difficult problem. And that's that's the direction we're going to go

16. 00:12:14

    in, but there's also more problems with that because that is at odds with the core idea of like coupled flight cuz coupled flight is essentially having velocity dampeners on. Mhm. And so, when you fall, you you pick up your velocity. And the usual function of the ship is to cancel that. Um, and so, making that like not contradicting that and also making that falling gameplay work is super super difficult. And that's why we we can't just do it and, you know, just send it out. So, we will do it. It won't be in 3.6 though cuz we need a bit of time to make sure that it doesn't have any loopholes and it doesn't have any like, you know, problems and stuff. Like, for example, you could

17. 00:13:01

    like turn off hover mode and then hit space brake, and you would just stay there. Cuz that's what space brake's for, And then you would have the same gameplay of like floating there and being able to do this. Um, and so, that's why the toggle is is so hard to do. Um, but we will we will go in that direction. We also It's also important to remember that, you know, our live environment is still a testing environment. So, so we want we want hover mode to get its time and then we want people to experience it. We want to get all the feedback we possibly can on hover mode because, you know, your first impression with it may not be what your next impression of it is as you get used to it, as you find different ships tackle hover mode differently or hover mode affects different ships differently. Um as far as I've seen some folks when

18. 00:13:49

    they're asking about toggle, I think some folks are asking for can we just go back to like the old version to the new version? And so, what we why would we not want to do that? The whole point of hover mode would be undermined to some degree if we did that because in terms of just straight-up competitive gameplay, like say you're in a a ground troops versus uh Area 5 ship. you would never use hover mode cuz why would you? You can just stand there and be a floating target in the sky. and so going back to how we you how it used to work is probably the most undesirable at least in its current form of just doing that simply without any other like

19. 00:14:37

    um sacrifices. Like Like maybe we could do something where you go back to the old flight system where you kind of hover there but your thrusters like burn out and fail in like 20 seconds or something. That would be That would be more reasonable than going back to what we had. Then trying to use all your maneuvering thrusters to keep you perfectly still. Exactly. Yeah, like that. Okay. We have done since the initial current with the 3.0 wave one PTU the initial release, but there has been a big like dump of improvements to hover mode from what people first got and then what they have currently now. And I can't remember when when that actually went through and whether you've done stuff since. don't remember patch letter, but it was like earlier this week it was like Tuesday, Monday or

20. 00:15:24

    Tuesday. So there is some some big quality of life changes in there cuz there there were there were people that were totally unprepared for hover mode too. Came into the landings and didn't walk away from it. We're getting there. Um one of the things one of the I guess side effects we've seen with hover mode is that there's a lot of our VTOL engines are now rotating where they hadn't been in the past. The next question says, will ships that originally had thrusters that appear designed for rotation like the Freelancer and Caterpillar eventually see them used for VTOL or is the expectation that they will not perform as well in hover mode as other ships that have had their rotating thrusters implemented? Uh it's case by case. Uh we were looking at the Freelancer the other day. It's it's not as simple as just making those engines rotate um

21. 00:16:13

    like the Cutlass. Mhm. Um because the Freelancer actually has its landing gears built into those rotating thrusters. And when they then rotate there is no uh There's no way to land when it's in T-Rex mode. A land because the landing gear are pointing out to the front of the ship. So you would have to go out of it to land which Is that a benefit? If you could land without it Why would you use it? it? And the other big thing is that when it would be rotating like that there is actually no thrusters pointing forwards and backwards. So you'd go into hover mode and you'd lose all ability to stop. So you'd be going down without your landing gear around. So that would be quite a hefty adjustment to the original Freelancer commercial where you know the engines rotate and turn into like a little T-Rex. It was it was it

22. 00:17:00

    was it was definitely a striking visual. That's true. But but as it comes down and it's landing like right before it lands it switches back to other mode and still somehow manages to float down. It was it seemed a little bit like have your cake and eat it too as far as the two different Yeah, I don't think the Caterpillar ever had I don't know. If you're considering it's like this long and those engines are just at the back. got a significant amount of um thrusters underneath it that are uh all down the not the center axis, but the center axis of the main part of it. They're almost try thrusters in that they they do 45s and down. So, it has enough thrust under there to to counter it. No, I want I want to say that's not to say that we're we're not sitting here saying that Freelancer thrusters will never rotate. It's just that right now there are a

23. 00:17:47

    couple challenges inherent to them. So. All right, let's see what else we got. From the live chat, uh are damage over time plasma weapons still planned? Yes. I think the the Glaive and the Glaive supposed to have plasma weapons. Well, so if plasma is a a thing, that's sort of the characteristic that we that we want to go for it is uh what's the difference between a laser cannon and a plasma cannon? At the moment, not a huge amount. Um whereas having damage over time allows those two weapons to have sort of meaningful choices. Like the plasma cannon might do less alpha damage, but it burns away at your hull once you do a hit. More dots. We'll put dots. Uh what stops ships from holding objects, vehicles, and other things consistently in their interior? And why

