"This month, the Graphics Team have been working on two main areas. The first is on improvements to the tech for space landscapes, which includes more realistic particle movement and lighting, GPU spline-based lightning effects, multi-threaded asteroid creation, and improvements to the volumetric gas cloud tech. Also, work was done on volumetric point light shadows for gas clouds, which are crucial to convincingly lighting our more complex space scenes. These shadows are computed in a single render pass and stored efficiently in 2D deep shadow maps, which can then be used to quickly evaluate the shadowing at any distance from the light. Keep an eye out, as many of these changes will be demonstrated soon."
Seems Citizencon we might get a first look at Crusader, the Gas Giant, or at least cloud tech for weather and such in planets.
"Work continues on the Underground Facility and Crashed Relay, with both moving into the final art stage."
Underground Facility was also in the past Monthly (then white-box stage), Crashed Relay wasn't.
Later in the report it mentions a 'upcoming underground bunker location', so it's a rather decent bet to assume that the Facility is a bunker.
"For guard NPCs, they worked on designing a patrol system from the ground up. This should allow them to quickly map interest points and connect them with probability paths to define a patrol route that can change dynamically based on rules the designers control, or on game-driven events."
What this means imho is that Guard NPC's can determine their own patrol route. This is awesome. It means that they can then plonk down these NPC's anywhere and they will walk sensible patrol routes, and if one part of the wall is suddenly destroyed they should be able to dynamically alter their patrol route to take that destroyed wall section into account.
"This will allow groups and parties to have chat lobbies that span the universe."
Universal chat across instances will be great to have and imho it sounds like it will be ready for 3.3.
For 3.3 they're focusing on client-side OCS but the servers should eventually also benefit from it by unloading areas where no players are present.
OCS primarily loads and unloads content around you based on distance and size of the objects. Larger objects like planets are loaded further away than smaller ones like ships.
What to load and unload is handled entirely by the server.
Distant objects will receive fewer updates from the server.
Bind culling is in a state where they consider it feature complete. Addition: it is the tech used by OCS to load and unload entities, so the two technologies are closely connected. "Bind culling is server-side control of OCS on your client."
Client-side OCS is required for Squadron 42 as well.
Q: "Where are the hours (dev time) going right now?" A: (paraphrased) essentially putting it all together, making sure the client is telling the server when it is finished loading a container, a planet for example, so that it can then load the objects inside the container.
Talking about state synchronization, making sure that objects end up in the correct state when they are streamed in on the client. (Post-stream edit: I recall them talking about ship damage, doors being open or closed etc.)
QA is using "zombies" (headless clients?) to test what happens when players are around everywhere on the server.
Every single object in the game has or had to be updated to support object container streaming, so the potential for bugs is large.
Because of async spawning, all object components now have to be thread-safe. (Components in an entity-component model sense, not ship components.) Edit: they have to be spawned thread-safe.
There was no good way to make Lua (scripting language) thread-safe, which is the reason why they had to convert all existing Lua code to C++.
On good builds that aren't broken, QA is reporting "drastic performance improvements", but they don't want to over-sell it.
That was the "deep background", now they're taking questions. xD
Q: "Can we expect performance improvements in the first iteration of OCS? EDIT: also increased player count?" A: Your mileage may vary. Server load is going to be heavier due to larger world, but clients will have less in memory. EDIT: I missed this before, but Jared kind of swivels this question more toward the player count, since they had talked about performance just before. The answer to the player count question is "probably not", since performance improvements from the initial OCS implementation are expected to be "strictly client-side". More players can be added when server performance improves.
Q: Why are client and server OCS split? Why not both at the same time? A: Server-side streaming requires extra tech; they wanted to get client-side OCS in first.
Q: How will OCS affect view distance? A: it shouldn't. Entities are unloaded at large distances when they are "pixel-sized".
