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Should We Be Given Free Ships & Calling All Devs – Aspects of Flight and Landing

Welcome to some more Star Citizen, talking about climbing, Atmospheric Flight, Cruise Speed, Tracking Ships, as a summary of Calling All Devs Aspects of Flight and Landing but also a bit on Accessibility of Ships to test in the Persistent Universe.
Calling All Devs – Aspects of Flight and Landing

Mantling

  • In the future you will be able to pull yourself up to ledges and to ramps, parts of ships.
  • This will be useful if your ship isn’t on perfectly flat ground and it’s ramp is at on odd angle.
  • The plan is to have the animations procedural for this type of vaulting or mantling, if an object is low enough tho you’ll just be able to hop or jump up to it quickly.
  • This can be used of any appropriate heights and is part of the motion warping system used for smooth animation transitions.

Decouple at Cruise

  • There is a bug currently with cruise mode meaning you’ll lose speed if you decouple, that will be fixed.
  • They are moving towards Cruise being less sensitive to losing you speed, meaning you’ll be able to have some movement while cruising without slowing down, typically you’ll be maneuvering very slowly in cruise tho.

Atmospheric Flight 3.3

  • There is a lot more to do with the flight model and Atmospheric Flight.
  • The ships require a lot of tuning still.
  • Drag is now a factor, they want more effects from general atmospheric factors.
  • With 3.3 there won’t be too much difference to the systems we have in place now.
  • Hurston is the Tier Zero released, it won’t have the full atmospheric changes to flight tho.
  • Hurston will have a breathable atmosphere in 3.3 tho.
  • IFCS and the Flight Model are not finished by any means.
  • Ships will all be affected differently by different planets & atmospheres.

Pursuing in QT

  • They want the ability to scan & detect QT trails, so you could work out where they have gone. You’ll also potentially be able to find out some information about the ship.
  • They also want to look at ways of masking your trail and making it harder for people to track you. This should be at least in part down to your ships items and their quality & function.
  • It might be harder to track QTs that are mixed in with other ships and trails.
  • Smugglers will be able to attempt to hide cargo that will make it harder to be detected too.

GIVE US ALL THE SHIPS
On Reddit Now Reddit user brawling badger posted:
“in alpha they should be giving backers access to ALL the ships to test, that way CIG would get better statistics on ships and also better feedback on ships that would = a better game? surely that’s what everyone wants right?”

Krisling-CIG  – replied giving some insight & thoughts.
Hello there,
I see your point about opening all ships to backers to widen the individual’s scope of testing but I’d like to offer a few further considerations.

1) A lot of people jump into the ‘verse to enjoy themselves and that is great. When playing, rather than methodically testing, people are going to want to get the most bang for their buck in a session. This means people are more likely to tend towards the ‘best in class’ ship for whatever they want to do (if you want to do some hauling, why would you take the Aurora over the Caterpillar?). With universal access to all ships I fear we would lose a lot of feedback and data on lower tier ships.

2) When the ship you fly, your ship, is in a bad way either due to bugs or balance it really motivates you to speak up in reasoned debate, enter those IC issues and make it known. I don’t think that same motivation or sense of ownership will be there when any player can, excuse the pun, ‘jump ship’ on a suboptimal experience.

3) We need representative gameplay – there are a lot of moving parts to Star Citizen even at this stage. Not just ship tuning, but economic and wider gameplay tuning too. If everyone (I’m exaggerating the situation here a bit) does combat missions in their F7CMs and Sabres, it becomes a much lengthier process for us and the community to realise ‘oh, these missions are impossible for an Aurora or Mustang’. An example for economic tuning – it becomes much harder to determine fair insurance claim prices when no one needs to claim insurance, they always have another ship to use instead. As more multi-crew gameplay comes online, we need players to be incentivised to, another example, crew a Freelancer’s turret rather than just taking out a Buccaneer escort.

Just some thoughts I had, thank you for participating in the Star Citizen community.

N.B. I’m not in a position where is availability of ships is a decision I can make, this is not the official CIG view or reasoning. I would just like to contribute to the public discussion 🙂

Having ships available to buy or rent in the PU is going to be awesome for players but also for balancing the economy, working out progression times & giving reasons for backers to play the game, for longer periods of time anyway. This functionality has been long requested and it’s currently aimed at being in Alpha 3.3 for release on the 10th of October now.