24. 00:18:36

    is it sometimes broken in ships when it worked a previous patch? Uh that could be many things. Lots of different bugs. Yes. Lots of different bugs working together against each other. Uh occasionally it is purely an asset issue. Um the way we build the assets, you you have a physics proxy and there's two ways you can sort of assign that physics proxy to a uh a mesh. You can combine it into one mesh and then that is a pretty solid watertight way of ensuring collisions don't work. The problem is you then have a physics proxy that is combined with that mesh. So, if you want to actually get to the the bit you see, you have to detach it first to do your work, then reattach it. So, it's it's a bit of a workflow pain.

25. 00:19:25

    Um the other way you can do it you can have it as a child mesh. Most of the time that works exactly the same way, but every now and then it just doesn't behave the same way. But, it is a nicer way to work. So, you'll quite often you'll find when artists go and do fixes to ships or designers, they they'll detach those meshes, make them child meshes, and then just forget to put them back and combine it. As the the solid solution. As for the part where why is it sometimes it works one patch and another and it doesn't the next patch? Integrations. I mean, it's every patch is okay, here's everything that was before and now we're adding all these new things in and vast majority of bugs come from untested, un- unanticipated integration you know, interactions between systems. Lots of times if you watch if you ever watched Bugsmashers, which was a program we

26. 00:20:12

    broadcast for a number of years, I mean, you'd see just the strangest seemingly non-related systems chain you know, this thing you know, a ship uses this system to keep things in there, but this thing also interacts with this system and they don't interact with each other, but they interact with the same underlying system that causes the problem in the other ship. It was it's it's always a it's always a challenge and one of the reasons we have our PTU to help us identify those. Throwing sort of live game networking stuff as well. If if you're on a particularly poor connection or the server's having a moment, and the difference on your client between putting the box down where the the root of it is at the very bottom flush with the proxy of the ship, the server might think you're a centimeter off or I don't know how accurate they do it.

27. 00:21:00

    The server thinks you put it inside that proxy on the bottom of the ship. It now has to go do I go I do I put it above? Do I put it beneath? And then my life. You're starting to get that faraway glaze. Flashback. Yeah, I remember that. That's on my list. Let's talk about another thing on your list, Dave. Is it hot mic? Why not? Why can't we summon ground vehicles without it despawning our ship? Is this intended or a bug? I think this is just cuz ground vehicles are counted as spaceships. I I would say that's I don't actually know if that's intentional or not. It is not, but as it stands, you you can sort of only have one summoned vehicle. Uh and At the moment. At the moment. Um if you got one out there, you can sort

28. 00:21:47

    of it just goes I think we we may have even done something to 3.6 for that cuz I'm sure I saw a forum post. It's not something we either of us sort of actively deal with. Yeah. But it's it I think are we safe saying that it's not a it's not a design intention? We're We're not We're not sitting here saying you can you can we want it forever to be a ship or a vehicle. And then cuz cuz obviously many of your many many ships are designed to carry vehicles. Yeah. But for ships that are sort of designed to come with vehicles, you'll you'll eventually be able to spawn the vehicles in them. But if you wanted to spawn a PTV and a Valkyrie separately, you you should be able to do that. And just load it up and then go on your travels. Honestly, I think originally that decision was made as a performance

29. 00:22:35

    improvement to stop having too many vehicles on the server. Cuz a lot of people with a lot of ships. Yeah. Despawn Despawn a ship. Let somebody take it out and spawn a ship part of it or spawn a ship over there. And you know, some cuz somebody would try to spawn their entire fleet and just to take the picture of it. Yeah. And someone would do that at Olisar filling the landing pads next to the frame rate tanks. Yeah. And then so something that's in play now, but not necessarily down the line. Okay, let's see what Let's go back from the live thread here. What's that weird foldout thingy that you can open in the lower back of the Prospector? I don't actually know what this is. Oh, the the thing at the back. Um so, that was something that Tony uh requested years and years ago when we were actually doing the Prospector. It's for uh when you do FPS mining that you can

30. 00:23:24

    load some of the stuff you have done directly into the back of the Prospector. I didn't know that. I didn't know that either. Learn something new every day. The more you know. Uh have you ever considered an EMP rocket or missile? We don't have any in the game at the moment, do we? We don't have any in the game. Uh there's a few ships that we want to have them come with them by default. Both new and old. Uh this one is short and straight to the point. Are ships going to murder their occupants less than 3.6? hopefully. I'm I'm curious how how how firmly you were going to go on the record there. yeah, that's that's just a bug that is should have been fixed. I'm pretty sure it's been fixed. I haven't seen it anywhere near as much as 3.5.1 live in