Missed the question, but they're talking about OCS reducing the game's memory footprint., Q: What are the current improvements from OCS that the devs have already seen? A: It takes less time to load, because for example when loading into Olisar the game only loads Olisar, rather than "all the stuff". So faster iteration time between builds. The full map with Hurston was apparently so large that low memory machines couldn't even load it before. Now, with the reduced memory requirements, QA testers can actually put multiple game clients on a single machine for testing.
Q: How deep can containers go? How many containers can be within containers? A: No limit. A solar system is a container (EDIT: it's the "root container"), a planet is a container, stations are a container and each room is a container. EDIT: he says "a container for the different shops", so it's not 1:1 rooms to containers but a station contains multiple containers. Apparently it's "about seven levels deep" at the moment, but there are no limits.
Q: Biggest challenge developing OCS? A: You'll get a different answer from everyone, but async spawning of entities is a big one. Interdependencies also, waiting for other developers to finish something before you can continue. "Four-deep dependencies." QA says since OCS touches everything they need to test everything.
Q: Funniest bug testing OCS? A: Trying to catch an AI who is running away from you, they reach the streaming distance and unload, then you catch up to their last position and the server sends an update moving them away again.
Q: What hardware (RAM, CPU, GPU) benefit most? A: RAM, but they're adding more stuff as memory is freed up. "We will be finding out the improvements together." (Post-stream edit: CPU benefits are mentioned too.)
Q: Does OCS have drawbacks? A: Mainly finding all the bugs caused by entities unloading and streaming in again.
Q: When OCS releases, how can the community identify OCS-related bugs specifically? A: Report any bugs and the devs will sort them out, but maybe objects popping in or jumping around.
Q: How does it play into Sq42? A: Mainly the size of the map.
Q: What do you want people to understand about OCS? A: It has been a few years since they started working on it, so it has taken a massive amount of time and effort to develop. It has touched every part of the game and had/has the potential to break everything. It's also worth remembering that OCS is based on object containers themselves, which they developed 3.5 years ago. The first release of OCS will not be all of it, since server-side OCS is yet to come. It will still take a lot of testing. "Your help on this is going to be appreciated."
A realistic Earth? The tech is simply not there right now. But they hope to be there when it's time for Sol to be implemented. It's a distant goal.
Non-lethal weaponry? Distortion weapons that do damage by disabling ships will be ported to SM as handheld weapons (disabling visors e.t.c.). No plans for tasers and tranq rifles yet. The ASS will aid this when the time comes.
Navigation for ground (compasses GPS e.t.c)? In discussion but not happening until the core mechanics are set in stone. Potentially a mobiglas app, maybe a handheld gadget. There will definitely be something in place in the future.
Deeper customisation for ship interiors beyond dashboard trinkets? Front end for external livery is incoming but internal customisation is more complex (but not impossible) due to material constraints. They want to have a feature for players to choose light states (colours, dimming, what happens in an emergency e.t.c.). Dirt and wear (as separate variables) reconfirmed with dirt being purely cosmetic and wear being about component states. Options for furnishings and bedsheets.
Deeper customisation for ship interiors beyond dashboard trinkets? Front end for external livery is incoming but internal customisation is more complex (but not impossible) due to material constraints. They want to have a feature for players to choose light states (colours, dimming, what happens in an emergency e.t.c.). Dirt and wear (as separate variables) reconfirmed with dirt being purely cosmetic and wear being about component states. Options for furnishings and bedsheets.
We had interior decoration in ships at Star Wars Galaxies. I definitely want to see that in SC too.
Favorite bounties frozen in carbon .... ***sigh *** ... on display in my yacht as a show of skill.
Deeper customisation for ship interiors beyond dashboard trinkets? Front end for external livery is incoming but internal customisation is more complex (but not impossible) due to material constraints. They want to have a feature for players to choose light states (colours, dimming, what happens in an emergency e.t.c.). Dirt and wear (as separate variables) reconfirmed with dirt being purely cosmetic and wear being about component states. Options for furnishings and bedsheets.
