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[Silas Vitalia]

So you can pirate the shit out of people who go to null.

Will still need a wardec mechanic of sorts or it'll be too easy to just "hide in highsec". You seen anything yet about the ability to just drop in and out of populated servers for safety's sake though? It sounds like it'll be very segregated.

You won't have 'manual' control over servers as far as I know.  It's all going to be under the hood and they want it all to look as single shard as possible.  The server issues are super complicated and i haven't had it quite ironed out lately yet since I'm not up on everything.  It's going to be halfway between single shard and multiple instances, basically.  IE their big spaceport on Earth or wherever they spent 2 years modeling of course can't handle 10,000 human players (there are only so many landing pads for example) so the server AI will do it's best job to keep you grouped with folks it think should be around you.  As you move away from hyper populated areas this will decrease. 

Something like 90% of the traffic you see in space will be NPC anyway - it won't be like eve where you have a local and you can see who is around you, they are really going for the first person universe 'immersion' thing for the most part.  You see a ship in front of you, you will have no idea if it's humans or npc in control until you hail them or bring someone on board. 

In Space Sharding - it's going to be sort of like boxes within boxes of servers.  The space around you is sort of invisibly divided up into multiple zones of space and as you fly through and as things get populated they get further subdivided into invisible new servers that get spooled up.  the 10 ships pew pewing around you might be on the same 'server' and the 30 in the distance might actually be on a different one but you won't notice.

Large capital ships etc will have their own sort of persistent server bubbles.

To my knowledge there is no 'despawn' mechanic related to combat - if you log out especially during something dangerous your ship is still going to be there much like EVE - although I think it will de-grid after x amount of time.  I think the despawn is also related to sec status and size - giant capital ships for example will never despawn (no logging off your supercarrier), and dangerous areas I think you have much fewer recourse as well.  IIRC your character might even stay logged even if you log out in these situations - might go take a nap in the bunk of your ship or something so you can still be shot while you leave.

Wardecs and org combat are absolutely a thing.  All sorts of merc corps and good/bad/neutral orgs already formed and populated on the forums and some are already on the live servers practicing.   One thing that will be nice is they are integrating much of these activities into orgs and solo work.   It's going to be way way easier for your 'merc' corp to check the local job board for escort, protection missions etc. and for all the other things, along whit solo work.

They want individuals (human and npc) and groups to easily be able to hire and post job requests for missions and contracts, and for humans and ai to take these jobs.  From hiring a crew gunner to hiring a bunch of ships to escort your space hauler.  They have spent a lot of time having most of the universe populated by millions of AI that are out there doing their thing; hauling minerals, doing jobs, transporting things, pew pewing, etc totally independent of the human players.  If you hit that NPC convoy hauling minerals then those minerals DIDNT get to their destination, prices might go up at their destination site for example - you will absolutely be able to effect things.

They are -really- trying to do 'dynamic' job creation so when you confirm that contract to escort the space trucker it's also maybe generating a 'job' for pirates (ai or human) to try and hit your convoy.

Bonus - much more shades of grey for 'sec status;'  for example if you are in pirate location x, they might have different set of laws than pirate group y and what goes in their space, it wont be a universal 1-0 type of rating.  Gotta know where you are, what's legal there, and how in you are with the locals.

[Mizhara]

.. yeah, that sounds like good things, with the drawbacks of non-optional bearing. I have little to zero interest in shooting an NPC or interacting with them. If only one in ten hostiles are actually interesting targets, that'll be a problem.

[Silas Vitalia]

.. yeah, that sounds like good things, with the drawbacks of non-optional bearing. I have little to zero interest in shooting an NPC or interacting with them. If only one in ten hostiles are actually interesting targets, that'll be a problem.

I think they are working on a 'slider' in your options that sets your encounter %, ie you can slide it more towards pvp and humans, without every being able to slide it to 100% or 0%

Having shot at both npcs and humans in space on the test servers earlier on, both are full of idiots and good pilots; you honestly wouldn't know in a lot of cases on some of these ships. but yea they will have to work pretty hard to make it both not obvious and worth your time.

[Louella Dougans]

They have spent a lot of time having most of the universe populated by millions of AI that are out there doing their thing; hauling minerals, doing jobs, transporting things, pew pewing, etc totally independent of the human players.

For some reason, this feels a bit off, like... at that point, why does the game have to be online, except to offload AI actions to a server, rather than running on the player's own PC.

Like, say you go to some star system well away from where the majority of the playerbase operates. And like 99% of the space traffic you see is AI stuff, with the exception of one other player who doesn't speak English, or doesn't share your time zone.

At that point, what is the functional difference between the game, and an offline single-player game ?

[Silas Vitalia]

They have spent a lot of time having most of the universe populated by millions of AI that are out there doing their thing; hauling minerals, doing jobs, transporting things, pew pewing, etc totally independent of the human players.

For some reason, this feels a bit off, like... at that point, why does the game have to be online, except to offload AI actions to a server, rather than running on the player's own PC.

Like, say you go to some star system well away from where the majority of the playerbase operates. And like 99% of the space traffic you see is AI stuff, with the exception of one other player who doesn't speak English, or doesn't share your time zone.

