Star Citizen Live: Invictus All-Ships Q&A

27 May 202201:07:161,918 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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recorded hi everybody welcome to star citizen not so live the invictus all vehicles q a i'm your host jared huckabee and yes uh once per bloom blue moon uh the show is pre-recorded uh with uh holidays in germany this week and then the memorial day for next week for the us and then the queen's jubilee and and some other bank holiday that's also happening next week the schedules are all funky so we are pre-recording the show with our good friends john and rich how you doing john rich hello i'm good yeah that's a nice nice high vis you've got there i wasn't even in the new office today i i just wear it because i like it it looks great sushi yeah it's well we had we had a little snafu with the color question i
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don't know if it's going to get fixed in time but in the current version of isc before it goes live uh this looks red and i wanted people to know it is not red it is hot pink it does look red in that saying it was very disappointing well hopefully it gets fixed by the time the episode airs all right so also also i can see myself in your your your uh reflection there look at that oh wait wait why did it disappear there oh you see it in riches so i can see it in riches all right so let's see me and your screen enriches all right we've wasted enough time uh invictus is going on right now and as we do every year uh we do we open things up to an all vehicles uh q a uh which we're doing on today's show uh a couple caveats remember that the game is still
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currently in development uh so you know there won't be an answer for every single thing you can possibly know because part of development is figuring that stuff out yes trolls even 10 years in uh two there is a major focus on squadron 42 at the moment so a lot of the combat and ship systems and everything that are being focused on at the moment are those that are expressly needed for squadron 42 uh so adjust your expectations accordingly and three uh we are going to be focused we're going to attempt to focus mostly on flight ready vehicles uh today since invictus and the free fly is all about the ships that are currently available uh in the game so too will be our focus for the show uh all right so starting things off the
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very first the most top voted on question this happens every single time we do this without fail uh what is the current status of physicalized armor and damage and components cool uh so they always get lumped together in one thing but they are somewhat independent systems um so physicalized damage that is still being worked on um physics guys are still working on it they've got a few more test cases found a few more issues um they are looking at some smaller scale problems uh to solve like uh rather than going full hamstring on a spaceship they're trying to solve a lot of these questions on smaller like environmental assets because if you can solve on that is it much easier to then scale it up for a
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spaceship um so they're still working on that uh the the vfx team are quite heavily involved in doing a lot of tests like simulations for the whole breakability side of it rather than just nice nice clean breaks but having a bit of uh crumpling i know i said vfx people think like oh it's just pascal it's not they do a lot more than just particle work there's a lot of um like mesh simulation that has knowledge within that team so defamation and twisting and bending of assets that's with those guys um physicalized armor is like a byproduct of the damage systems that will come with that physical components is sort of independent to that
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because we can do physicalized components without the physical damage side so we are looking in the very near future to start going through some of our ships um and putting those components in the right places like if you look at our newer ships say multi-crew ones with interiors star and a star lifter you will have seen all the hatches and having they you open them up the components are actually there so for new ships that's built in we're looking at going back to the older ships and updating those is obviously a lot of work there um so it's a balancing act between updating the older ones and delivering newer ones um but we are putting more of a focus on to going back to those those older ships and updating them because
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we do need those ships to have the items in the right place to have the resource network uh which is the thing we've shown in the past with all the nodes and the links and i'm sure we'll we'll see more of that in the coming months on isc as that progresses um but yeah that that side is in progress that's going to be a slow burn for many many months and you might see in coming patches ship interior is changing a little but not see any like gameplay side of that that's all the prep work for that yeah it's worth noting not to bury the lead there that dependencies are at the core of all of these things it's it's act you know we're here with the vehicle content and
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feature team the design team stuff but most of that questions mostly work for uh you know other gameplay teams other design teams other effects teams and stuff that then need to get integrated into the into the vehicles and stuff like this uh and you are right we will see more of the resource management stuff in quarter three of this year probably towards the end of quarter three maybe even the beginning of quarter four yeah so um what's the plan for medium fighters that aren't competitive and are food for light fighters yes so obviously we've learned a lot with the rebounds that we did with the you know light fighters medium fights heavy fighters and we're still kind of finding out what really makes
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a fighter stronger against another ship um especially when it comes to size and especially when it comes to the addition of a turret um on that ship um so we have been working on some of that balance in the background but you know we've been doing various tests ourselves to kind of figure it out because you know we need we basically we basically need to figure out why you know the hurricane for example is actually quite strong but it but it's probably a little bit too strong whereas we've just released scorpius for example and that ship even though it's quite a good ship stat wise it's kind of not as being effective maybe as you know we thought originally you know compared to the stats it has so we're still figuring out why this is the case but also we're looking to move the combat speeds down and this will really help bring in both the middle ability of the ship and also the
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speed of the turret um you know so once we bring down the speeds of ships those um those other two factors will become much more important in terms of combat strength so that's probably when our next step will come with these ships uh it's very hard because to listen to you because i can see you talking but then i can see you talking on john's screen behind you it's like there's a big rich and a little rich right behind you it's very distracting any recent work done on ship and vehicle tractor beams uh yep so we we have a few ships in the pipeline that make use of them um the the work done for the the handheld tractor beam is
