Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Tractor Beams & Space Stations

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:10

   hey everybody welcome to another edition of calling all Deb's our weekly Q&A series where I take questions live from you the star citizen backer and pose them directly to our star system developers and our five studios across the world starting on the taste show we are calling mr. John Crew about a foundry 42 usually hey John how you doing man hello how are you good thank you for being on the show once again you're fat you're fast becoming our calling all the abs I'll start by taking over from Luke Oh Chad so let's see what we have got two questions that I think are perfect for you this week so we're gonna start you off with a fun one first question is does bigger mean better when it comes to equipment slots for instance

2. 00:00:59

   will capital size radar be superior at detecting threats then much smaller radar of dedicated to get out Scouts built to detect things where capital class computers have more storage than something like The Herald it's sort of yes yes in some aspects no in others so bigger things tend to do certain functions better so in the example of radar a bigger raid I would see detects what it see further than a smaller one but you also have the trade-off that it's giving out much higher signals and emissions than a smaller one so you can see further where you're lighting up like like a lighthouse so people will see you quicker and for computers we don't have capital size computers we only go up to

3. 00:01:47

   mediums so big capital ships actually have huge banks of these medium ones but for those yes larger and higher grade items have more slots so you can do more things with them and we just sort of touched on that in the shipyard articles all right the ship your articles now those are articles that came out last year right around citizencon I believe I believe we did at eight articles and eight days those are available now on Roberts space industries comm we go into all kinds of things seu the item component system they that the what happened to things like bucks and Holika so there's a lot of good reading there guys that shipyard will put it we'll put a link in the put a link in the conv in the summary down below all right I got another question for you before I let

4. 00:02:35

   you go can we expect additional module concepts for already announced ships the example they give here is the endeavor it's not something we want to do at the moment not saying we're not going to do it ever again we've got these things sort of working internally but there's got the nice something working internally and development is quite often a long way away from being player facing and player ready yes so until everything that we've got so the retaliator modules the Endeavour modules getting those working and in people's hands and playing with them we don't want to do more just just it's just piling more unknowns on an unknown yeah of course yeah there's a good time

5. 00:03:23

   to remind folks so one of the things one of the topics we've covered and I believe the very first episode of calling of devs was the difference between our internal modular system and the player facing modular system well we've got internal modularity going and whatnot the the modular system that will be player facing that will be that you guys will use to swap out modules for the endeavor and the end reclaim and their retaliate er it's not online it's not scheduled to come online in 2018 of oh of course we are always reevaluating our schedule and priorities especially remember that there is a survey going on right now for just that very purpose so you know who knows but right now until that system comes online we don't necessarily want to compound it net to until we know precisely exactly how it's going to work yeah all right John thank you so much man I'll let you get back to work sure

6. 00:04:10

   no problem see you all right thank you so much to John crew I'm moving on to foundry 42 frankfurt our good friend dan treffen lead systems designer it's kind of doing I think we got two more questions for Dan as well hey Dan how you doing man hey jerath hey how's it going all good here but me I got two questions for you submitted by the backers voted on the backers voted on by the backers this one is the most voted on question for the entire month of March so don't screw it up I'm just kidding all right this is many of the roles and ships seen in the game will require or at least greatly benefit from a working tractor beam how are these mechanics progressing and what

7. 00:04:58

   kind of functionality can we expect the examples they give our arrange power sighs the items able to be moved skill level or is it just you know point you so we are working on this the first tractor beam that will make it into the game right now is a very weak tractor beam that we use very specifically for mining and extracting chips of rock from the the deposit you're mining you will not be able sadly to use this for moving cargo and other purposes or I know pushing players around or other ships for now but because we want to keep it limited to its purpose for now but we are looking into into getting all the other ships that require a proper tractor beam

8. 00:05:47

   equipped with one the there are some problems there that right now we're looking into we're looking into what happens when two player two or more players actually try to move a single box what happens when you try to shoot an Eevee a player with it and all these things there are some abuses that players can can do with with the technology and we need to have ways of mitigating that we don't want to stop it we we think limited abuse is part of the gameplay and it's part of the fun of of a game but it can't be something to continually hold someone hostage there forever and ever ever they cannot play the game so we are definitely looking into this the idea is to have