31. 00:24:14

    our 3.6 testing. My legs are pretty strong now, so What was it actually doing? I have no idea what it was doing. Yeah. You have to ask the actor for that one. See, if only we still had bug smashers, man. We could ask Mark. So, yeah, and his questions to That's true. It is. We'll go get Yiannis and he can come on and explain it. We see this one quite a bit. Is there any chance of a vehicle scale quantum drive that will allow parasite ships like the Merlin or Argo just to spline jump around a planet or moon, but not necessarily, you know, cross the distances between planets? It's just It's just folks just trying to make the the journey from orbit down to down to the surface a bit more tenable uh in their smaller crafts. Yeah, it's it's not something we've really considered. It's not going to be

32. 00:25:03

    a never never say never thing, but those those snubs have restricted ranges by design. Um we could definitely make it easier for them to get around places, but I I don't think uh a vehicle size quantum drive is the answer to that. Okay. What are the lessons learned so far from the new ship customization feature? It's a good question. I think we're uh we asked the question here. Uh I think we're still evaluating if we're being completely honest. It's It's really interesting to see what sort of floated people's boat, so to speak. Ship. Ship. Yeah. What floated people's ship? Doesn't work. Uh and Please do not confirm boats here on the

33. 00:25:52

    show. The The sort of metaphor. The content that we thought would be quite popular wasn't as popular as we thought. And then other things that we thought nobody'd be interested in that was really popular. So from the from the website, we learned a lot in terms of how to build the customizer. From the game side, we learned a lot in terms of where to spend our time and efforts providing that content for people. Um where I know we're we're not quite ready to announce where the next the next time ship customization uh the platform side of ship customization will will will hit, uh but I know we are discussing things and looking at our options and stuff like that. So uh stay tuned for additional for other Star Citizen communication channels to find out when that might happen.

34. 00:26:40

    Uh let's see. Uh let's John. This feels like it's a This is a loaded question. What's a What's a Vanguard buck? A Vanguard buck. So, bucks were this Battlefield upgrade kits promotion that was used in the original Vanguard concept. Back in 2015. Back in 2015. It was sort of this pitched as a easy way to swap between all your Vanguards. And we only ever did it on the Vanguards. We never did I think else and it sort of The reason we never did on anything else was incredibly confusing way of sort of packaging these items. It was a whole new name with a whole different explanation. So,

35. 00:27:28

    So, in essence what we attempted to make something seem easier and somehow made it seem more complex cuz ships already have collections of components and and some ships have skins and and stuff like that. And this was just meant to be like like one item that was a proxy for five, six, seven different items. So, when you swap this one, it just swap five, six, seven items. And then I believe at the time you could do that and then you could also individually customize them after that as well. So, Right. That That's what we allow you to do now on all our ships anyway. So, going forwards like we talked about in the shipyard articles back in 2017 that Available on robertsspaceindustries.com. You just go to It's on the main page if you scroll down a bit. A whole series of articles

36. 00:28:16

    written in 2017 about bucks and all ship related stuff. Check it out if you haven't. Yeah, essentially instead of having a buck for each war warden Vanguard you you have We're just going to give you the the items and then you can customize it however you want. You can You can swap out that middle module to between them all even the Hoplite now because now we've reworked the Vanguard the Hoplite central room actually fits in the same section as the all the others. So, all the Hoplite owners have a a way to customize their hoplites now. with the Harbinger and Sentinel in 3.7, we'll be releasing all the nose gun options. So, each of the variants is going to get its own set of nose guns. They're still bespoke to the Vanguards, um but they'll

37. 00:29:03

    they'll have different ones. There's like there's laser repeaters, there's distortion cannons, there's ballistic cannons, ballistic repeaters, there's and there's there's more than that as well. So, there'll be plenty of Don't bury the lead here. You you you you you just went into it another major Vanguard question in the middle of the it all up. All right. So, let's let's let's let's finish the buck up before we get to the cool nose cannon things. All right. So, what's happening with with the bucks is is when that time comes when the full in-game ship modularity comes and we can swap out modules, they will people who own those bucks will get the collection of items. All the items that were originally supposed to be in there. The difference will be instead of one clicking a collection of things, it will be click the paint, click the room, click Click the paint. It'll be a little more It'll be a little

38. 00:29:50

    more clicks, but people are still going to get everything that was included in that in those things. uh the only thing different from what you can do now with the Vanguard in game is you'll be able to customize that interior module cuz you can already well You can swap out components. You can always swap out the components. When the nose guns are around, you'll be able to swap them out. And so, it's just central room modularity. So, now let's get into those nose guns. Nose guns. Uh uh a lot of people uh Now that nose gun that that hard mounted nose gun, it's been a feature of the Vanguard since it was first introduced in in 2015. Uh now this rework that we're completing with with 3.6 was a visual rework. It wasn't a rebalancing of the ship. It didn't change the loadouts. It didn't change the armaments. It didn't change the the the the nose gun at all. But, in 3.7, we're adding custom nose guns.