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probably 70 copy and paste into the vehicle ones um there there's obviously some number twiddling behind the scenes in terms of the force and mass and uh the vfx team want to upgrade the uh the visuals of it because obviously it's a very thin spindly fps one versus uh one that you would find on a larger ship and it sort of works out the box in the use cases we have um it is of limited use right now will be more used with the cargo refactor when you've got physical crates to load and unload as that's why you don't really see it and there is some ux that we want to improve because on the fps one you have all your information on the the back of the multi-tool tells you your force limits everything
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that is all getting transported to the the remote view on the turrets or the if you're in a manned turret having it on the turret hood planes because whilst right now i could jump in game and use use attractive beam turrets on certain ships i have to know what all the buttons do and all the limitations because it's not being presented to me so it's not ready for player release and then towards the end of the year we're going to be doing some work because at the moment vehicles are just simply hardcoded to not work with it there are some quite interesting technical problems to do with ifcs and tractor beams ics is basically built on the assumption that one person is controlling the flight of the vehicle and that becomes not true when people are grabbing it with a tractor beam um
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so we're we've got a um we know what we want to do with it we just need to to do that because that's what everybody wants to do with no argument for me let's see what's going on with the overall balance pass that was started last year i thought we were going to see more work done on that in 317 but it hasn't seen any significant progress uh since yeah um yeah that's a fair comment um so um we basically moved the game as far as we could at the time with the resources we had to a point where we could move forward with the game um this meant bringing all the light fighters in sync and all the items in sync and the weapon balance and doing a complete pass on almost every single
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item every single weapon in the game almost every single ship was retuned and that's put us in a really good place to move forward and since then we've been working out how do we do our next steps and we're working on a couple of features in the background that will enable us to bring the combat speeds down and this is where the next step comes which is the combat speed so once we get the combat speeds down to a reasonable amount um we're gonna be you know we're gonna be able to really push forward on making ships more unique you know so even ships that are kind of similar in size and something weird they're still kind of unique properties to those ships that make them what they are and they're gonna be able to move those ships much more accurately and precisely within the kind of bubble that those ships operate in um but you know we just decided to work on these features first because
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there's no point doing small iterations because that'll stop us from doing the big iteration which will keep delaying the combat speeds from being moved down to the right speeds so this is kind of the quickest way for us to move forward and get the combat speeds down and now we we've discussed this several times but we've we're in a period of growth with star citizen we've got a whole bunch of new people here that have never had this conversation before and we can't expect them to go back and re-watch the old videos and stuff why are we trying to move the speeds down it seems counterintuitive to something else on the outside don't we want things to be faster and more intense in the words of george lucas yes so it it basically works up to a certain point so in combat there's i think we call combat geometry and it's how ships interact with each other um it's
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basically how ships interact and at a certain speed this falls apart and it becomes basically a nose on those fight if you go towards each other you just fly by each other and then by this yeah it's jousting then basically by the time you've looked around you're two or three kilometers away from each other again and it's repeat so what we want to do is we want to bring that combat closer and you have to slow things down so this um so it works it makes a much closer distance and then we can work on a much more accurate kind of weapon system for different velocities of weapons so the weapons can have the strength um you know missiles become more effective outside of these ranges so you can cover there and it just allows us to kind of control what the combat looks like and make it much more interesting it's much more about you know the geometry and kind of trying to get an edge on your opponent and then
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once you get the edge on your opponent being able to accurately kind of you know win against them but it takes but it takes it but it's a challenge to kind of get there and bringing the speeds down just allows us to keep the distances close and then you can kind of use the different ships we have in the game for the actual different purposes i have rather than just being this everything goes quickly by each other all the time and basically shooting at a very small point it allows us to kind of allow people to get edge on so you can get an edge on your opponent and then you can face them and then you've got a full face ship to shoot at um which we don't we which we didn't really have before so it's about moving the game towards that style of combat and allowing all the systems we have and all the weapon types we have to kind of make a difference in matter because at the high speeds everything just becomes high speed to that point and the
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differences don't matter as much and this is um it's something we've been working on behind the scenes for for quite a few months and i don't think we've really that we're gonna probably say quite a few times today bringing the speeds down but we're not gonna explain how we're doing that here because we we could spend like a whole hour or a whole separate ise talking about what we're going to do so we will save that for another time but yeah the goal is to have those slower combat speeds because that improves combat but then we've got a another plan for not crippling traversal around the universe because we're not just going to go oh ships are only going to go 300 meters a second now bam tough we are aware that like combat is just one
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aspect of the game there's a whole lot of traversal that needs to not be hindered by that so we'll talk about it more in depth another time i was literally just making myself a note here that i have to follow up focusing on that look it in uh will ship and vehicle stealth see some love in the future so we've already kind of sneaked in a couple of changes with a couple of the stealth ships we have in the game right now which lowers their signals a little bit but but we do have a plan to kind of make stealth basically the in thai radar you know system kind of matter in um in terms of those ships but again we're kind of in this point where our you know our focus is to combat speeds but also the
