Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus dotnet and we are freshly back from cloud imperium games Santa Monica offices where we talked to chris Roberts about star citizen and we talked to him for quite a while so I have two parts of the video up this is a shortened version the longer version for fanatics can be found below it's quite long and basically we just went through all these community questions that have been piling up that people wanted us to pass alonza chris and his team so that's what's answered in this video i will let you enjoy it if you have any further questions please post them below and i will see you all next time I mean you should always think of the of the ship itself being almost like a case in the PC world and you decide you know what brains you're putting in it what GPU you're putting in what cpu you know I mean all those things are basically what you can customize that's one of the reasons why I think that you know the game can be pretty interesting because you know you could have the same players with the same chip and they could have they could have basically kitted out their with totally different builds so part of I think combat when you're going up against people were kind of known how they set up yo they set up that they set up a shipping office for stealth and if so you need to change out your package for that because like if you have really stealthy ship it's hard to get radar locks for your weapons and all the rest of stuff so maybe you need to have more scanners you know they and but more scanners will mean that you can't have as many other you know whatever weapon or as much power so so so we basically implemented that system you know the balancing of its going to be a challenge but it's really cool and all those and the other thing that's really cool is each one of those systems has a physical component that gets put in the ship so like if you're shooting a ship for instance it's like it would be on a real ship it's not like we just roll a dice in which which which system gets hit it's literally our bolt go through like if we knock the shields down and we're going through the hull we've not the armor down now where our projector whether it's a physical projectile an energy ball we trace that through the actual ship and does it hit that does it hit the life-support does it hit the power plant does it hit this and if it does it'll do damage to it and it does damage to it because of the power system how they connect it will affect all they all the systems in it so it's all very emergent behavior it's like it's it's it's basically much more simulated than it shoulda ditional e because in a game most of this stuff is just like okay you've gone through the armor and now you've got a twenty percent chance that you're going to hit their power plan and a thirty percent chance you'll hit this and you've done it critical here well that's not the way this works this is like literally if you're shooting in the right place where you know whether the power plant is or where the life support will be then then and you get through the army you'll hit it and you'll do damage to it and if you do damage to it it goes down that's actually a good suggestion I don't think we were thinking about underclocking but I don't think there will be any reason why you shouldn't underclock it to reduce your your-your-your heat signature I mean basically the process that we do is all the items get created and it's just like a chip where basically they'll have a potential that can go over what their you know the default is and we just will when we create the item we roll a number you know maybe its twenty percent maybe it's thirty percent and then you as someone that takes that item if you go beyond the recommended setting you're just risking destroying the item but you know sometimes maybe you have to destroy a couple items and you now get that rare item that can go plus thirty percent thing may generate more heat but you may have a bill that you've set up where you know you'll just do a little more damage for each one of your ship so but I definitely would see the obeah there'll be sort of a market inside the game where someone like actually goes and collects these things over Cox and builds bills and then sells them for you know you know you know say twice as much as the base ship would cost but then you know you've got that a little bit of edge yeah totally absolutely yeah you know like you know with whoever the best over caught you know the digital storm whoever it would be origin pc you know they they can get that extra yeah they're there they'll definitely I think they'll be like boutique ship people out there the team's been really busy on the hangar module which is sort of what I was just sort of running around we're going to launch it at Gamescon August twenty-fourth when have a party on that Saturday and then after that let people download it and that will allow players to in their hangar they'll see the ships they've pledged the very first rather of the hangar module will only have the initial pledgeship so that would be the aurora 300 I hornet freelancer constellation but after that our plan is to continually sort of all these modules release you know the hangar module going to a dogfighting module at the end of December then the following year we'll have a planetside module and then we'll have a single-player alpha and then the sort of alpha beta of the persistent universe all these modules that we do once we release one version they don't they're not static we will like Rev them every couple of months with a new drop and be adding features adding content so the whole idea is iterative development with the community so they're sharing it they're getting to participate in it so I hope they all understand that at the early stages i mean you know this like when we do the hangar and we do the dog fighting it won't be as polished as a you know a beta is on an MMO that they've worked on for three or four years because this is a much earlier process but i think ultimately it will make a better game and a better experience for people at the end because by knocking out the problems early i think it will be much smoother in the end but at the beginning i'm sure there's going to be lots of teasing problem when the planetside module will be sort of just expanding that out way you'll be outside going to the space bar or going to the ship dealer and it'll basically be the first sort of public prototype of what it will play like or feel like down on the planet between your space missions I think we promised 100 systems I think