We had interior decoration in ships at Star Wars Galaxies. I definitely want to see that in SC too.
Favorite bounties frozen in carbon .... ***sigh *** ... on display in my yacht as a show of skill.
Have fun
Yeah not sure if it will be free mode or just have points to attach something to if we're talking decorative objects. Ships are tad more complex because things like gravity getting disabled mess stuff up, maybe it just needs a saved state to repair to.
"are we going to get better Joystick support for navigating menue/screen/mobi glass/Turrets?"
yes, but we're not prioritizing it because 1) the menus are changing too much in an active dev environment, 2) we want to make sure everything works for M+KB because we know everyone has a M+KB. Joystick will get more support when the designs are closer to being finalized. And 3) we'll talk about Turrets in the next few weeks
"Why does ship locking suck so much!"
We're iterating on the mechanics every release. As more group functionality is added, and the ability to share things in updated, door locking will come along with that. (such as mechanics that are set to allow you to shoot some intruder inside your ship without crimestat for it)
"How are we going to deal with huge amount of spawning people in one area?"
We're working on a bunch of different ways, and as player habs are added in the next few releases we'll be experimenting and taking player feed back, but we don't want to add instancing, we want it to make sense.
"Orbits are a thing. If rest-stops orbit, wont they be out of sync with being 'between' planets eventually an be useless most of the time?"
LaGrange points! They wont be exactly in the best spot all the time but it will keep their relative locations pretty consistent.
Lagrange points: a place in space where an orbiting object can remain "stationary" relative to the orbits of two larger celestial bodies.
A much better (but still understandable) explanation here:
Hurston is a 12 million square kilometer big planet and 11 times larger than the currently largest moon in the world, Yela. So far, the moons offer different, but altogether exclusively rocky surfaces.
Hurston will for the first time include various biomes: savannah, forests, water bodies. However, due to the extreme industrial exploitation of the planet by the weapons manufacturer Hurston Dynamics, there will also be large areas of completely destroyed environment: large rubbish and scrap areas as well as areas with toxic puddles and other hostile attributes
Tl:dr: Hurston is hella big, has 4 biomes and its flagship landing zone city.
- [NEW] According to CIG, the life-support system is not upgradable because the system cannot detect the difference between used and fresh air. How will this affect the max crew capacity of ships like the Cutlass Black, and [inaudible]? The system can definitely differentiate between consumed air and unconsumed air. It goes even way deeper. They keep track of every gas in each room. If the levels of oxygen are not enough, you will slowly start choking, suffocating, and all that stuff. They know exactly what is inside the room. If the level of oxygen is too much, you will encounter problems like hyperoxia. They are also looking into ways to upgrade the life-support system. The work for this is obviously not super important but it is planned. They definitely want to differentiate between ships that can carry 3 or 50 people. Oxygen is going to be a very expensive commodity in space. If you have a CO2 scrubber than that will be a lot cheaper than carrying all of the oxygen in tanks.
· Will the vending machines ever actually work? – It is in the work. They have animations for it, and in general, if they have animations for it, they will do it.
· Why is the Hammerhead still in 3.3 when so many tasks aren't finished yet? – They cannot answer this question, because one of the ship guys must answer this. (No ship artist or director is present.) – Brian assumes that they are waiting for a downstream dependency to finish.
· How will the finance system work for organisations in the end? – The organisation stuff is still in development and most of it is in flux. They try to provide the tools for the organisations to allow them to manage the money however they want to. They can collect all of it in one big account, they can pay dividends to their members. – They are looking into more democratic forms of organisations so that there is not only one leader, but that is in its earliest stages of design.
· Will planets have caves, and if so, will we be able to build structures in them? – The current planet system does not support this, but they can add them by hand if they want to right now. There are so many other things that they must solve first before they start thinking about more exotic features like caves, rivers and so on. – They didn’t take into consideration building structures inside of caves, yet. Once this is done there is no reason that would make this not possible. They are looking into ways to allow players building structures in space, thus it will also be possible to build them in caves.