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reason why that's holding things back in terms of you know stealth is because you know once we get to these new features it requires a complete rebalance of all the items in the game and it's the items that define the stealth m aspect so we kind of need to get to this point first and then once we get to that point we can start looking to write you know what makes stealth stealth ships and how do we bring the signals of those ships down with it you know you know and then what downsides do those components have without you know really taking away from the purpose of the ships but yeah we've got to get to that point first and then we can start you know balancing the game towards those things okay another question i think is probably gonna come down to the combat speeds it's hard to justify not piloting another ship
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over a turret with the balance decisions what will be the value in picking a multi-crew ship over multiple single fighters yeah you're pretty much right that this comes again down to the speeds um so with the unlimited speeds obviously with the turret you're limited by the speed of the turrets but once we slow everything down does the the basic speed of the ship and the speed of the turret will become a much more determining factor in that combat success of that ship um you know and also we're still figuring out the strength of these turrets as well you know we're still not you know we haven't really you know the game isn't final we're still working on this and you know as i said before we're still in a situation where some ships that do avatar are much more powerful than others and we're still working out what that means you
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know is it the turret speed is it the weapons you attach to those turrets and you know you know did you just ship it's on yeah the changes we did a few patches ago to introduce capacitors did do quite a marked shift uh away from this whole uh let me bring two ships instead of one with a multi-crew if if you go look at the the analytics which are not the be all and end all of balanced decisions they're just part of what informs changes those ships that have turrets went from being well below the fighters in the in all the applicable metrics to being at the top end even now in combat they are becoming more more strong um in the future
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and to now to a lesser extent um the simple cost and maintenance of running multiple ships will be a factor that people have to pay attention to it's going to be much more oh much more time and fuel and insurance and cost efficient to all pile into one ship to get to places and we want to especially with things like pyro coming online getting those smaller ships to one location is going to be quite a chore versus you will pull into one with a larger quantum drive you do the jumps quicker that can get there quicker that sort of time sync aspect of it will will become more important which is perhaps less clear in the in the current game where
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everyone even though quantuming from like if one of you spawns at microtech and one of you spawns at hearst and that's that's a good chunk of time to meet up that's only going to get longer in the future so being in a in a single place in a single ship will just get that experience happening quicker for you i imagine changes to physicalized damage the resource management system everything will also go a long way towards towards making multi-crew ships more viable yes yeah because at the moment if if you're in a turrican like i'm not doing anything for all the time i'm not in combat whereas there will be things to do outside of combat for those additional crew members so it's uh i get the the aspect of well if we're both in two single series
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we're both doing something all the time right now that's that's true now that's going to be true in the future in a multi-crew ship it can be it can be frustrating to run a live environment in the middle of game development it's the the the the the combat and vehicle experience in star citizen today is not what the combat and vehicle experience of star citizen will be tomorrow and it's i mean there's still valuable testing and stuff there's still there's still reason to have the live environment i mean the the the testing and the input that we get from the backers has proven itself out over uh the last 10 years more times than we need to uh discuss right now but it can still be frustrating for players and for
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developers alike to to to to be there and like and know that this experience that there is today is not the experience that it will be you know tomorrow both for good and for bad some things are easier today and they will get more difficult uh tomorrow but things that are difficult today like making a multi-cruise ship seem viable will become easier you know in the future so it's uh i don't know i just i put my i put my fan hat on for a second i just i i i i feel that frustration sometimes so yeah and we were talking before this and then we're we're thinking about how we were going to answer some of the questions and we realized that the answers that we've got here wait these changes we've alluded to we haven't actually talked about externally even though we've been working on them
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for six to nine months we're like oh so we need to like in our heads we know where it is now internally which is a vastly different experience to the current live build so it's this this big time delay that we have to uh wrap our heads around because many of the flight changes anything are now currently going into squadron before they just make their way to persistent universe so yeah what are the plans to differentiate shield types grades and manufacturers oh yeah so um you know we've got the best kind of tunings right now and we're still kind of settling on where the base tuning of the shield lines up and everything and the grids of components
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um so once again when we come back to combat speeds and we go through the big rebounds of all the items in the game you know we're looking at you know what makes the difference between like you know what makes it a military component and you know is it just you know is it stronger but it produces more heat or it uses more energy or is it weaker but you get a super long lifetime with this component or you know does it give off a really big signal but you get really good power all the time it's really strong and you know and it lasts forever and there's all those factors we have to consider and then we basically put them in a big pool and then we look at the items and go right that i am resist and it should pull more towards this direction this direction because this is that i am type and that's the kind of future plan the frames as we go through and add these you know and as you know johnson early you know the items have
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become much more important i mean you know you know as they become physicalized within ships as well you know so where they are in the strip mall matters so that might affect your choices you know because if you've got a ship where the item is right on the edge and it's not really protected you might want a strong component that can you know take more damage or take more distortion damage you know stuff like that so we want all these factors to be a consideration when you're choosing the load out of this ship because it's a really important step when you get your ship you go right what you know what door on that ship to be because it's got a purpose obviously but you can still customize that a little bit you know towards you you know the goals you have for that ship you know if you want it to be a pure energy ship you know and fight distortion you might pick a certain item type you know throughout the whole ship um so you know we do want to give players that choice yeah and one other thing