39. 00:30:39

    Yes. So, the the Harbinger and Sentinel were always uh pitched with different nose weapon options. So, we're in the process of making those options. So, the Harbinger and Sentinel will not come with the MVSA laser cannons. They're going to come with their own Vanguard specific versions of existing weapons in the game. We'll probably change the Hoplite's nose weapons as well. And then there's a few more that are just going to be available to get from the shops in game. So, there is the Vanguard owners that last have options to pick from. And you can also uh individually change the four nose mounts. So, if you want to have two laser cannons and two ballistic repeaters on the nose, you can do that.

40. 00:31:27

    Got it. So, so there'll be a specialized mount for Vanguards. Yes, you can only those Vanguard nose weapons only fit on the Vanguard. When we looked at doing the rework, we toyed with the idea of making something more generic. Make almost sort of taking them away and just giving it four generic size two hardpoints, but it sort of it was there from day one and it's it's part of it and just replacing them just seemed a bit of a sort of easy get out that Yeah, it's kind of like taking that taking that gun off the A-10 Warthog. It's it's it it's part of the Vanguard's personality. it would have changed the front of the ship like quite a lot in terms of looks. Yes, and if you watched ISC 2 weeks ago you or last week rather, you've seen how how

41. 00:32:15

    how involved Chris has been in in like making it just like the concept. So, So, all right. Let's see. What else do we got from the live chat? We've had a lot of questions. We talk a lot about flight. How are you guys feeling about driving? Any tech you're working on for ground vehicles? At the moment, no. It's something that I actually would would love to work on one day, but the fact is it it works reasonably well and there's no problems with it. And so, at least in the near future this There's no problems. It works well enough. Don't go away. Tell Tell us there's no problems with it. Go ahead. All right, fine. There are some problems, right? But it works works well enough. frame with you when you're doing this bit. Um yeah, it works it works well enough for now.

42. 00:33:03

    Um and at some point in the future we'll we'll come back to improve them. The the vast majority of our gameplay is in vehicles and space vehicles. space vehicles and so I I've got it out of the habit of saying ships cuz of my title. So, I call everything vehicles now. Um spaceships and sort of on foot combat. That's the sort of spaceships is well, 70% of the game. Everything else is less, so we put the majority of our time and effort into We know there are some minor issues with ground vehicles and we have a long list of things that we want to do to make them be as good as flying spaceships around. Uh from from the live chat why can't we spawn Archimedes

43. 00:33:53

    and P-52 on the moons? You can't? Didn't realize you couldn't. So, I'll look into that. I'm going to say it's probably a bug if it's if it's not. If you can spawn another uh space small spaceship. I know there's a size restriction on the the moon. Yeah, but usually that's a that's a Yeah, it's like big restriction and they're not a too small to fit on the pad. So, we'll go look at that. Uh if that's something you're experiencing, look look on the issue council see if it's been reported. If it hasn't been reported, report it. In case you did In case you don't know what the issue council is, ask your friends. And you shouldn't be. So, all right, what we got here? Uh Why do light fighters, like the Arrow, have the same cooling, shielding, and power capacity as medium and heavy

44. 00:34:41

    fighters, like the Hornet and Hurricane? Weaponry and whole armor aside, what incentive is there to use a larger, slower ship when a nimble, tiny fighter has the same capability? I don't think it has the same capability. I I would disagree it has the same capability. It may have the same items inside, but if if you put like a a glass of water inside a 55-gallon oil drum versus 55 gallons of water inside an oil drum, if both things the same item in there, they behave very differently. It's sloshing around. The heat system is also um the heat system interacts in ways that are not immediately intuitive. So, for example, you might have the same cooling capacity on two different ships, but because they have all different items in a different loadout, the

45. 00:35:28

    heating behaves differently. That's a better way of explaining it. So so depen- depending on the the the size and make and model of a ship, that that may two different ships may use the same component differently. Different levels of efficiency, different uh different performance characteristics, even though it's the same component. So. Especially like I say coolers, they they may seem to have the same values and and put across multiple ships, but on the Arrow it may let those guns fire for much longer, but that's the F8, fire everything for a much shorter time. It's much like the way that, you know, John Cru and I could go and talk to the same girl, but have two very different reactions at the end of the night. I don't know where I was going with

