Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus Donette and we are back with part two of our interview with chris roberts working on star citizen hello Chris hey how you doing how you guys doing you can answer that in the YouTube comments below I'm sure Chris will read all of them about how you are doing and your life stories today we're talking about character and ship and other types of customization we just spoke about procedural generation that should be in the sidebar or something on YouTube and yeah we're just gonna jump into customization here so what what are the main types of aspects of the game you're hoping to allow customization and regarding characters ships organizations well all of they both know so I mean like I think one of the you know big ideas for starters it's a big sandbox so you know I think we want what we want to do is have a whole level of customization so you can customize your character your appearance you mail your female what you look like obviously you can buy different outfits so how you look how you dress then on the ships themselves you know we view the ships as a character in themselves and so there's a huge amount of customization that we are sort of allowing like all the ships are basically you know right now when you play arena commander you know the Hornet has I think about 50 different items plugged into it so the way you customize is like everything like the radar or the targeting computer or your weapons or your coolers your power plants your thrusters your shield they're all items that plug in and obviously you can have different kinds of items different levels you know some will draw more power somewhere way more somewhere require more CPU cycles and so we know one of the things that we think is that you know besides people like upgrading getting different ships they'll probably be buying different equipment a better better gun or you know a more powerful powerplant but of course I'll always be trade-offs right so if you have a bigger power plan is going to weigh more and you know then you may have to like sacrifice something somewhere else or if you have a really strong shield generator that will probably draw more power so you may not have as much power for your guns and so people will really be able to sort of customize the loadout and the functionality of their ships just based on the items and then on top of that we want to be able to sort of let players sort of customize their ship in terms of appearance so you know be able to paint them with some decals name this year so that's some Rd we're still doing for this sort of being able to sort of paint your ships to do that you know your characters and your ships and actually all the buildings in the world all also sort of change they aged with time and all the rest of stuff which is pretty cool and you know it's a huge amount of stuff to customize and you know the same approaches apply to the organizations which is sort of you know less something that you know physically you have in the game but more of a group and we allow you know players to sort of just determine what kind of organization they have give different names for the ranks and as we go forward as it gets more and more developed you know they'll be able to control like the you know the you know the fees people pay to be in the organization how the money spent all those kind of things so there'll be a huge amount of ability for people to sort of basically run a you know an organization is the equivalent of I don't know you want to call it a corporate corporation or something and so it would be happy want to run it but you know it can be run like a government or it can be run like a you know for-profit corporation or it can be run like a you know non for profit corporation or just run it like a friends list with a really flat hierarchy however you want so so I mean I think that we're really going to try to let players kind of define their own character and ship and groups to sort of build their own experience inside statuses and and that's one of the core sort of approaches that we're taking on the design in terms of in terms of aesthetics for the let's start with the ships specifically what are the plans for painting versus decals yeah will they be able to paint the primary buffer panel or random components of the ship well I said the good question so that does actually stuff we're doing like graphics R&D work on how we're going to achieve that so they're you know obviously you know there's a lot of complications because you know because there's an open box a memo you know you could have a hundred people showing 100 different ships or with a hundred different paint schemes and we start to get into problems and like texture memory and all the rest and stuff so we're sort of looking at some different solutions you know the simple one obviously is you know you've got a primary and secondary color and you can sort of pick those then you can sort of overlay some decals on but potentially there's an opportunity for people to sort of you know create their own sort of decals or do their own custom paint jobs but of course then you need a certain amount of like oversight so people don't do the inevitable flying penises so but we're just in the early stages so I'm we're not quite sure how far we can take it you know something like I forget the name of it now but it was by the grand theft auto guys but it wasn't grand theft auto I had a really good customization stuff all points in make a PP that's right a PP so a PP has some really nice customers so we've looked at that