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uh specifically regarding shields is is missing from the current live game is um shield emitters so what everyone has at the moment is the shield generators which is like clues in the name it generates your shield and they they sort of have a bit of the emitter functionality built into them at the moment where like they dictate your shield faces like a bubble shield a front back a quadrant whatever um but in in the future we want uh the shielding misters which will be physicalized things on your ship they are essentially the projectors for your faces and that's going to be somewhat locked to your ship you might have multiple emitters per face like i'm not going to say this is going to happen but we'll use as an example a hammerhead might have multiple emitters for its front face so
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it has that sort of layered redundancy in terms of i can't just shoot one emitter to pieces and it brings down the front of this hammer um i've got to take them all out to do it so it's not going to be a simple like one-to-one mapping but that will be adding another layer of custom not customization but sort of complexity to the ship you might have two to light fighters they might have a different shield emitter set up out the box so those you could have the same generators on them and they give a different experience so customizing these generators alters those two ships in different ways um between the two of them so yeah there's there's a lot of things going on with shields uh any news regarding the ability to
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spawn vehicles and snubs in or together with our larger ships uh it's it's definitely something we we want to do i've said this before uh the the people that were working on this um unfortunately had to be re-prioritized onto other things uh it it is a frustrating you can do this now but it involves you manually loading it yourself and it usually fingers crossed stays between sessions that will get much more reliable with persistent entity streaming so hopefully you have to just do that once and then for all your future play sessions um like you've loaded your carrick up with your pisces and your rover that's it done you do you do that pain once and you're good to go
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um but we definitely want to still have it there in either the aesop or an equivalent terminal of still want an interface for it yes we long term we don't want people to have to do the manual leg work of putting it all together you should be able to choose upfront like here's my 15th character i've got in my account for whatever reason and i want to have this rover and this snub ship in it bam spawn it long as they're all at the same location put them all in put on the landing pad uh any plans or updates to the ballistic ammunition ammunition capacity changes people are running out of bullets rich yeah so we're always evaluating the balance in sensor ballistics you know we like you know we do recognize this was a
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massive change to the game having limited ammo but it was always the intention again it's not kind of in development cycle like it was always the intention to have limited ammo you know because that's the trade-off with the ballistics is it's super powerful but there's a limited amount but then you've got but then you've got your energy weapons which last forever but they're not as strong um so we're always a value in it and you know we like we you know we've been doing play tests this week and where we were changing the ammo of some weapons just to try it out um yeah it's always subject to change um but i can't give any guarantees whether what will change because it you know we've got a big step to move towards with a low combat speed once we get to those low combat speeds and then the bullets will be more
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accurate because you're at lower speed so more of those bullets are going to hit so they're going to be more effective and we just need to figure out where that kind of balance lies and also it's the lack of ability right now to restock because you've got to go so far away back to kind of restock your ballistics um and stuff like that so you know there's other choices we have okay we need to get that in there we definitely want to have that ability to restock ammo um even if it's something as crude as hey i loaded 10 000 rounds of ammo in the the back of my cutlass i'm gonna go in the back pick up a box and eva out to my ship and whack it on the uh the gatlings that would make a huge difference to it and yeah like rich says ballistics are always gonna be limited that's that's a core design decision
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how limited will change as as we go but um definitely don't expect hundreds of thousands of rounds by by default uh something this person has always found confusing is escape pods how are they going to be launched from ships even on newer ones at gold standard they don't all seem to have an actual exit point from the hull and some are quite far away from where the crew would actually be uh i hope all the newer ones have a uh marked uh escape point um a few of them are quite uh hidden like they are very subtle like palm line cut out of where the panel is going to pop off and they might not always go the way you think they are like um just because they're on the upper floor
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of a ship they might not be coming out the top they might be all coming out the bottom just because of the way we've rooted stuff inside but they they all do have a intended way out the ship um sometimes some of our like suit lockers might look like escape pods which might be confusing to people um because they're the big vertical standing things um but it's usually the vertical standing escape pods side like escape rafts like you see in the 890 in idris where you it's a hexagonal box that's the back on the argon pv goes outside um or might be ejection beds like you see on the the rafter freelancer but in terms of hey how do i get to them because my ship just explodes right now uh again this is tied to physical damage
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so i wouldn't expect escape pods to to become a thing until that comes online because until that point we do have the the whole hey my ship has 10 000 health it gets to zero it goes bang we don't have that finesse where we get to a point that well with physical damage there isn't a health pool so it's basically degrading your ship to the point it becomes non-functional at which point then you go hey it's time to get off this ship so you will have that grace period which could be it could be seconds depending on if shots end up going into your power plant but ideally it's going to be multiple minutes if not hours where your ship is crippled non-responsive and you go right
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now is the time to to get off this ship so that's it's very much a future thing it's planned in for the future not for the the current uh gameplay yeah the star trek ideal of everything blowing up in the bridge and running around and having to fix things is definitely something we've all that's been in the dream of multi-crew gameplay for this game for for for a long time and uh it's honestly what first drew me uh to the project back then so when we talk about frustrations one of mine is sitting waiting patiently for multi-crew gameplay it is yeah all thanks in their time let's see regarding flight physics on planets things like vitol