· What is the biggest weakness of the Lumberyard engine, and what is its strength? – Its strength is its graphics capabilities, and it allows them to work on the scale they want to work on. As designers, they need a lot of tool engineers developing tools for them to ease the process for the designers. Prototyping is not very easy, but they already transformed the engine so much that they cannot use most of the prototyping tools from Lumberyard, and they still need to improve their own tools to improve and speed up their own prototyping process. – Every engine is just a foundation, and you always must build upon it, and make game specific changes to it. They went to Lumberyard because the internal development team of Lumberyard is very passionate about pushing the engine as far as possible. The features they are pushing are not only the typical engine features but also their integration with backend services and social media (like Streaming) is amazing.
· Will, there be differences prices between fuel stations, and can I trade it? – Yes. Fuel is a commodity like anything else, so you will be able to trade it. They are looking into fuel mining from gas planets, but it is still in a design/prototype stage.
· David [Weapon Artist], what happened to the crossbow from the Shroud of the Avatar, and will you be able to nail someone to the wall? It isn’t coming soon, but it still planned and he heard some talk about it recently.
· How are you going to handle large bodies of water, and will, for example, ships displace water? They are looking into, and it is in prototyping, but a lot of other things had a higher priority, so it is on the backlog right now. Therefore, the interactions are very, very limited, but they do want to expand on it. They also want to have underwater content (finding caves, exploring, diving). Art is developing fast, so fast that gameplay engineering cannot keep up with them.
· In the past, we have seen the FoIP function, and you have introduced Facewaretech as the company behind the technology. Is there any news on the camera? You will hear more about it shortly. It is still alive. In the next 30 days.
· Will we see animals in the game? Yes, definitely.
· Will organisations have a physical treasury in-game containing organisation assets (e.g. cargo)? The idea is that whatever you own, you can interact with it in your hangars. There will be limits to what can be physically shown in a hangar, so at one point it will probably not display all of the assets a player or organisation owns but as much as possible.
· Will Star Citizen support RTX/raytracing? – They are working on future-proofing their technology, if and when they see a huge benefit in raytracing, they will add it. As of right now, they have yet to see this huge benefit. They are always open to new technologies, but as of right now Brian does not see it, but that might change in the future.
· The coming planets will have different biomes. How do you plan to make the transitions as smooth as possible between the different eco-systems? There have been a lot of changes to the planet tech in the last couple of months. They can push way more details, way more ground textures, and more eco-systems. The transitions will simply blend between the different eco-systems.
· What about the Star Citizen joystick? They are interested in finding the partner to put something out there. It is something they want internally as well. There is nothing concrete about it, but the idea is still alive. – Business development is looking to find a partner to produce it. - In the past, other companies approached them as well to develop other Star Citizen related products, but they haven’t found one yet that lives up to CIG's standards.
· Can we smuggle alien creatures/animals in the future? – Smuggling should be possible. The will have to implement transport containers for animals to keep them alive in space. This will also be true for transporting humans (e.g. prisoners).
· What does the weapon refactor task on the roadmap entail? The whole weapon system has been through a major upgrade. It allows them to make way cooler stuff like beam weapons, which they couldn’t properly do in the past.
· What resources are you accessing to design the fauna and flora of the various planets? For example, for all the planet life, one of their environment artists is specialised in creating plants. Usually, they spent a couple of days researching the thing they must create.
· Can the collection beam also work as tractor beam (on the Prospector)? Right now, it doesn’t, but they are looking into making it work like a tractor beam, but they were a bit worried about the consequences it entails. But they want proper tractor beams in the future.
· What about the spider mining droid? “No comment.” - Dan Truffin
· 3.3 will bring two builds with OCS and without. Does pushing two builds add additional overhead? It is not too much additional work. All of it is based on the same stream. The little overhead that it adds way outweighs all the benefits they gain from it.
