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That the higher levels of space stations are restricted to the elite, with capsuleers occupying the very top decks? (The Burning life p. 73)

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Author Topic: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander  (Read 101386 times)

Silas Vitalia

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #195 on: 17 Aug 2014, 13:24 »

Lots of good points! Let me talk about how some of these currently work:

Tracking:

Gun weapons right now are either 'gimbal' mounted or 'straight' shooting:  The 'gimbal' weapons if you have the target within your circular retical will track within the retical. You still have to maneuver to get the target inside your circle, but then the auto tracking will help.  Gimbals for different ships will have different tracking rates, you will be able to modify your ships tracking computer, etc to affect these stats.

The gimbal  mounted tracking assist weapons tend to be the 'high frequency / low damage' ammunition.  Good to help you finish off someone or help strip shields but they don't have the punch or the range for most of your work.

The 'straight' weapons function like you'd expect, you have to lead your shots and don't get much help.  These tend to be your high damage weapons.

They are trying to find a comfortable balance between both of these, and how effective to make the tracking.  They are likely going to give a 'small' assist for the straight shooters to help focus your fire a bit, and will continue to adjust the gimbal trackers.   

Oculus Rift people can have all their gimbal weapons tracked to their line of sight, so you can fly straight, look to the right, and your gimbal weapons will auto-track wherever you point your head. VERY COOL.

Damage Model

Shields and Armor.  Weapons are into two different camps, some do more damage on shields and some do more damage on armor.  Some weaopns will travel through shields at a higher rate to strike armor directly, etc.  Lots of variety.
Shields will eventually be adjustable with modules to focus on higher recharge rates or overall higher buffer, similar to eve.  Right now they are working on overall strength, recharge rate, all that stuff.  The next patch will give us a lot more flexibility on energy management, so directing your power output to say, the rear shields and engines instead of weapons, etc.  There are weapons being worked on that are also more 'disruptive' similar to a sort of neut gun that damages ship systems, etc.

Missiles will primarily be Infrared, Image Recogniction, and Friend or Foe.  You have several different types of countermeasures to use as well, so launching a flare against an image recognition missile won't do you much good.  In current patch only heat-seaking missiles are available, but you can still shoot off a chaff and get nailed by them. 

Larger capital ships will essentially be invulnerable to fighter-sized weapons, you will have to either use other capital ship weapons (long-axis railguns, etc), or bomber-carried torpedoes, which of course they have special ships for.   Basically they are treating it like a WW2 battleship game in space, the carriers launch fighters and bombers, etc.

If you are commanding a destroyer or a frigate you could kit your capital ship to pew pew up close like old ships of the line, or more stand offish, etc.

Also all ships are fully destructible, so you can lose specific parts of ships, thrusters, weapons, etc, changing how the ship performs, where it's center of gravity is, and how it maneuvers.  Highly important for disabling larger ships later on, you can actually blow off the thrusters to disable them, or shoot the wapons, etc.

Flight Model

It's a full 'newtonian' flight model, meaning if you turn off your computer-assisted flight controls, you will fly in a straight line until you apply thrust in another direction.  All of the ships have something like 8-16 manuevering thrusters aside from the rear thrusters, (that can be destroyed) So if you remember shows like 'Babylon 5' you can absolutely fly your ship like a starfury if you choose to.  The ship computer can be set to fly more like an airplane, where you point the nose where you want and the ship figures out how to fire the manuevering thrusters to point you in that direction.  It's sort of a slider, so I often fly with it 'half off' meaning you can do more of a 'drift' turn, that is fly in a direction, change directions while maintaining your original vector for a bit, and then push off with full thrusters in that direction.  You take G-forces like a real ship, if you leave the G-limiter on you never have to worry about it, but you can turn it off for tighter turns and you start to black out if you push it too hard.

They are adding in updated 6dof  (6 degrees of freedom) for the next patch, meaning basically 6 direction 'strafing' whenever you want. so to make it easy to change your z-axis, things like that.   They are also doubling flight speeds for the next patch, which will change combat quite a bit.  They are adding 'afterburners' for the manuevering thrusters so you can make tighter turns.  With the speed being doubled they are making sure to tell you that it will be much, much harder to turn going full speed, so not to be raging on the forums when all of the sudden going full speed means you can't turn fast.