46. 00:36:16

    All right. Now, as a follow-up, can we expect ships to have more appropriate equipment related to their class, uh like they they specifically mentioned the high-end 600i should not share a quantum drive with a Cutlass Black. Yes. So, that's something where if the guys have not already fixed for 3.6, it'll be fixed for 3.7. It's more of a function of the when those ships went into the game, we didn't have the full range of items. Uh now the props team have made more of the range of the items, so we can make the actual in-game versions of them and then divide them out amongst the ships. Yeah, it's important to remember that the process of implementing the full item 2.0 into all these ships is still ongoing. It's on like we talked earlier about some ships

47. 00:37:05

    you can't even access the components just yet. And then some ships have temporary or or inter- intermediate components. Words. All right. Uh will the craft with VTOL-style thrusters work better in hover mode than the ships made more like aircraft? Uh for example, will the Cutlass handle better in hover mode than a Hornet? So, uh they certainly behave differently, although in that particular example, it's not great cuz the Cutlass has a bug at the moment. But, what happens is that when you move a thruster or rotate a thruster in our system, it completely rebalances all of the acceleration capability of that ship like on the fly. Um and so, if you, for example, rotate a thruster down, you lose all of the forward thrust that you would have

48. 00:37:52

    had and it's now facing down. And so, you can't strafe forward as quickly, but you can, you know, move up and down much more quickly. Um and that's the difference that you'll feel. Um I know a lot of the larger ships are balanced such that um they really struggle to hold themselves up without having without rotating those thrusters down. Um but then again, like the Hornet may have more difficulty because it's not got a thruster for down, but it's also much lighter, so it ends up balancing out a little bit. Um in the case of the Cutlass, um it has an issue at the moment that that that thrust capability is not being balanced correctly, and so it's not as nimble up and down as it should be. But that's the intention is that you get um the same amount of thrust, but it

49. 00:38:43

    directed in different directions, which will naturally change the handling. Um so yeah, that's something that I thought I'd bring into Can you comment this from the live chat here? Can you comment on the damaged dirt, and especially reflections on ship cockpits? They can completely obscure the pilot's view at times, and can prove to be very distracting. Is this more for art? That's in capital letters. Last part. He It's an art and design thing. Um so arts tend to go in and make really pretty-looking things, and get the glass behaving how it would do. Um and then when it goes in game, and it doesn't so it reflects really well all the wrong things around you. It gets

50. 00:39:31

    bugged up. Um they get a bug. It might not be the original artist that gets that bug. That artist goes, "Well slide it back down again." Uh and then it gets fixed. Then the original artist sees that and goes, "That's not how I made it." Put it back. So it's it's coming up with a compromise. If you don't have glass with some level of reflection and um impurities to it, it it doesn't look like it's there. And then it feels very odd. And obviously, like we've talked a lot about how everything is starting wants to be a nice physical experience. You want to see and feel like you're in that world, and be immersed in it. If you're sat in a ship completely transparent glass, it sort of doesn't feel nice. But sometimes we do definitely go too far the other way, and generally

51. 00:40:20

    that's a bug and it's something we we'll work on. Um We had some big changes to the glass shader in the last year that made things a lot nicer. There's definitely a few ships that are kicking around with that someone's taken a heavy pan scara to the window that probably shouldn't have done, and they'll just get to tell you that over time. Yeah, you you hit everything. You hit you hit where where you you hit. Uh previous to overheat systems being put in this place, cooler overclocking was temporarily disabled in order to enhance testing of overheat systems. Is it still the plan to re-enable the ability to overclock coolers along with the appropriate wear and tear effects on the cooling components? And if so, when? So, we could do this. However, it was it was

52. 00:41:07

    an interesting Yeah, it it creates a really difficult to deal with uh interaction where you can effectively nullify a lot of the heat mechanics by doing that. Um and so, we either have to like balance it such that you still have some heating effects even when your cooler is overclocking, or we need to make that like horribly damage your cooler. Uh we now have the misfire mechanic uh that is uh going to be out with 3.6. And that provides a good opportunity to provide some of those like compromises that you have to make if you want to overclock a cooler. But, you know, before we had the misfires and you know, wear and damage and stuff, um it was the more reliable solution to say it's much easier for us to balance and deal

53. 00:41:56

    with the heat systems if you can't overclock the coolers because it's effectively like tuning two different setups, one that's overclocked and one that's not, and it like it actually more than doubles the amount of work. You want to set the base level it it it it before you set the customization. It's like when we talked about it, you know, like you want to set all the law system. You want to set the way laws are supposed to work before you introduce all the ways you can circumvent it. Exactly. So, you want to you want to make sure that you've got you know, the heating the and overheating system working the way that you want it before you introduce the way to circumvent it. Yeah. There's It's also another weird thing with overclocking is and it's just like a cool concept of overclocking is you're essentially letting the item have more power or