right now our map has about 115 systems each system can have multiple locations planets and each planet some of the planets can have multiple landing locations so something like Earth has three landing locations presently star citizen as it comes out the first reve reve or whatever it's not going to have a seamless like you fly from atmosphere down onto a planet and we like generate a whole procedural planet because with the amount of star systems and planets we have it's just us a you know unless you're doing some generic random looking planet which i'm not a big as that's like a Content issue just creating that many assets so what's going to happen is we're not going to have any loading screens but you'll be in orbit around a planet and then you'll negotiate your landing at which location you want to land at and I'll give you clearance to land when you've negotiated it you'll sort of basically here you know autopilot the same as you would do say in a wing commander or a privateer and it would initiate the landing sequence which will be an engine so you'll sort of see you'll be like your point of view and it'll just will sort of take control you won't be able to fly it down and you'll be point of view going through the clouds externally we'll see you you know ship going through clouds and then the clouds will break and you'll see the area landing and you'll land and land on the pad and then controls back to you in your you can step out and go visit this the bar or the shop or whatever so the whole design is sort of an emergent system so it sort of reacts to what's happening and what the players are doing or who's blockading whatever so the goal of the game design is to have the players by their own actions generate a lot of what's happening in the universe and a lot of the conflict and interest and intrigue and then we as sort of the game masters are adding and feeding new content in on a weekly basis we'll be adding new content in but the idea is you know we can never add enough content to keep up with how gamers are I mean they'll just blow through everything faster than you can great the idea is the games themselves create eighty ninety percent of the content that they're consuming essentially because it's all about you know their struggles for power or which factions with what are the faction and then we add in additional sort of stories like so like you know like a cool like five mission series where you could get this one item or we create a new sort of bad guy npc or we have a new star system that we add this one can discover and so we sort of add these things in to sort of keep things changing and evolving and we're also looking at what the players are doing and based on what the players are doing we're sort of feeding that back into what we're doing so it's like okay well you know this one faction is getting the upper hand in this area of the galaxy so let's make some new stories about it in our newscasts and then maybe let's send some you know let's let's switch something up so you know this other faction come over here and get involved in what's happening over there so the idea is to make people feel like this universe is an ongoing living evolving universe and not something that's static the model of this should be more like very small iterative updates which is also what we're doing on the development that's why we're dropping things like the hangar module and dog fighting and doing it or development of them so it's just it's a different way of thinking about it but that's that's kind of the goal and with the animals from current yeah yeah tell you what will we use that I mean so and actually one of the reasons why we're doing the public facing deliverables is the you know one problem to anyone that tells you about agile scrum is that people like you kind of kind of abuse it when it's an internal thing whereas yes it's always meant to be on like you're going towards a goal and it's a demo you're gonna have to do but you know when you're doing a demo for 200,000 people you can't like fake it right so actually forces you to actually have it work properly and not be kind of jerry-rigged in the background so that's kind of one of the reasons why we're doing it because I sort of feel like it's it's going to force us to get our homework done sooner let me say that way because what happens normally development is that you tend to finish everything to like eighty percent of the way and you're like alright that's easy to do to fix up the last one but you're off to the next task because you're so busy and then what happens at the end this why projects slip quite a bit is at the end of it you just you have a lot of things that you have to clean up and not any one of them is particularly like difficult or time consuming but there's so much of it that it just you don't have enough time to get it all done and that's why everyone crunches at the end of projects and I'm not saying that our method is inherently going to make us be brilliant and everyone else dumb but I do think what it's forcing us to do is instead of having like one big crazy crunch at the end it's sort of smaller Sprint's where there's little crunches for it but you're in better shape as you get towards yet well no other than say thank you I mean it's amazing i mean we're getting to build you know we're getting to build this game at a level that you normally would only get to do if you're doing it at a major publisher but with complete sort of creative freedom without having the marketing department you know sitting over your shoulder going oh you need to broaden out so we get the casual player players in and do this and this game sold well so let's do that and we need you in this quarter so we can really just concentrate on making a great game in the only and and we have no it we have no other goal than that and as a game maker that's like amazing it's you know it's like the artists dream and that wouldn't happen without the support of the community it's something is happening that I think will you know I'm not saying it's changing everything but it definitely adds a new element to the landscape of gaming where you know gamers can have their voice heard and make certain things happen that maybe one have happened in a bigger corporate situation and I think it's really great i mean i think it's great because it sort of it lets the voice of the people or in this case the game is be be heard more so that's fantastic and and I you know thank everyone that's really back just because you know it's it's it's a privilege and honor to do that and I'm thank you all for letting us do this