· Do you plan items that allow the player to get from a spaceship down to a planet like parachutes, jet backs or items they can add to the upcoming exoskeleton-suits? They are planned but they have a low priority. They want to allow us to put us almost anything on an exoskeleton-suits, but there are of cause trade-offs.
Alpha 3.3 will release with a new site that is a direct feed of the in-game telemetry of clients, with both the global and your specs analysis.
This is a quite cool feature having one in-depth look at what hardware specs are being capable to achieve playing SC, this should clear up all the "can I run it" and what performance to expect as the game develops.
Here's a newsletter sneak peak. The so-called NDA character customization they have been prototyping that is a proper deformation of facial elements is likely what this is about.
On the peak it's likely one UI concept at the stage, seems they're going to embed multiple presets into one character and dynamically customize from there.
Comments
Around the Verse - Piano Man-Less
Around the Verse - A Cyclone of Color
Around the Verse - Banutiful and Habulous
Ship rental store, this is not a feature in the current roadmap yet because it was still edging between 3.3 and 3.4.
Seems Citizencon we might get a first look at Crusader, the Gas Giant, or at least cloud tech for weather and such in planets.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/16743-Monthly-Studio-Report-August-2018
"Work continues on the Underground Facility and Crashed Relay, with both moving into the final art stage."
Underground Facility was also in the past Monthly (then white-box stage), Crashed Relay wasn't.
Later in the report it mentions a 'upcoming underground bunker location', so it's a rather decent bet to assume that the Facility is a bunker.
"For guard NPCs, they worked on designing a patrol system from the ground up. This should allow them to quickly map interest points and connect them with probability paths to define a patrol route that can change dynamically based on rules the designers control, or on game-driven events."
What this means imho is that Guard NPC's can determine their own patrol route. This is awesome. It means that they can then plonk down these NPC's anywhere and they will walk sensible patrol routes, and if one part of the wall is suddenly destroyed they should be able to dynamically alter their patrol route to take that destroyed wall section into account.
"This will allow groups and parties to have chat lobbies that span the universe."
Universal chat across instances will be great to have and imho it sounds like it will be ready for 3.3.
RTV about Object Container Streaming, with the lead network engineer of CIG.
For 3.3 they're focusing on client-side OCS but the servers should eventually also benefit from it by unloading areas where no players are present.
OCS primarily loads and unloads content around you based on distance and size of the objects. Larger objects like planets are loaded further away than smaller ones like ships.
What to load and unload is handled entirely by the server.
Distant objects will receive fewer updates from the server.
Bind culling is in a state where they consider it feature complete. Addition: it is the tech used by OCS to load and unload entities, so the two technologies are closely connected. "Bind culling is server-side control of OCS on your client."
Client-side OCS is required for Squadron 42 as well.
Q: "Where are the hours (dev time) going right now?" A: (paraphrased) essentially putting it all together, making sure the client is telling the server when it is finished loading a container, a planet for example, so that it can then load the objects inside the container.
Talking about state synchronization, making sure that objects end up in the correct state when they are streamed in on the client. (Post-stream edit: I recall them talking about ship damage, doors being open or closed etc.)
QA is using "zombies" (headless clients?) to test what happens when players are around everywhere on the server.
Every single object in the game has or had to be updated to support object container streaming, so the potential for bugs is large.
Because of async spawning, all object components now have to be thread-safe. (Components in an entity-component model sense, not ship components.) Edit: they have to be spawned thread-safe.
There was no good way to make Lua (scripting language) thread-safe, which is the reason why they had to convert all existing Lua code to C++.
On good builds that aren't broken, QA is reporting "drastic performance improvements", but they don't want to over-sell it.