54. 00:42:45

    request more power. And the more power it has, the more heat it generates, which on a cooler a bunch of things makes no sense. So, the coolers have a power requirement to function cuz without power they won't function. Um so, the coolers themselves actually generate heat that they then get rid of themselves whilst dealing with everything else. But the more power they have, the more heat they make, which makes them can make them actually worse because you've overclocked them briefly. You go around in a weird You need a cooler's cooler. A cooler's cooler that doesn't require power. Short answer is it makes life very difficult. So, So, still working on it. let's do some more Vanguard Warden questions just cuz I like to see Cole

55. 00:43:32

    squirm. Me? You can answer them. Did the ability to retract the top turret on the Vanguard make it into the rework or was it just not feasible? it's not in game. Uh we want well, we want to do it. We wanted to do it from the start. We just ran into time versus uh manpower availability to do it. So, we've built everything to support it. Um we just ran out of time to do it before So, it's got a place to retract it. place to do it. So, um the the one big thing that's left is we need to remodel the outer surface of the upper turrets. So, if you remember on the original concept that the the guns on the turret sort of rotated up onto it and then the whole turret goes down. We just haven't modeled uh and set up the guns to do Uh the turret itself has space to dip

56. 00:44:24

    down. It doesn't go all the way down like the original concept was because that actually just went into the interior room inside it which isn't great. So, when we did the rework, we actually bulked up the top of the ship to give it space to put the turret back down into it. So, we'll get to it one day. It's just not in the original it's not in the rework release. Uh for the person that was asking if they can get a a Warden as a loaner for their Redeemer, uh none of the people here at this table are involved in that decision, but uh Tyler's already saying that they'll look into it. So, it's not a promise or commitment to to do it, but that they'll examine uh that as a possibility. So, thanks for asking. Uh is ship to ship hailing working for your team? Uh uh I think It's not. It's not us. Not us.

57. 00:45:10

    Yeah, it's it's not us, but uh no, we we we we yes, ship to ship hailing is one of those 3.6 features uh that's going in. It's actually the the US one or two team from the from uh LA from my studio uh that's working on it. I've seen Kirk and Kaylee uh working on that. They ship to ship so they think it is it's it's a it's a ship feature. It's communications feature that just happens to happen on on spaceships. And I haven't seen it, but yes, uh as far as as far as everything I know, uh I saw it working before I left and it doesn't mean that with other integrations something else won't break it and whatever, but I it is still our intention to put that into 3.6. Um it seems like the 600i has no VTOL. Is that intentional or a bug? that's a bug. It's a bug. I actually was working on

58. 00:45:59

    that today. Oh, okay. It's got some big thrusters underneath to do it. It's just a bug. Um did you do uh with the new Vanguard model back to Vanguard. Uh everybody loves the Vanguard. I love the Vanguard. The the Vanguard Harbinger was the first spaceship I got to name, so it's so I've been waiting for the Harbinger for a long time. Oh, delayed then. Right now I the second I came out of my mouth I I was realizing I shouldn't have said anything cuz John will just troll. Sorry, when the when the Harbinger doesn't make 3.7, it's because of this what just happened right here. With the new Vanguard model, can we expect better handling in the event that one of the engine nacelles are lost or damaged, or does it maintain its maneuver This is maneuver I think I mean maneuver thruster and main engine placement behavior. So, it's got better handling full stop

59. 00:46:47

    now. So, a lot of the fixed thrusters have been adjusted into joint ones, so they've got a little bit of gimbal motion which Makes it a lot. Yeah, does a huge difference and we when we redid the exterior, uh we redefined where the the section of it breaks up. So, it's got those two twin the the two booms with the engines on the back. Um In the old version and the glow bits on the front now. The the old one had the end of the the the thrusters on the back the maneuvering thrusters very close to them and then the break for where it fell off right was essentially took half your main engines away and the ability to turn in that direction. So, now that cut isn't there anymore. Uh the entire boom comes off. It's had its health boosted up to compensate for

60. 00:47:35

    that, so uh even when that thing comes off, when I've seen people flying around on Spectrum in game and on Reddit, you can still fly it with one of those booms completely missing, which is sort of fitting to the lore as well. So, yeah, it's much better and it's got some new slightly Redeemer-ish rear engines on it. You said redeem. All right. Let's get into some 890 Jump questions. Now, the 890 Jump is not coming in 3.6, but it's coming in a 3.6 X patch. Whether that's 3.6.1 or 3.6.2, we'll we'll find out as as things go along. But, it's But, it's coming as far as the as part of the 3.6 branch, so we'll go ahead and call it fair game To To what extent can the 890 Jump and other capitals be customized? Or at least what is the planned extent? Now, I don't know if they're talking about the