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made things like vtol mode sort of lose meaning when you can just hover upside down or nose pointing at the ground why does it make flying easy especially for things like the prospector well it does make flying easy prospector it does break immersion are there any plans to force ships to stay close to horizontal at slow speeds this would also affect ground combat and make it more necessary as you wouldn't just be able to point straight down at targets um just that one is yes um so it's so it's playing with explaining so at the moment we have error surfaces on these ships but it doesn't fly like a plane so they're still driven by the thristers but you know we do change them based on another planet they're on so they do lose some power and atmosphere but the
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thrusters to generate the performance in space have to be set in strengths to generate the accelerations that require in space and then we fly an atmosphere you lose some efficiency but we still need the strength of the thrusters to be able to push the ship through the air and actually pushing error surfaces through the air takes a lot of strength to be able to do that so we are limited in terms of to get the maneuverability in atmosphere currently just that we still need quite strange well we we still need quite strong thrusters which means you can hover quite easily but that's not always going to be the case so in the future we um we are going to move towards control services and this is going to allow us to move the movement of the ship from thrusters to aerodynamics so it's going to be the aerodynamic driving the maneuverability of the ship
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and atmosphere and then the thrusters are just going to help a little bit they're going to help just move the ship and allow the switch to layouts to kind of do their work but it's not going to be the primary source so if so if you're finding gladius for example any and you go really slow it's just not going to have the power to kind of keep it up and that's where the veto ships going to come in where they can transform and fly and veto and hover and that's where they'll have the advantage um but we need to add control services first and work out how we do all the controls and with that as well because it's quite a complex problem to solve you know without going like you know full flight simulator for example didn't we do some version of this before with the adding the the old hover mode yeah right uh to an extent yes um
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but that that sort of tried to solve the problem in a different way and some people liked it a lot of people didn't like it and it was it was the right idea with not quite the right implementation um another thing we we can look at uh when all the stuff richards talked about is um heat we don't really use heat at the moment because the way heat works in our game is not not how we want it to work long term and this is something with a resource system that is being entirely redone but for four ships like a gladius as well as needing that control surface to keep up in the air like if you're not going fast those thrusters can start overheating as an extra penalty because in reality you could just append your gladius like that and balance it on its main thrusters
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but because they're powerful enough to do that so they should be powerful enough to do that but they're going to be working so hard that that heat is going to build up and we can cause intentional problems doing it that way um to to stop i've seen people landing their scorpiuses on the wings that way and that that sort of stuff will start being a lot more like right like a gun star and last starfighter this person would like to know when we are getting better lights for the exterior of our ships the mole has forward-facing lights which allow the pilot to see in front of the ship but when you try to land on the dark side of a moon or planet you cannot see below your ship so you find yourself landing on large rocks or uneven terrain also the players in the mining turrets are
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unable to mine rocks in the dark because mining turrets do not have lights on them making it very hard to see the rocks below the ship yep so i'll start with the turret one first there was a problem with turrets that didn't allow us to have lights on it back when the mall came out and that's something we are actively fixing um on the reclaimer at the moment for supporting salvage because it has a very similar problem the the pilot of the reclaimer has the humongous floodlights for illuminating what's in front but the little salvage turrets next to it aren't necessarily always going to be looking that way so we've got some lights on those and we're just working out the the quirks with the system of at at the moment that they're all connecting to the same light controller
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so the pilot can turn the wall on and off which is less than ideal for those in the turrets when the pipe decides he wants to turn his lights off and they're lights enough it's the goal to have them on and then when that's working we can go back to the mole um for the whole lights are too dim slash too bright that is uh a classic video game developer art design standoff that we've had for years and probably every game studio has design is like i want a light that can see five kilometers ahead of me which means it has to be a certain brightness uh i'll go that's too bright it it just blows out all the art this everything is just bright white um it's a common complaint i see regarding paints as well on ships in the in some lights they look completely different
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too in other lights it's just a similar problem with light intensity there things look good at certain light levels things look bad at certain light levels so design always want the brightest lights we can possibly get away with so you don't crash into rocks uh want things to look nice which means nice balanced lights um the the way we're gonna likely solve this is that literally having a high beam and a low beam setting so if if you want nice big bright lights for flying super fast if you toggle your headlights into or nord night vision i know todd is very keen on having some some night vision uh i am as well but in terms of headlights we do want that
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maybe not fully dynamic but some control over the intensity uh okay um let's move on after i can only troll the developers so much before they refuse to be on the show ever again uh what are the plans for reintroducing cannons into dogfighting are they that's still in you mean you can technically dog fight with them at the moment technically exactly yeah it's difficult what we're looking for here yeah well so again it comes back to the big the big rebalance of weapons that we did we tried to put in a specific purpose with size weapons and type of weapons and to give them kind of you know
00:38:29