That was the "deep background", now they're taking questions. xD
Q: "Can we expect performance improvements in the first iteration of OCS? EDIT: also increased player count?" A: Your mileage may vary. Server load is going to be heavier due to larger world, but clients will have less in memory. EDIT: I missed this before, but Jared kind of swivels this question more toward the player count, since they had talked about performance just before. The answer to the player count question is "probably not", since performance improvements from the initial OCS implementation are expected to be "strictly client-side". More players can be added when server performance improves.
Q: Why are client and server OCS split? Why not both at the same time? A: Server-side streaming requires extra tech; they wanted to get client-side OCS in first.
Q: How will OCS affect view distance? A: it shouldn't. Entities are unloaded at large distances when they are "pixel-sized".
Missed the question, but they're talking about OCS reducing the game's memory footprint., Q: What are the current improvements from OCS that the devs have already seen? A: It takes less time to load, because for example when loading into Olisar the game only loads Olisar, rather than "all the stuff". So faster iteration time between builds. The full map with Hurston was apparently so large that low memory machines couldn't even load it before. Now, with the reduced memory requirements, QA testers can actually put multiple game clients on a single machine for testing.Q: How deep can containers go? How many containers can be within containers? A: No limit. A solar system is a container (EDIT: it's the "root container"), a planet is a container, stations are a container and each room is a container. EDIT: he says "a container for the different shops", so it's not 1:1 rooms to containers but a station contains multiple containers. Apparently it's "about seven levels deep" at the moment, but there are no limits.
Q: Biggest challenge developing OCS? A: You'll get a different answer from everyone, but async spawning of entities is a big one. Interdependencies also, waiting for other developers to finish something before you can continue. "Four-deep dependencies." QA says since OCS touches everything they need to test everything.
Q: Funniest bug testing OCS? A: Trying to catch an AI who is running away from you, they reach the streaming distance and unload, then you catch up to their last position and the server sends an update moving them away again.
Q: What hardware (RAM, CPU, GPU) benefit most? A: RAM, but they're adding more stuff as memory is freed up. "We will be finding out the improvements together." (Post-stream edit: CPU benefits are mentioned too.)
Q: Does OCS have drawbacks? A: Mainly finding all the bugs caused by entities unloading and streaming in again.
Q: When OCS releases, how can the community identify OCS-related bugs specifically? A: Report any bugs and the devs will sort them out, but maybe objects popping in or jumping around.
Q: How does it play into Sq42? A: Mainly the size of the map.
Q: What do you want people to understand about OCS? A: It has been a few years since they started working on it, so it has taken a massive amount of time and effort to develop. It has touched every part of the game and had/has the potential to break everything. It's also worth remembering that OCS is based on object containers themselves, which they developed 3.5 years ago. The first release of OCS will not be all of it, since server-side OCS is yet to come. It will still take a lot of testing. "Your help on this is going to be appreciated."
Mars vs screens from one of Hurston's moons.
Which is which? Hint bonus
A realistic Earth? The tech is simply not there right now. But they hope to be there when it's time for Sol to be implemented. It's a distant goal.
Non-lethal weaponry? Distortion weapons that do damage by disabling ships will be ported to SM as handheld weapons (disabling visors e.t.c.). No plans for tasers and tranq rifles yet. The ASS will aid this when the time comes.
Navigation for ground (compasses GPS e.t.c)? In discussion but not happening until the core mechanics are set in stone. Potentially a mobiglas app, maybe a handheld gadget. There will definitely be something in place in the future.
Deeper customisation for ship interiors beyond dashboard trinkets? Front end for external livery is incoming but internal customisation is more complex (but not impossible) due to material constraints. They want to have a feature for players to choose light states (colours, dimming, what happens in an emergency e.t.c.). Dirt and wear (as separate variables) reconfirmed with dirt being purely cosmetic and wear being about component states. Options for furnishings and bedsheets.