61. 00:48:25

    ship components or if they're talking about the the web platform. It's It Right now, there's no plans to use the web platform for it, so we're going to we're going to answer we're going to focus on in-game components. Capital ships generally have most if not all of their items are size four or capital class, which means they are bespoke modeled into the ship. So, size zero, which is vehicle one, two, three, small, medium, large, those items are actually made by the prop team and they are essentially swappable between any vehicle that can take them. Whereas, when you get to capitals, they become sort of a an integrated feature of the ship. So, they they're made by the ship team themselves. As they're making the ship, they On the 890, the the power plants are the probably you've seen them in

62. 00:49:12

    whatever media we've shown of it. Are the two long huge tubes in the engineering bay. Those are the power plants. Rather than being this cube uh actually I'm not sure yet. Well, you're going to see it soon, actually. Um And there's lots of other things in there that are bespoke to the ship. That doesn't mean we're never going to uh not give a upgraded 890 Jump power plant. It's just going to be a very rare thing to have. It's going to take time to fit cuz essentially you're going to take your ship to a dry dock. Leave it there for a period of time cuz they've got to rip out half the the ship to put this new thing in. Uh there might be a subtle change to how it looks. Um but, it's not as easy as the current ship customization. Yeah, but the 890 does have some size three items in there though. So, there is some level of items you can tweak and of course all the weapons and missiles.

63. 00:50:02

    Uh what locations will we be able to spawn a 890 jump at? And is it able to enter exit atmosphere on planets? So, it is big as we've confirmed. It fits in what we call internally the extra large hangers. So, uh Hurston and Area 18 have those. Um I'm not sure whether any of the new rest stops do, but absolutely Hurston and Area 18, you'll be able to spawn it at and get out of the atmosphere. And we say we're not sure if any of the new rest stops do. We mean the current ones that are in 3.6. I mean that that's Future ones definitely will. Um we've already talked to Ian who's sat out there. Can't spawn it on a small pad. Can't spawn it on a small pad. It's way too big for the 00 pad. The uh back half of it would be hanging

64. 00:50:51

    off. It's a big ship. Yeah, you mentioned it's a big ship. It's uh bigger than you previously reported. Yes. So, I whatever I said last time, 199 m, uh I checked with the artist that day before I said that and they were like, "Yep, 199 m." And then after I came back from filming actually it's it's not 199 m. It's it's 210 or something. It's not It's got this big now. It's not that Big bigger. It's a bit bigger, but uh it's still within the extra large metrics. So, it fits in the same hangers that Idris is other big ships do. You just wanted to annoy all these people that make the size charts. And if they've taken the they've taken the they've taken the the hull of your model and whatever and and adjusted it to to 199. Uh sorry, it's we're thinking it's

65. 00:51:40

    210 right now. Now you can figure it out. actually get bigger since you said it. It was a measuring issue at the beginning, so. And I'm sure it wouldn't I'm sure it wouldn't it goes in there people will probably measure it again. They'll find some way. I look forward to seeing what people cram in it. What delayed the Endeavor? Combination of things. Uh got bigger over time. So it got to 10 m. It got to 10 m. Um When There was a few reasons it got bigger. So the the primary one was making sure it fit two 85X's in in the hangar at the front. So the original when we got the original concept mesh, I can't remember how long it was. It was 100 and something meters. Uh Between that concept and when we

66. 00:52:29

    started, we we made the 85X, which got bigger. The original concept mesh didn't actually really fit two 85X's uh in comfort in there. So by the time we made it fit two 85X's, it ended up getting significantly larger to just keep the overall shape in sync. Otherwise, it would have ended up with this that blowing the ship out and then changing its its profile or its Everyone has sort of originally called it like the Dorito or the the Mighty Ducks thing. It would have looked even weirder if we just made the front long enough to keep it and the back. Uh the the engine style didn't really fit the new Origin. So when we reworked the back of that along with the new size, like this size actually feels fine. Um and then when we came to filling it with all the content that had been promised with it, we ended up going

67. 00:53:17

    Yep, this this is how big it is. And that was When we did the initial estimates for the ship, we based it on the concepts of what was in there. And as we broke it down, it just got more and more work. Um the Origin art style isn't a particularly friendly art style to sort of pick up. Um they have a lot of sort of hard sci-fi art guys. So building Aegis ships and Anvil ships is their bread and butter. Um but when they switched to an Origin ship which is a very different construction method in Max and a very different styling method. It's sort of part of the problem with the 600i. It's the art style of that was sort of very brutal luxury, sort of minimalist luxury, which didn't go down well. and then we were trying to adjust that with So, everything we'd learned on the

68. 00:54:04

    600 immediately became less applicable to the 890. So, we had to think about it in a different frame of mind and do And it goes without saying that our process of concepting ships have of evolved since 2014. Uh in in in those those earlier ships, uh they had fewer answers waiting for us when it came time to build it than the concepts we do today. Pretty much. Um Aside from the external concepts, we we couldn't really use any of the other concept imagery for it. we're almost out of time. So, let's see if I can do one more one more Uh one more 890 jump. If I'm swimming in the 890 jump swimming pool and the gravity generator gets destroyed, what happens to me and the water in the pool? And will we see a difference between space and atmosphere?