reasons for choosing that weapon um you know depend on your kind of purpose you know if you want to destroy a light fighter you want quick sharp weapons but if you want to destroy something like a medium to heavy starship you need something more impactful like a cannon for example you know yep we you know we are still learning lots with the weapon balance and how we can kind of redefine kind of the different styles of weapons we have in the game and you know what it means for the different ships as well that you can fit these on because because you can understand weapons that work well on a certain ship because you know but then because we're starting you can fit that weapon on pretty much every other ship as well you know you know if it's got the right loadout and stuff so it's quite tricky getting the bounce right so you know but we'll start opening that up um you know as a battery
00:39:20
speaking of balance why does cig say they don't want a meta for ship balance but they continue to nerf every ship outside of the gladius arrow all right i'm just glad he has two and arrows those are two different ships it doesn't well i'm going to go next to glad to see right now um but on a serious note um that's not our intention to look like we're just nerfing certain ships um but the balance of ships is it's quite complex because the way status is everything we're trying to do right you know we're trying to build ships that work as fully functional ships you know and as you know and even the shape of the ship defines a large portion of how well that ship performs in combat so we've got a ship like an arrow for example which is seen as kind of an
00:40:08
overperformer but it's such a small ship and it's sharp which again goes back to the combat geometry at um at lower speeds at the moment with the combat you know we kind of have really that kind of noise on those where you're aiming at such a small part of the ship um we want to change so ships on the arrow right you know might actually lose some performance when we lower the speeds uh right down because you'll be aiming more about the top of the bottom the ship when it's more service area um you know but as far as i wanted better we just want all ships to because all ships have a purpose and then we've got like a window where that ship operates but i wouldn't say we're ever tying that ship specifically to that kind of meta and that's kind of what we mean we're not you know we can have a ship for that it's
00:40:57
defenders as a light fighter but it doesn't mean it's going to go oh wait it's well it will well well it's a light fighter we give it 50 points here 50 points here 50 points here because it's a live fighter and and that's what we mean and then that doesn't generate a meta we want all these different factors that start to provide when it ships to kind of matter in different ways it's how all those different ways come together and you know and as soon as before it's a continuously moving target as well it's a challenge to keep right yeah that whoever asked that question uh must have forgotten about the time where we removed half the arrows shield generators to bring about it was never supposed to have two it was supposed to have one but it had two for over a year yeah and and there was a big outcry when we corrected that back to where it was
00:41:44
supposed to be so it went from being the best the really best to just the best i wouldn't say it's even the best it's it's certainly a strong choice but there's definitely no like uh there's no protected ships in star citizen they get special treatment over the others if if something is way outside of its intended range it will get looked at and sorted out one way or the other okay i i i won't argue with you i want to i it won't it it's it's that you come there comes a time where you've been killed by vinnie sinatra in his arrow so many times you can't you just it's hard you have you have to be like no it's the arrow it's not me i'm not
00:42:32
the one who's just so it's him it's not the arrow it's him it's his skill because i'm pretty sure he could do it in any ship he just prefers the arrow we've been talking about a lot about uh reducing the speeds uh and stuff for combat uh what about racing any racing support that we can look forward to like we talk about game mode or flight modes like maybe a racing flight mode or something that turns off all the weapons and missiles and just lets us race or something i don't know that's probably more one for the uh rini commander feature team i know they are at the moment looking into a few racing specific things um but that's not really our wheelhouse to divulge their
00:43:23
information but it's definitely been looked at we don't want to the the lowering of combat speeds is is not really going to remove racing from the equation i know there's a very i'm not say small there's there's a a dedicated fan base for it that we don't want to exclude from the game okay there anything you can tell us about the store all box for the aurora it's a box it's uh i'd use this as a get out clause all the time but it is genuinely true uh cargo refactor uh will make will make it be a thing i'm not gonna promise it's gonna come with with the patch that the cargo effect comes in because there is some
00:44:10
asset requirements to adjust it but we will not be blocked from making it be anything at that point for vehicles with snub craft will there be improvements to relocating the parent ship uh from this from the snub after navigating to a planet servicenbc yeah i think i'm not entirely sure what the specific issue there is but it is aware of i think you just lose the marker which is a bug because you have your last known ship marker which actually when you get in your subship is the ship you're in so you then lose the marker for the constellation and that's something we we want to fix
00:45:01
in the future but that's less vehicle team more um ui feature that the the new star map will help with that uh the new marker system will help with that um being able to pin things on the star map go even if you don't see your ship but you go hey i'd left my ship here bam you can send that to your friends whatever uh being able to mark locations will be a big help uh this one simply says player facing ship modularity question mark uh yep still planned um again like the the answer i gave earlier people working on it were reprioritized onto other squadron work so uh no progress since i last talked about
00:45:50
it it's still planned still something you want to do still going to support it it's not people think i have a secret vendetta to cut player facing modularity from the game that is absolutely not the case it's something we want to do but there is a place in star citizen for both modularity on ships and baked variants not not just one or the other uh will ground refuel vehicles be a thing these are all the people that want that one uh fuel tanker that was in the background of the the vulcan concept um i know paul jones really wants to make it happen because of spaceships run out of fuel and you can get starfarer to come refuel
00:46:38
you uh ground vehicles currently don't use fuel but we want them to use fuel in the future so then naturally that that will need to be a thing because if i can only dread people trying to refuel like a little ground vehicle with a staff error planetside it's not the best application of tools to to fix the job how about boats uh we'd love to do some boats um we've got the tech to do it right now um i'm not gonna say why but uh for the pu like a lot of our vehicles and ships now we want to deliver them alongside the gameplay and at the moment there is no gameplay for having boats and there isn't really enough environmental locations to even
00:47:27
have them like uh hurston has some water on it i think a couple of the other moons have some water uh we've got the river uh there's not enough to justify boat did it game play the moment today right now absolutely in the future all right uh we're about three quarters of the way through you ready to hit some ship status update questions that are dates it's it's as always when we do these a big chunk of the questions are just some variation of where is my ship or where is this ship and whatnot so i should i should get some little paddles of no yes all right so so we'll we'll group these up here uh at the end here uh what is the status of the rsi