Dopamine Version
"are we going to get better Joystick support for navigating menue/screen/mobi glass/Turrets?"
yes, but we're not prioritizing it because 1) the menus are changing too much in an active dev environment, 2) we want to make sure everything works for M+KB because we know everyone has a M+KB. Joystick will get more support when the designs are closer to being finalized. And 3) we'll talk about Turrets in the next few weeks
"Why does ship locking suck so much!"
We're iterating on the mechanics every release. As more group functionality is added, and the ability to share things in updated, door locking will come along with that. (such as mechanics that are set to allow you to shoot some intruder inside your ship without crimestat for it)
"How are we going to deal with huge amount of spawning people in one area?"
We're working on a bunch of different ways, and as player habs are added in the next few releases we'll be experimenting and taking player feed back, but we don't want to add instancing, we want it to make sense.
"Orbits are a thing. If rest-stops orbit, wont they be out of sync with being 'between' planets eventually an be useless most of the time?"
LaGrange points! They wont be exactly in the best spot all the time but it will keep their relative locations pretty consistent.
Lagrange points: a place in space where an orbiting object can remain "stationary" relative to the orbits of two larger celestial bodies.
A much better (but still understandable) explanation here:
https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html
Translation:
Hurston is a 12 million square kilometer big planet and 11 times larger than the currently largest moon in the world, Yela. So far, the moons offer different, but altogether exclusively rocky surfaces.
Hurston will for the first time include various biomes: savannah, forests, water bodies. However, due to the extreme industrial exploitation of the planet by the weapons manufacturer Hurston Dynamics, there will also be large areas of completely destroyed environment: large rubbish and scrap areas as well as areas with toxic puddles and other hostile attributes
Tl:dr: Hurston is hella big, has 4 biomes and its flagship landing zone city.
Around the Verse - Stop, Hammer(head) Time
Con42 - Dev Panel Summary
· Will the vending machines ever actually work? – It is in the work. They have animations for it, and in general, if they have animations for it, they will do it.
· Why is the Hammerhead still in 3.3 when so many tasks aren't finished yet? – They cannot answer this question, because one of the ship guys must answer this. (No ship artist or director is present.) – Brian assumes that they are waiting for a downstream dependency to finish.
· How will the finance system work for organisations in the end? – The organisation stuff is still in development and most of it is in flux. They try to provide the tools for the organisations to allow them to manage the money however they want to. They can collect all of it in one big account, they can pay dividends to their members. – They are looking into more democratic forms of organisations so that there is not only one leader, but that is in its earliest stages of design.
· Will planets have caves, and if so, will we be able to build structures in them? – The current planet system does not support this, but they can add them by hand if they want to right now. There are so many other things that they must solve first before they start thinking about more exotic features like caves, rivers and so on. – They didn’t take into consideration building structures inside of caves, yet. Once this is done there is no reason that would make this not possible. They are looking into ways to allow players building structures in space, thus it will also be possible to build them in caves.
· What is the biggest weakness of the Lumberyard engine, and what is its strength? – Its strength is its graphics capabilities, and it allows them to work on the scale they want to work on. As designers, they need a lot of tool engineers developing tools for them to ease the process for the designers. Prototyping is not very easy, but they already transformed the engine so much that they cannot use most of the prototyping tools from Lumberyard, and they still need to improve their own tools to improve and speed up their own prototyping process. – Every engine is just a foundation, and you always must build upon it, and make game specific changes to it. They went to Lumberyard because the internal development team of Lumberyard is very passionate about pushing the engine as far as possible. The features they are pushing are not only the typical engine features but also their integration with backend services and social media (like Streaming) is amazing.
· Will, there be differences prices between fuel stations, and can I trade it? – Yes. Fuel is a commodity like anything else, so you will be able to trade it. They are looking into fuel mining from gas planets, but it is still in a design/prototype stage.
· David [Weapon Artist], what happened to the crossbow from the Shroud of the Avatar, and will you be able to nail someone to the wall? It isn’t coming soon, but it still planned and he heard some talk about it recently.
