Star Citizen - 10 for the Chairman Episode 56 (video and text)

Erillion

http://imperialnews.network/2015/03/10-chairman-episode-56-including-transcript/

"Usual intro and Thanks

– On to the Questions! –

Admiral Barker Asks: If players continuously attack a certain race, such as the Banu, could that prompt a race war between us?

Probably not, we aren’t going to have “meta simulation ” programming on a race basis. We’re definitely going to have a reputation score for organisations, so obviously the UEE and the Banu, Xi’An etc will all have their own ones. So individuals or groups that attack another organisation (even as large as races) will prompt an uneasy or hostile relationship with them, so maybe next time they’re in the same space they could be attacked rather than friendly. I wouldn’t necessarily say that would have an effect on the UEE as for the most part I doubt players will be doing these things on their behalf, but as individuals or groups it’d certainly prompt a response from the Banu, any maybe even the UEE. If we watch it, once the universe is live, we’ll be game-mastering the universe so potentially we could flare up some border troubles as a result of what players are doing. So not generated by our simulation, but perhaps by us game masters.

Commander Keen Asks: Will we be able to use tractor beams against incoming missiles for defensive purposes?

I’d say you’d have the same opportunity to hold a missile with a tractor beam as you would shooting it down with a laser beam. I guess it’d depend on how fast the missile was moving, and maybe big enough, it’s all handled by the physics of it all, but I’d say it’s not something you should rely on to save your skin.

Tille Asks: When ships are docked together, will they have to stay put, or could one or both ships fire their engines while docked?

Our plan for having ships docked together is that you’d have to kill your engines and sort of be adrift in space as opposed to flying along. That is the plan for when players meet each other, but we have some things like in SQ42 when a retaliator docks with a carrier, which would kind of be the equivalent of a merlin docking with the constellation. So, I guess in the kind of situation where you dock and leave your ship, yes the bigger would be able to fire its engines, but in the case of say, 2 constellations docking together they’d have to come to rest, dock, then you can do whatever you want to do, but if you want to then fly off somewhere you’d have to disconnect.

General Jack O’Neill Asks: Will NPC’s duck and dive, or run for cover when they see a player pull out a pistol/rifle etc… (prior to fighting) in various landing zones or city zones?

Yeah, we’re definitely going to have a realistic AI behaviour that includes, if you’re in a crowded law-abiding area and you pull out a gun, some NPCs will run away, police will probably pull out their guns and tell you to drop your weapon, that’s part of the whole NPC AI plan. Hopefully we’ll get them to feel real and alive.

Minor Danzig Asks: Will the Arena Commander simulator feature historical battles you can fly in?

Really good question, haven’t thought of that before, but I think down the road it’d be fun to have some historical battles, like the battle for the T’Varin homeworld etc. We have scenarios in AC, so we could do this. Part of our plan for AC as we go on aside from more ships etc, is to have more content for SP and Co-Op, so some missions that are templates of the kind of mission you might get in the PU. Perhaps like an escort mission, or one where you need to ambush another ship etc. It’ll be good to have these options in AC as a testbed for various scenarios we’ll get in PU and potentially SQ42. Historical battles aren’t planned initially, but I can definitely see those being kinda cool down the road.

Arthidon Asks: What are your plans for DirectX 12?

Well we are in discussion with… Various people… Some of which you’d know and could guess, about how exactly we’re approaching DX12 and Open GL Next. This week we’re actually doing a lot of DX12 and Open GL next stuff rather than being at GDC. We’re obviously pretty close with AMD, and we’re actually pretty close with Nvidia as well. There is a slight wrinkle, and that’s that we’re using cryengine, so that’s not our engine, so typically we’d expect that sort of support to come form cryengine themselves, but seeing as we have a lot of cryengine experts working for us at the moment and we have such a strong standpoint of owning the engine and what we do with it, so we can take some of that support into our hands. We’ve got some great talent coming in/in at the moment which we’ll be telling you about soon, expect to see an inside CIG piece about our new studio in Frankfurt in the near future. They’re obviously be very closely involved in what we’ll do for DX12 and OpenGL Next. Basically expect Star Citizen to really push the barriers on what we can do with hardware and graphics software, removing as many bottlenecks as possible to allow SC! We’re pretty keen on all of this, including working with AMD on what was Mantle, moving forward onto other things.

Steroids Asks:

In addition to escape pods, will there be drop pods that we can use to drop soldiers planetside without having to go planetside ourselves?

Well, not right now. We don’t have a plan for drop pods to do HALO REACH type entry into planets. I guess if you’re going to fly down onto a planet you’ll take a dropship is what our answer is to that at the moment.

Blix Asks: If my arm is damaged in FPS, and I get back to my ship, how/will that effect how I control my ship?

I think that if you’re damaged in your arm, and you get back to your ship, there’ll be some effect as to how you’d control your ship, like maybe reduced range of motion, or slower control speed etc. That’s what we want, we want to have sort of real world persistent effects on your body. It’s not necessarily hardcore permadeath, but it’s pretty hardcore compared to other games, with our limited number of respawns before everything gets passed onto your next of kin for example. We definitely want to have persistent body damage until you can get patched up or heal properly in a med bay or hospital.

Kal_Allusis Asks: In the case of accounts with more than one game package, will there be a benefit of using one of your characters as a crewman instead of other NPC’s? For instance, will your character’s wage/upkeep cost be lower than other NPC crewmen?

The way we’ve been thinking about using other characters is less about a lower wage, we don’t want to give people free people to crew all this stuff, but more about having control over what a character looks like etc. If I have 5 game packages I can create a crew that look/named just like I want them to, whereas NPCs you can’t. Once you have them together, you can play any one of those characters in a game session, it allows you to pick and choose who you want to play, and what they look like etc. You could probably designate them as successors to each other as well, or some of your friends could take them over and play them in a co-op mission as well.

Kore Asks: When playing as a bounty hunter, will we have access to our target’s known associates? If so, will we have auto-access to that based on the contract that we accepted, or will we have to buy it?

If you’re playing a bounty hunter, you’ll be taking a mission from somewhere, and typically with the package you’ll get some details, perhaps some known associates, so you’d have all these pieces of information, some on you persons of interest list etc, and you’d have to go and track down your bounty using those. Maybe you track down one of those associates, and he gives away a bounty’s location. As you go about your job of tracking this person down, you will potentially gain more information about him, sometimes even a new bounty or associate that you’ll have to move on to. The system is really fluid, and is build for the fidelity of this world. Even in our early prototyping, the conversation system is looking really cool. I think SC as a space sim is doing it a dis-service, where a First person world makes more sense given all the fidelity. Nothing has done this to our level of fidelity before, transitioning smoothly from certain types of gameplay to others, all simulated in the back-end by the universe simulator, all reactive to actions of you and other players. It’ll really feel alive, it’s up to you to choose what you want to do in this universe, there really isn’t a win-condition or an end-game as you’d normally think in a typical MMO, with a level cap and end-game content. We just have a big huge sandbox you can play in, you might have different definitions of success in the universe, with both non-combat oriented roles as much as combat oriented roles. I can see it all coming together, not as quickly as I’d love, as I really want to play it as much as you guys. That’s really what’s happening this year, is getting all these pieces together to form a cohesive structure onto which to build SQ42 and the PU.

Tidbit: CR isn’t going to be doing 10FTC next week, as he’s off to South By Southwest again, but there will be a 10FT someone else in his stead.

Usual Extro and Thanks"

 

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