and we're looking at some of the stuff that Yvonne line does with their characters and so we're you know we're gonna we're gonna try to do as the best we can that will work inside the constraints of the universe and we're also going to have some kind of level of rules of limits because we don't want sort of the immersion breaking like weird-looking characters or like really obnoxious paint jobs and stuff like that but it's still early too early to say quite how far we can go with it but we are trying our best to try and have something that really allows people to sort of customize their characters and ships and stuff like that so potentially what I'm hearing is it sounds like maybe a racing game approach where you've got liveries primarycolour secondarycolour you might run into resource issues on the system side well that's sort of that that's sort of the fallback so you know that we're pretty confident that we can do that but we would like to go further beyond that so that's kind of what we're doing the research there's a whole bunch of sort of like kind of different texturing methods that potentially would enable you to sort of kind of planned you know sort of stencils on top of textures and bake it all together but you know nothing's been finalized yet we're just in the R&D phase and moving on to characters I was reading in some of the forum posts by it was one of your one of your lead developers I forget which department but he mentioned issues with model height and model width in terms of weight with animations obviously so what are your plans for customization of the character in terms of face body type well I think I think in general sort of the height has to be in a certain range for you to sort of fit in cockpits that doesn't mean that like characters can't be taller or shorter than others but that would be in sort of things like your like head versus like you know your arm reach your leg reach because everyone needs to be able to reach the controls so and then in terms of body types you know we sort of we definitely want to have sort of the the thin normal fat kind of set up but you know it would probably be in such a way that again it would you know be able to work in you know standard chairs and cockpits so you know we you couldn't really be Jabba the Hutt basically right but you know you could be someone with a paunch as opposed to a you know six-pack or whatever so that that's kind of the the the approach mean from the NPC side we probably would we'll be able to be more extreme on it because obviously we don't have to worry about fitting into every single cockpit of every single ship but for the player side we have to have some constraints or else it becomes a complete nightmare in terms of like you know controls and customization all the rest of stuff are you are you considering more of a sliders approach to face and body type manipulation or a preset approach if you see it I'm getting at thank you much so that's all stuff that we're in the process right now of our doing so we're looking at both the slider also the preset approach again I think I said earlier that I we don't want people to be able to like make like you know freakish looking people so you want people to look like reasonable so what I'm gonna have us a bunch of different presets and be able to blend between them via sliders so you know you can pick you know I don't know five preset of 10 preset chins and you can still it slide between them and say my nose is say when eyes are so it'll enable you to like come up with realistic looking results but not necessarily something that just doesn't look like a would any human would look like and moving to clothing what are the where will players get clothing how will they be able to customise it well I mean playthings gonna be you know you know generally you go down on the planet you go into a store there'll be stores that sell clothes as well in store that sells you know guns for your spaceship or spaceships and yeah I mean they'll be like the real world you go in you know you'll see oh yeah I want to buy that out that Jack in we definitely want to have a bunch of stuff that's specific to areas in space you know so like maybe there's a planet that's known for its leather and that's where you go to get this really badass leather duster and you cut you don't get that somewhere else because it'd be really nice to sort of have clothes that are sort of tied to locations so you can sort of see what someone's we're look the visited that one I got this got this you know jacket or whatever so yeah basically that's going to be pretty conventional you'll go into stores you'll buy you know outfits and you know some kind of outfits will be available most places or something like I said will be location-based and players will also have some control over stations in space any plans to allow customization there or is that fairly fixed yeah I mean so well so there's you know give me two levels I'll be the space stations that players can take over which will be sort of in the persistent universe but not persistent they'll be instance and then they'll be put areas that they'll be space stations asteroid bases that will be have a single instance and players can take over and then on that level they could take them over and I think that the you know we're thinking of the locations that players can own there'll be some level of customization they can do to it in terms of like expanding capacity rooms whatever chairs beds all that kind of stuff it's kind of we're gonna be prototyping with the hanger system so the hang of the new