PVP/New Player stuff

A long topic, but basically similar to eve they will have areas where misbehavior is severely punished, and they will have areas where it is not.  They do not have a CONCORD mentality though, so if you shoot someone in high security space you are extremely likely to be seen as they have high military police presence and constant monitoring. 

In the less patrolled areas, the developer attitude is more that if no one sees you commit a crime, then there's no evidence. IE you don't take a security hit for blasting someone if there's no evidence.  It would be on them to seek retribution.

They are also really trying to make it 'immersive' in the sense that unless you have the proper scanning equipment or whatever, you probably won't even be able to tell if you are shooting at an NPC or a human player.  They aren't planning on an icon above that random ship displaying your name and announcing who you are.  Don't like the way they look? GTFO.

Keep in mind though that PVP is not the only focus of this game, they are spending equal time developing full careers for trading, hauling, exploration, mining, all the goodies.   Since there are no 'skillpoints' it's more up to your equipment and interest, not if you have the 4 years in the game to sit in the ship.  If you've got the ship you can fly it.

There's no subscription either, it's like guild wars 2. You buy the squadron 42 single player game, and you get MMO access forever.  After you make it through squadron 42 (depending on your choices), you'll start in the appropriate area and be off.

They will have cash for credits (similar to plex), for busy adults without the time to spend 20 hours a week doing things.

They are 'trying' however (and this never works), to insist that you won't consider the missions and adventuring as 'grinding' though.






« Last Edit: 17 Aug 2014, 13:32 by Silas Vitalia »
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Lyn Farel

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #196 on: 17 Aug 2014, 15:10 »

Thank you for all the info, it's very informative.

But what do you mean by the faster you go, the less you turn ? It is logical to expect that you turn the same, but the curve of your turn will be sensitively bigger since you go faster, thus making your turn less tight. Or do they mean it's like in old sims like X-Wing where going at 1/3 of your max velocity means that you are also more agile ?

Oculus Rift people can have all their gimbal weapons tracked to their line of sight, so you can fly straight, look to the right, and your gimbal weapons will auto-track wherever you point your head. VERY COOL.

If you don't have Oculus Rift, you are screwed ?

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Silas Vitalia

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #197 on: 17 Aug 2014, 15:24 »

I mean it's harder to change your vector the more velocity you have.  You can rotate your ship just as fast no matter the velocity, but if you are going very fast it takes much longer to change vectors because you have to counter all of that velocity before going another way.
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Silas Vitalia

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #198 on: 17 Aug 2014, 15:43 »

If you have a rift yes you will have an advantage, but you would have one anyway just by being able to look around your surroundings easier. You can turn on mouse look but hard to do that and fly at same time.  Remember though only some of the ships are fighters. Many more are large ships where you will control from a bridge like star trek with a helmsman and bridge crew and someone down in engineering, etc
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Ché Biko

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #199 on: 19 Aug 2014, 15:10 »

Did Saede forget to tell Ché something :?:
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-OOChé

Silas Vitalia

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #200 on: 20 Aug 2014, 11:43 »

What's that Che? I don't get it?

Also here's a fun little multiplayer video some guys put together. 

Not too bad for version 0.8 of the game mode :)  Version 1.0 with all the matchmaking and private /custom matches should be out in about two months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LLKqyfHhNo

Hopefully when we get some real spectator/camera controls the nice videos will start comin!
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Lyn Farel

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #201 on: 20 Aug 2014, 12:45 »

Will we be able to gang up with people in v1 ?
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Silas Vitalia

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #202 on: 20 Aug 2014, 12:56 »

Will we be able to gang up with people in v1 ?

You can do that in about a week with 0.9, they will have 'match codes' you can use to send invites to your friends for team deathmatch, battle royal, or co-op vs waves of npc enemies.

About two months after that they'll have a real lobby system
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Lyn Farel

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #203 on: 21 Aug 2014, 12:44 »

Yay nice, so I might be able to be your space biatch  :yar:
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Silas Vitalia

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #204 on: 21 Aug 2014, 14:18 »

Yay nice, so I might be able to be your space biatch  :yar:

Hah we'll see.

I will definitely need a co-pilot and also a dedicated turret gunner on my pirate ship though! https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/ships/drake-cutlass/Cutlass

If you do sign up let me know I'll get you into Koro and I's group of piwates.



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Samira Kernher

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #205 on: 21 Aug 2014, 14:22 »

Mm, cutlass.

Definitely want to get one of those when the full game comes out. Bit too expensive for me to pay for with real money.
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Silas Vitalia

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #206 on: 21 Aug 2014, 15:12 »

Mm, cutlass.