00:48:16
polaris last we heard it got a bigger hanger it got it last we heard was that it got a standard hanger weapons component upgrade and interior pass you heard correct uh i think i said that and that is still true well not full uh quite a hefty one mostly on the internals it grew a bit i can't remember the number off my head but it grew a little bit longer not foundry 42 doubling size like it used to uh the the big thing is the the hanger is a standard metric size um i can't remember what one it is but it is the closest one to whatever it was just not bespoke
00:49:04
anymore so it was this weird trapezoidal hanger and it still is but the area inside it is the metric for i'm going to say extra small which extra small internally is i think small backer facing so all your standard fighters will fit in there no more theory crafting and red images of here's the top images of these ships which will fit um capone's got a little buff up as well and the interior i don't think it ever had a docking collar on it it now has the proper size docking collar on it so from the player perspective the small hangers that they can that they can land uh fighters and stuff and that's what it's got now so if it fits in a small yeah
00:49:51
that they're like the gladius to say but um because internally we have confusingly uh numerical size zero to five what you start counting with zero only in this instance safe save your rants for later do you really um all right and then and then concept changes are to the interior which mostly was hasn't been seen or or so much anyway uh yeah stuff that the backers are familiar with i mean still looks like the polaris yep still a big flying dorito um externally you probably unless you had the old one next to it you wouldn't notice uh any difference visually aside from being like maybe five percent longer and for folks the immediate question is
00:50:39
well when are you going to show us the the updated in interiors when you ask very nicely no on jared's twitter account no [Music] uh uh let's let's let's let's say with without making a promise that i am not empowered to keep uh we will revisit this idea around iaea and see if that seems like an appropriate time uh uh to do this again because that's the next big thing after fleet week so we'll we'll see if we can't do a little segment on on on the new players interior on the concept interiors uh then uh it's not saying it's gonna happen that's saying we're gonna try a thousand updates on this uh what is the status of the 600i gold
00:51:28
standard pass again it's had a concept re-pass on it externally very similar um it has a docking collar which is like the the big ticket exterior change internally though it's been quite a major rework it still has a lot of the same uh feel about it just with a a much more sensible layout there's a lot less up and down to get places but the big ticket thing is the modular room is no longer in the middle it's at the rear uh everything that was in the rear is sort of moved into the middle so all your crew habitation and engineering uh is and is all there so the front two
00:52:18
thirds of the ship internally stays the same um between the the modules and then it's the back that changes so on the exploration one the touring one's a better one so that in the current version we have that back room with a big panoramic window that suits the touring one better and then exploration has all the exploration stuff in the back there as well uh how about the aegis retaliator gold standard uh that got paused again uh the the resources on it needed to be done on somewhere else um so the what we showed last time um with the updated central room with the docking collar on the side and the bigger lift on the other side no uh infinite drop hole through the top and bottom of the ship
00:53:06
that's where we pretty much left it we've widened all the corridors so ai can successfully navigate around it because it was too tight what's left is uh the cockpit dashboard needs to bring you up to to current standards it's a bit old-school both in terms of visuals and set up so the work we've done for the gladius will sort of get transplanted and upgraded into retaliator and then we need to make the exterior match up with all the interior changes because because those corridors have got wider they don't stick out the hull um but it leaves very little room so she'll get a little a little thicker in places but not massively and of course ducking colonies to go on the side which
00:53:55
would necessitate the the wings the wing thrusters moving a little we showed that in a spring report some time ago with the starfarer now having the ability to refuel what is the timeline we're looking at for the one question uh we're looking at for the interior remodeling in gold pass on this amazing space whale not gonna answer one question but i i will say that we absolutely are going to redo the interior of that thing um it had had some reasons i can't go into why we couldn't do it but we now can do it um being given the green light to do that so i think some aspects of it will stay as it is um like the cockpit and the section behind that in the neck and
00:54:44
the the chin area that will stay the same the cargo area will stay the same but outside of that is probably going to get a whole refresh because it's just not that good to negotiate around it was literally one of our earliest ships with an interior we were still figuring this stuff out yep ah there's and and what we what we've learned over the years from experience and from player feedback could you fill a book all by itself what is the current direction you're looking to go for both the aries models i'm not sure i understand the question uh that's presumably to do with the the uh the weapons i would imagine this is a why why did you break my eye on
00:55:34
a question in disguise i would have understood that question okay why did you break my eye on on the spot rich why did you do it personally yeah well the reason why i did it um well well let's just get a balance it was getting where it fitted in the game with the kind of current kind of energy in the weapons we have we basically had to fit it within what work for the game now and after earlier the game now is different to what the game is going to be in the future and with you know we've been prototyping kind of different weapon solutions especially for the iron where we want to make that weapon feel much more impactful because you know it's a big weapon i want the reason why you know got that purpose to it and
00:56:22
we can't quite deliver that with the current weapon system when it requires some changes to the kind of call tech behind the weapons for it to work properly so once we have that figured out we'll you know we'll definitely be revisiting them that ship and then on the ballistic side again it depends where we go with the ballistics um but also we you know i said before we you know we kind of see that benefiting from the ability to kind of restock um you know much easier than he can now i think a lot of uh we we tried a few things in ptu many vacate some work some didn't work but a lot of people only really saw that the ptu changes and a lot of the hey why don't they do x and why don't they do why it would make it so much better we'd already tried even before overcatty
00:57:10