69. 00:54:52

    That's a difficult question. That's a very difficult question. Uh I would suggest that the the water will probably be sucked out the pool very quickly to avoid a Passengers style drama happening. As cool as that might be, that that terrifies me as a non-programmer. It's a That's a to try and That's hard. That's really hard. Obviously, if the ship's in gravity and that it's less about space and atmosphere, I assume where this question's going. If you're in gravity in a planet and the gravity driver on your ship goes off, um Does the water stay? The water stays there. It's in the planet's gravity. What if you're flying upside down? If you're flying upside down in an 890 and you lose gravity the water in your pool is probably the least your problems. Something for the physics programmers.

70. 00:55:41

    Get them on camera to talk about it. Yeah, that's an easy thing to do. All right, let's see what else. Snape or 35 or 36, but it's interesting enough. Uh have you ever Do you ever think Have you ever considered having a ship that requires a a landing like a traditional airplane? Actually requires a approach. A rolling landing. The The The problem with that is it it restricts that ship's abilities. it it can never go in space really. Or be very bad in space. I mean, we'd have to do something like a hard transition. Yeah. Yeah, it would it would have to have like thrusters that can make it maneuver in space, and then it would have to fly really well as a plane. Um and have like wheels and everything. But But then I guess if it has thrusters

71. 00:56:30

    for space, it can't It would have to essentially be an airplane. An airplane only can't go in space cuz it wouldn't have the thrusters. Sounds like a useless vehicle. I I'm going to say probably not. There There is definitely uh the the potential of having ships that are aerodynamic like the Gladius and maybe the the 300i let them landing like a plane. That's definitely You can glide. I I I cut the thrusters, lower your heat profile significantly. They actually are The awkward thing about that is they can glide, right? However, um they're not nearly as lift creating as like a jumbo jet in real life. Mhm. And so, when you cut the thrusters, they'll

72. 00:57:17

    glide for a bit, and then they'll just fall like a brick. So, yeah. I mean, if you They They could land, and there's definitely discussion to have them land like a plane at some point. Need a bit of work. Uh from the live chat, "Why is the S1 the size one fixed gimbal found on ground vehicles not the minimum weapon size for all ships? A size one fixed gun can't be gimbaled, so a gimbal user loses half of DPS, which is a lot for potentially player. Why do ground vehicles have a gimbaled size one, but ships don't?" I think that's specifically the Dragonfly and the Nox. that was there as a sort of a temporary workaround for the the problem with size one fixed guns on a vehicle that goes

73. 00:58:06

    like that across the surface and that you it's fundamentally useless um, until you have a stable firing platform, which ships can do cuz they can just stabilize, whereas on a Dragonfly and Nox, you're you're constantly going over the terrain and if you have fixed guns and no way to control it, it you might as well not have them. Um, it's definitely a valid concern. Um, that size one weapons on ships can't be gimbaled and goes back into a very long debate we're having about making size one guns effective. Which we could sit here for another hour and talk about. Yeah, it it's it's a real little challenge because you want players in Star Citizen to have a good experience. But at the same time, you want to create a path towards upgrading, so they can't

74. 00:58:55

    be too capable. Yeah, we don't want them to be completely useless either. Like they should be able to hold their own against uh, appropriate targets. Um, but at the end of the day, if they're going to go up against something significantly better, It's balance. Balance never stops. Uh, my mind just went All right. That's it. That's our show. Thank you so much for joining us here on Star Citizen Live all about spaceships 3.5 3.6. Uh, hope you enjoyed it. Remember 3.6 is available on PTU now. I think it's wave one. I've been really disconnected. I've been in the UK all week cuz I'm missing the normal communication channels. Pretty sure it's on wave one right now. Keep an eye

75. 00:59:43

    I've had I've had major launches happen while I'm doing shows like this. I walk in, something is one way, and I walk out and I'm like, "Oh, okay." So, keep your eye on the the various Star Star Citizen communication channels to find out when we go to wave two and open it up to everybody and all that stuff. Um John, Dave, thank you so much for taking the time again to be here and answer your questions for our Star Star Citizen viewers. I remember that ISC is still on hiatus. That will be returning to your YouTubes on July 25th, he said before checking the calendar. July 25th, yes, I know dates. And of course, we'll be right back here next week with another episode of Star Star Citizen Live. Um I don't want to tell you what it is yet. You got to find out.

76. 01:00:30

    So, that's John, that's Dave, I'm Jared. Thanks for watching. For the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42, you can subscribe to our channel or you can check out some of the other shows, and you can also head to our website at www.robertsspaceindustries.com. Thank you very much for watching.