Definitely want to get one of those when the full game comes out. Bit too expensive for me to pay for with real money.

Will really come down to how they will balance things. 

The Cutlass currently looks like the equivalent of an old Minmatar Typhoon in Eve: a million ways to fit and fly the thing depending on what you want.


Right now in the 'unbalanced' multiplayer I'm handedly getting my ass kicked on the regular by the Hornet, which is sort of a close range brawler with lower top speed but superior acceleration.

I've got this crappy 'loaner' 300i until they get the Cutlass in game. 

The 300i is faster top speed than the hornet, but not fast enough to get away before often dying.  Also much lower weapons and much, much weaker shields/armor.   So you can zoom in, pew pew the hornets, but can be difficult to get away or to do enough damage on a run to be worth it.

With the 'newtonian' flight models, it also happens often that I'll have a perfect bead on a hornet, get in on them blap blap blap, they'll shrug it off, flip on their axis (while flying backwards), and spray me to death with a face full of pew pew.


I think once they start doing 'balanced' matches with similar team compositions it will be fine.  Right now teams are random and there's no limits, so you can basically get 4 Eve Punishers vs 4 Omens, which is fail before the match starts.

I'd also add once you can play with your friends and properly coordinate, things will vastly improve. Being able to coordinate attacks with faster ships will make the 300i much more competitive.  Because right now 1v1 it's completely outclassed, but a pair of them could make short work of a lot of things.



 








« Last Edit: 21 Aug 2014, 15:39 by Silas Vitalia »
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Lyn Farel

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #207 on: 21 Aug 2014, 17:03 »

Yay nice, so I might be able to be your space biatch  :yar:

Hah we'll see.

I will definitely need a co-pilot and also a dedicated turret gunner on my pirate ship though! https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/ships/drake-cutlass/Cutlass

If you do sign up let me know I'll get you into Koro and I's group of piwates.

What's the job of the co pilot exactly ?

Punching it like chewie ?
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Silas Vitalia

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #208 on: 21 Aug 2014, 21:16 »

Yay nice, so I might be able to be your space biatch  :yar:

Hah we'll see.

I will definitely need a co-pilot and also a dedicated turret gunner on my pirate ship though! https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/ships/drake-cutlass/Cutlass

If you do sign up let me know I'll get you into Koro and I's group of piwates.

What's the job of the co pilot exactly ?

Punching it like chewie ?

Hah! Well there is a lot of ship functionality that is difficult to do while flying, they are trying to work a ui system where you can allocate ship systems to different bridge stations or copilot seats. So it could be anything from changing the power distribution (full power to shields!) To managing the scanning equipment to hacking enemy systems to who knows what.

They've said it before that although you might technically be able to do many of these things from a single seat you would be incredibly innefective vs a crewed ship splitting up the work. 

Also the more people on board, the more bodies to give weapons to when you board the enemy ship!
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Lyn Farel

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Re: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander
« Reply #209 on: 25 Aug 2014, 04:08 »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0grZDNdUYY

12:00 Ships interiors (Firefly anyone ?)

17:00 Old hangars (old vids) -> interesting info as they are moving away from that model and using instead modular (lego) rooms from different manufacturers that will expand adapting to your needs and choice of aesthetics, and also tied to your location in the universe.

20:00 The aforementioned new 4 hangars types

36:00 Races (again) -> Murray cup happening on various planets and racetracks over each season. Hints to racer profession.

39:00 Races ingame multiplayer demo

54:00 Multicrew vid live

57:00 Boarding ops

All in all I rather like their small crafts designs, albeit very uh... trite SF USAF look, it works well and they each have a strong visual identity (Hornet, Jumpdrive, etc). At least for their iconic ships. I'm kinda meh towards their bigger crafts though and some of the others, like the Idris especially, etc. I don't know but I don't feel them the same way. They do not seem to have a coherent shape at all, they do not seem iconic.

Still very unhappy with their space backgrounds. It's like Eve. It's not space, it's subaquatic nebulae everywhere. I like nebulae but if they are gonna put us right inside nebulae every time... ugh. Edit : the Arena Commander environment is pitch black, which is nice though. Hope they keep it that way at most places.

Also, Chris voice really sounds like a cartoon voice  :P
« Last Edit: 25 Aug 2014, 07:21 by Lyn Farel »
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