hanger system that's based on the room system which is sort of like the system that will underpin all the stuff on the planet side so sharps bars the hangers allows the ability to sort of add sections to the room basically and so we'll probably have a certain amount of that that will you know it will be prototyped on the hanger but it will be obviously we can use it for other things like potentially a space station or an asteroid base where people could just say okay well I want to customize out this thing I have and I want to add an extra yeah whatever reception room or something like that and finally for our last topic of customization will look at ship tuning which we've we spoke about way back in December of 2012 I think during the technology interview you mentioned specifically to think of shipbuilding like building a computer you can overclock components things like that pick and choose your cpu your power supply what's the extent of tuning in terms of things like the engine how much control will the players have well I sort of it's going to sort of depend I mean the tuning I mean like I think I mentioned is that like some of the items will have an ability to perform above their sort of designated rate just like a CPU would but when you overclock them they emit a lot more heat and they drill more power and so it's sort of like an E and you also won't know where the ceiling is on the item so you'll they'll be just like chips so like some will be able to overclock you know quite a lot and some won't be able to overclock very much at all so you know when an item gets created there's going to be a you know essentially a random number that also say you know okay this is you know this can be has a potential yield from 110 to 130 percent so then you know when the item is created okay it's one hundred and twenty two percent or something and then the player if he's willing to experiment and there will be some downside to it because he could also damage the item I can see if he can get beyond the baseline performance specs and then and we're sort of going to have a sort of bench or whatever that will be sort of an addition that you can have to your hangar you can kind of do some of this stuff for and then you can have your own special upgraded or you know overpowered item that you can plug in and then a but of course like I said there will be you may need extra cooling you may need extra power to take advantage of that but your gun may you know hit 10 percent and 15 percent harder if it's been tuned what's your vision for the inner for the user interface for this for the tuning actions well so that's that's still too early so we're still in we're still in the prototype phase of that trying to figure out like this is essentially a bit of a minigame so with you know trying to figure out what would be a good way to do that so to speak like what would be a way to make it kind of fun and be in fiction so you know I don't know if like we're you know we're out of bench and you put the item there and you see this sort of sign you can push it and you've got a certain amount of time to hit it and if you see it's going to heart you bring it down and not ever those are all the sort of things we're sort of playing around and prototyping with but hopefully it will be something that we kind of fun for people to do and then also you know the upside is oh look I've got this you know much more powerful weapon because you know you put some time into it and there is some risk like I said I mean if you don't tune it properly you have a power you could damage your weapon just like if people are playing arena commander you know they can overheat their Gatling guns and do damage to it and let's throw in one final community question just to set the get it on the record for the redditors who asked field of fuel to be right now is limited because we're in an alpha still are you planning to allow players to tweak field of view or expand it at all or well I don't so we're playing around we're gonna do some stuff with the field of view in terms of when you fly around like for instance in release 13 which is V zero point nine which is dropping about a week when you go faster your field of view will narrow you know we'll get a little bit of a shake to give you a sense of speed so we're gonna play a field of view dynamically in the cockpit I'm not sure we're gonna let you like just do whatever you want to do with the field of view because in some ways it can be sort of giving you too much I mean you shouldn't have a field of view that should be you know realistic so to speak so you know what someone to have like this crazy field of views they can see people behind them because I'll give them an advantage in combat so we haven't really decided about the field of view maybe and they'll probably a way that you can sort of like zoom in and be wide sort of kind of a scoping in they're already kind of is something like that but it needs a lot more work but I doubt we'll just let people be able to say oh yeah my field of use 180 degrees because I just think it would not not be fair to everyone when you're in sort of more competitive or a dogfighting setup sure sounds reasonable to me so as always links in the description below for all the content check the YouTube channel for the previous video which was on procedural generation and thanks as always Chris for your time thank you thanks for listening guys thanks for guys out that of back to us ISM thank you for supporting and hopefully you're liking everything you're seeing so far and if not I'm sure I'll hear from you