At that point, what is the functional difference between the game, and an offline single-player game ?

If I recall one of the early stretch goals they will probably still do is that you can absolutely install a local copy and play it single player offline forever; you wont ever be able to merge your character back with the mmo but you can do this


The AI bots I think are there to give some life to the background and also to carry out all of the economy and war stuff.  I'm not sure if you saw some of the videos the but the procedural planet stuff is like... city wide coruscant kind of shit on the surface and in space, you just have to have it filled with ships or it will look terrible.

I think they've said you will have a much larger impact on the npc/world economy the less populated an area is, so even if you are goons you will have very little chance of a 'burn jita' thing doing much of anything, but take your org to null sec and kill all of the npc miners you will hit the market hard there and also generate lots of AI npc requests for more minerals and transport jobs, etc. 

Who knows though, lots of talk and we haven't seen it working yet.

BTW this AI activity extends planetside to the actual npc avatars, they will be going about their business on the surface doing missions or working bar or running their own little adventures without your interferance.  If you wanted to you can hire them to be a co pilot or gunner on your ship or you could hell sign up and join an NPC ship as a crew member.

[Silas Vitalia]

https://youtu.be/fs2fpfJd68E
Nothing optimized yet of course but they are getting 50 players grouped up in space and planetside and screwing around at the same time now so that's quite exciting to see.  It's still jerky and I really don't think it 'feels' good yet visually or control-wise but neato, what progress.

Also mining is in, that's pretty cool.  It's pretty involved as far as scanning and carefully shattering rocks and then scooping up the minerals.

[Mizhara]

Squadron 42, Citizencon Trailer.

Mother... of... God...

If this ever releases and is playable, it'll all have been worth it.

[Silas Vitalia]

Have been super busy gonna check out the recaps and get back here later

[Silas Vitalia]

I skipped around on the live stream video, all 10 hours or whatever, not a lot new to see.   Some nice new ships, incremental improvements, etc.

Far too little progress these days for me to even bother checking in much anymore, it's just glacial right now.

At least by the time the game actually gets released I can probably just sign up for one of those remote streaming google game services and not have to build a new PC to play it though, hahahah

But yea looks like they dropped a good chunk of that crowdfunding money hiring Mark Hamil and Gillian Anderson and Gary Oldman etc, might be fun

[Silas Vitalia]

Here's the trimmed-down keynote if you want to see current planetside type missions, with some city and open world gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfXB5jnGXBQ

[Veiki]

Dropped money for Squadron 42 (still waiting) and it looks like fun, if Chris Roberts ever manages to finish the game and stop trying to be a director.

[Mizhara]

If Sq42 is anything like the rest of it, it still needs some staggering amounts of optimization. It's looking amazing and all, but I am genuinely worried it's going to run like shit even after release.

[Silas Vitalia]

Latest PU releases have been running pretty smoothly, although I'm not sure what the player-cap is at right now.  They've been adding tons more missions and NPCs and ships for every release.  Some of the larger planetary/space installations are being included now which are pretty neat and with a stupid amount of detail and level design. They've switched to a 'quarterly' release schedule for updates instead of making all these random release targets and missing them completely and pissing their rabid fanboys off.  The amount of ships they've got now is starting to get intimidating and frankly too much overlapping, and it's hard to see them as anything more than cash-milking at this point but that's how they roll. 

They have this habit of having a release coming up, and then pimping out a fancy new ship that's $200 or whatever, making it look super cool and OP to sell a bunch, and then they'll have to dial it back with balance work after they've sold a bunch to keep the train moving.  It's gotten quite old.  The latest $1,000 or whatever hahahah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to1kDbR4L4I
I'm just going to steal one when the game is live, we all need an outlaw ship carrier for the bad neighborhoods

I've got 0 worries about single player (Squadron 42) not being silky smooth on release, and I've got 0 worries about small numbers of players in the PU running smooth as they do currently. 

Much less confidence in how their server-stacking and spooling up is going to actually work when you've got 100 people or more in these giant ships full of people and pew pew.  It really will sink or swim things for multiplayer, right now it's just not there and not ready for large groups.

Once you stop caring about the release date and sip your coffee and just wait for it to be out, it's way more fun

[Mizhara]

Not going to begrudge anyone their fun at all. Hell, the more people buying in and playtesting everything they can now, the better for those of us waiting for a full release. I wholly endorse it. The singleplayer I'm going to stay hyped for, because it genuinely looks amazing already, but I'm starting to get more and more leery about the multiplayer universe.

I can't quite figure out what you're supposed to do there. It's starting to look like sort of a sandbox, but without all the amazing economy and industry and player markets etc that defines good sandboxes. i.e. Eve. Since you can bypass the entire thing by literally buying ships with real life dollaridoos, the in-game economy will sort of become meaningless, I fear, and thus the sandbox will too.

Ah well, doesn't matter. I'm in it for Sq42.

[Samira Kernher]

Once you stop caring about the release date and sip your coffee and just wait for it to be out, it's way more fun

This.