9. 00:06:37

   you can consider it a beam weapon although it doesn't do damage where you you focus on the item you wanna you want to attract her in or move around and you connect to it you grab on to it and it can move it left right wherever you want you can push it you can pull it depending on what you need so you can use it to to pull let's say cargo crates you let's say your pirate you just destroy the big hauler and there's all these nice juicy floating su boxes in space you will just sit in your ship safely and point your tractor beam towards it and like pull them into your cargo bay orb the other way around I'm a hauler and I need to transport my car go to another hauler I would just like take my tractor beam and move move stuff from my cargo towards their cargo it just

10. 00:07:25

    speeds up the process again mining will require tractor beams we're looking right now into the Orion because Orion is more of a space mining platform where basically once you blow something up you blow up a chunk of rock that'll be pieces flying in every direction so you have to be really quick with your tractor beam and stop stop them from getting away it's basically money just flying away which you don't want so we definitely want to do this regarding the power of a tractor beam it'll be it's it's in it's in the same idea as all of our items if you invest more power into it they become more powerful the range increases you you get all these benefits but your risk frying it your risk frying parts of your ship there are risks

11. 00:08:13

    involved yeah now that's kind of the idea with the tractor beam but it's still in the works not everything is final here I mean you mentioned the Orion what kinds of ships are we thinking can use attractive is this something that only specific ships can use or is this something maybe like utility slots what are we thinking so we're also looking into into allowing players to to put them on maybe a ship does not initially fought with the track thought up with a tractor beam let's say you have a smaller ship and you need to have more more of an utilitarian purpose to it and maybe the thing we're looking into right now is maybe allowing the player to remove one of their weapons or one of their missile base and equip or one of the turrets and equip like a tractor beam turret and that will allow them they will lose some

12. 00:09:03

    firepower but they'll allow it will allow them to have other functions in the game rather than just puing everyone so they might be able to assist in a mining operation or work as a whole or a mini hauler between two Halsey's for example all right so we're looking into that's not something that we're committed to yet we are looking into it if it works and it doesn't break other things in the game and it it's it's worth doing then yeah we'll move right on that but it needs to be proven like like everything it needs to be proven is to be fun and is to not break the existing gameplay this one's about Space Station's the question is is building our own Space

13. 00:09:51

    Station something that's being or will be eventually considered for the future the example they give is like the Pioneer but for space I will say it's being considered but we're talking far future at this point we would love to have that but again we're talking tech we're talking we need to find again the right the right amount of how much do we do we don't want to allow the player to put station extra station is to station just create like unlivable space where but we like this idea of the player how we how we want to want them to own a piece of land we like the idea of allowing them to settle somewhere at the edge of the galaxy I don't know in

14. 00:10:38

    somewhere close to a Sun Corona put a science station there where they can run some experiments using whatever that quality that Sun provides so there's a lot of scientific slash maybe manufacturing or extraction possibilities like extracting various materials in a certain area where you would drop a station and that station constantly harvest stuff there there are possibilities here so yes but we're really talking not the near future to use an American idiom were several carts before the horse yep pretty much all right all right so thank you so much Dan I'll let you get back to work with Oh will do thanks okay bye-bye all right and finally we have a question for uh

15. 00:11:26

    well me that's a question for our content manager submitted on by you voted on by you could we get a ship's production roadmap on the website like the main production roadmap but based on the shipshape diagram for the ship pipeline short answer is no long answer is not at this time there's just higher priorities basically the ship shape information exists in video format so the work to build something out on the website would be additional work to get something to get you guys stuff that you already have in the video format we've got a limited web platform team they've got a number of priorities for 2018 integration of spectrum chat and stuff into the game the Voyager direct melting the all the various you know pledge promotions that go on throughout the

16. 00:12:13

    year a revamp to the pledge store itself and a couple other things that are farther down the line basically it's just it's a pretty low priority there's other things that would affect more people and more immediately and the information that it would be presenting if we did do the work is already available elsewhere so not in the cards for anytime soon all right so with that we wraps up this week's coloring all Deb's thank you for watching remember you can submit your questions for consideration each and every week up in the thread up on spectrum and don't forget to vote that's the two-prong plan we need your votes to figure out which questions you want to see answered most each and every week so for calling all devs I'm content manager for global video production Jared Huckaby we'll see you next week everybody thanks for watching for the latest and

17. 00:13:13

    greatest in star citizen a 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.uvu.edu/library