and it it wasn't working so what we have now is like rich says it's it what is what works for the game right it's not that um it's gonna stay like that it will change um but where it's going to change to it we don't really want to commit to it a lot of people said like oh it's a big gun if people stand in front of it they deserve to to die in one shot and yes that is true to an extent but a lot of what we saw in both feedback uh watching people play it internally externally and the analytics were was not people standing in front of it and getting one-shotted there was almost being like abusive to the point
00:57:58
of how it was being used in combat so we had to do something quite radical to to nerf that uh to give us the time to look at other things there was quite a big uproar about it uh it is still a pretty good combat ship um just been slightly hammered by various factors send your letters to john crew care of freedom house church street wilmslow sk postcodes come on i don't remember the i don't remember the postcard um uh last ship update uh constellation constellation uh is getting a little old in the tooth compared to a lot of the other ships
00:58:46
it's one of star citizen's signature ships uh any joy anything you can tell us what i'm hearing is people love struts and they want more struts in the cockpit to obscure view yep like gold standard on all the other ships when we get to the constellation a big thing for it will be putting the components in the people will see there are component bays in there already they were done a long time ago components have changed in how they are used the quantities even some of the sizes of them which shows you how old it is um i think somewhere it says it's got two quantum drives if you go look at all the hatches in there so we'll be going through and ripping all those out putting proper ones in which will necessitate other interior changes so we'll collect
00:59:34
everything up in one big pass and do a big pass across the interior not going to say it's going to look wildly different it's got a very key art style that we want to keep we do want to do something about the struts on on the bridge we had planned to do that with the taurus um but instead what we've done is we spent the extra time we had available to us on the pilot seat which is why you see it has all the buttons and flip up polo displays now which benefits all of them we had hoped we could reduce some of those struts in the forward view at the same time we just sadly didn't have time and that would have only fixed two or three out of the variants the we wouldn't have time to do the kilo as well so when we get to gold standard we'll sort them all out so they're all
01:00:21
all uh have a good view out the front it's still gonna have struts like it's like the the carrick has has struts but we'll try and get rid of those particularly annoying ones through the the center view only two questions left sorry to hit you with a hard one at the end here sounds like only one question left why do ships why do some ships get prioritized over others uh there are some ships we've been waiting for like the currently being built banning merchantmen since 2013. uh this is another thing to write it write a book on um there is no one answer that applies to every ship um it is a combination of
01:01:10
the the resources we have at the time uh if you take uh if i could click my fingers now put the polaris into production um that would take out a big chunk of the the uk team for maybe 12-18 months which means we can't deliver a constant flow of other vehicles in patches so you could go multiple patches without any vehicle release or any support for other features coming out so we have to balance that across not just delivering vehicles but supporting the other teams the last few years we've been trying to not push vehicles out without their things like the crucible we could make the crucible now but we don't really want it floating around without the repair other directors to gamepl their side
01:02:06
delivered alongside it the problems that affect me of hey we've we've changed our minds for ie we want to do this instead also affects them for other things like that the feature they're working on now might be delayed for another team which delays the feature i need for this vehicle so we we chop and change a lot and then also if you have uh artists especially hey you're working on this big ship for 18 months you don't want to put them on another big ship for 80 months after you want to break that and give them hey here's a nice little snub ship to do so that's why you might see like a random ground vehicle come out from nowhere um because they are much quicker relatively to do and gives gives those people a nice like pallet refresh
01:02:54
of what they're doing um so yeah they're we're not actively ignoring the older ships a lot of them have gameplay consequences and gameplay requirements that uh i don't have an answer of when they will come online so i can't plan developing those ships at that point and no not for nothing the larger you know the larger ships i mentioned the manual merchant in 2013 but there's also the interest from 2012. it's like this uh multi-crew gameplay and resource management i mean i mean even if we could make an interest right now i mean because most of it's you know part of squadron 42 instead of this and put it out there it'd just be like driving around in a giant canoe i mean it's it's like you need the multi-crew
01:03:41
gameplay you need the resource management in order to to have a capital ship experience to put it out right now would be disappointing and more more than one i know people want to have it they want to see it they want to walk around they want to walk around and take all the pictures and things and then after you're done with that for the first eight hours you go well yeah it's a very big gladius and that's not what we wanted that's not what we want that experience to be yeah all right last ship last question what's the one ship you haven't added to star citizen that's still on your list uh for me it's a big round donut style like classic alien ufo don't know what gameplay just won that
01:04:30
visual of that big big round flying saucer we we almost had an argo i don't i i know we did i am very disappointed that never happened one of the untold tales we almost had an argo donut ship at one point how about you rich um i'd like to see a big silly racing what makes a big what makes it big and silly massive thrusters like you know that's on the herald for example i'd like a relationship like that for no reason at all i still want my jalapeno another one i want is a humongous ground vehicle we have a metric for large ground vehicles and the nova and ballista are
01:05:19
technically medium to give you an idea of how big this large one would be it'd be like a multi-story ground vehicle the road the rolling thunder yeah all right uh rich john thank you so much for taking the time uh to be here again for those who are watching apologies that we couldn't do it live uh anytime there's this giant enormous conflicts of holidays uh uh it forces alterations to schedules people have to get things prepared for other people who aren't going to be around and stuff and just trying to do this on friday was was too problematic so here we are as always you know it says pre-recorded and everywhere so you don't have to wonder it is uh invictus is still going on right now be
01:06:08
sure you check out isc yesterday with our look at the mole and uh the scorpius next week on isc we're back in the seventh floor of the manchester goodyard building and talking about uh big mission changes coming to alpha 317.2 uh uh so you want you want to check that out um again rich john jared take care bye oh and no i don't think we're doing a star citizen live tomorrow or next week because it's a holiday here it's the queen's jubilee and i'm a loyal subject of the uk now her majesty should come around your house if you don't take the day off apparently take care everybody bye you

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