· How are you going to handle large bodies of water, and will, for example, ships displace water? They are looking into, and it is in prototyping, but a lot of other things had a higher priority, so it is on the backlog right now. Therefore, the interactions are very, very limited, but they do want to expand on it. They also want to have underwater content (finding caves, exploring, diving). Art is developing fast, so fast that gameplay engineering cannot keep up with them.
· In the past, we have seen the FoIP function, and you have introduced Facewaretech as the company behind the technology. Is there any news on the camera? You will hear more about it shortly. It is still alive. In the next 30 days.
· Will we see animals in the game? Yes, definitely.
· Will organisations have a physical treasury in-game containing organisation assets (e.g. cargo)? The idea is that whatever you own, you can interact with it in your hangars. There will be limits to what can be physically shown in a hangar, so at one point it will probably not display all of the assets a player or organisation owns but as much as possible.
· Will Star Citizen support RTX/raytracing? – They are working on future-proofing their technology, if and when they see a huge benefit in raytracing, they will add it. As of right now, they have yet to see this huge benefit. They are always open to new technologies, but as of right now Brian does not see it, but that might change in the future.
· The coming planets will have different biomes. How do you plan to make the transitions as smooth as possible between the different eco-systems? There have been a lot of changes to the planet tech in the last couple of months. They can push way more details, way more ground textures, and more eco-systems. The transitions will simply blend between the different eco-systems.
· What about the Star Citizen joystick? They are interested in finding the partner to put something out there. It is something they want internally as well. There is nothing concrete about it, but the idea is still alive. – Business development is looking to find a partner to produce it. - In the past, other companies approached them as well to develop other Star Citizen related products, but they haven’t found one yet that lives up to CIG's standards.
· What is the status of beam weapons? Will we get them in the future, and will current ships be able to equip them like any other weapon? Yes, they will have beam weapons in the future to complement their existing weapons for ships. The first implementation of the beam technology is the beam on the prospector. You will most certainly be able to equip them to your ships like any other weapon.
· Can we smuggle alien creatures/animals in the future? – Smuggling should be possible. The will have to implement transport containers for animals to keep them alive in space. This will also be true for transporting humans (e.g. prisoners).
· What does the weapon refactor task on the roadmap entail? The whole weapon system has been through a major upgrade. It allows them to make way cooler stuff like beam weapons, which they couldn’t properly do in the past.
· What resources are you accessing to design the fauna and flora of the various planets? For example, for all the planet life, one of their environment artists is specialised in creating plants. Usually, they spent a couple of days researching the thing they must create.
· Can the collection beam also work as tractor beam (on the Prospector)? Right now, it doesn’t, but they are looking into making it work like a tractor beam, but they were a bit worried about the consequences it entails. But they want proper tractor beams in the future.
· What about the spider mining droid? “No comment.” - Dan Truffin
· 3.3 will bring two builds with OCS and without. Does pushing two builds add additional overhead? It is not too much additional work. All of it is based on the same stream. The little overhead that it adds way outweighs all the benefits they gain from it.
· Do you plan items that allow the player to get from a spaceship down to a planet like parachutes, jet backs or items they can add to the upcoming exoskeleton-suits? They are planned but they have a low priority. They want to allow us to put us almost anything on an exoskeleton-suits, but there are of cause trade-offs.
Around the Verse - Leg-go
Alpha 3.3 will release with a new site that is a direct feed of the in-game telemetry of clients, with both the global and your specs analysis.
This is a quite cool feature having one in-depth look at what hardware specs are being capable to achieve playing SC, this should clear up all the "can I run it" and what performance to expect as the game develops.
Here's a newsletter sneak peak. The so-called NDA character customization they have been prototyping that is a proper deformation of facial elements is likely what this is about.
On the peak it's likely one UI concept at the stage, seems they're going to embed multiple presets into one character and dynamically customize from there.
Around the Verse - Austin Texas Cakewalk
When concept art gets a spot on translation to in-game, only the clouds missing on now