Player Living Spaces – Habs, Hangars & Customization
Welcome to some more Star Citizen, currently in Star Citizen we have little spawn rooms in Port Olisar, Grim Hex & Levski.
We can also, log off in our ships beds. Visiting one of these areas currently sets the area as our spawn point for when we log back on OR die. Beds in ships are just logon & off points rather than respawn points.
The rooms are tiny, there is no customization or persistence and they only serve to have us spawn there atm.
I wanted to talk about what we are getting in 3.3.5 and then the future of Habs, Hangars & Customizable Persistent Player Spaces.
Habitation
Each Hab block in Lorville on Hurston can hold 100 players, they can and will add more Hab blocks and Residential areas throughout Levski based on the player population. There are whole residential sections of the city.
For Alpha 3.3.5, these are places to log on and off so they need to have some character as we don’t have them persist with us yet, they will however act as a big player Hub.
In the future you will be able to rent and customize your habs, you can keep it tidy, ordered, chaotic, have items in there to aid you, or keep it barebones.
Things that were previously hangar flair like pictures and models will be able to be placed around your hab. You’ll be able to store, clothing, armor & weapons too.
They have shown functional coffee machines and things like that too, the idea is that it will be a place for a player to store some items, have the customize it to their liking and for that to persist. We don’t know if you’ll be able to buy habs too outright, it depends on how they want the economy to work & it might even be based on planet, building and location.
Full Persistence is required to have true customizable habs, that are physicalized and persist between sessions. Expect a range of types, qualities and sizes of habs across the various planets in game, probably Alien ones too, the Banu seem pretty chill!
Some people will certainly try to live entirely planet side, Outposts can be built by players with a Pioneer, Outposts will have a variety of functions, acting as player bases, places where you can exploit the land of a moon or planet using ships or built structures. They’ve also discussed the possibility of storage or landing pads being built too for ship storage.
They confirmed tho there is no tents or sleeping bags for “portable habs” planned.
In the future when in you die you’ll go to a medical facility, shorter term I believe you’ll spawn at the last hab location you were at BUT there is a hospital in Lorville and in ArcCorps Area 18 that will both be used for that purpose. Some medical ships will allow for respawning players, it remains to be seen if you can build an outpost with this functionality.
Hangars
Hangars in 3.3.5 are going to operate in the same way as we have now with no private hangars in the PU at this stage.
Hangars are in the future going to be available for players to rent & potentially to buy in the future.
They have said they want physicalized hangars too, exactly what form that will take remains to be seen. As they could have an internal structure that loads player ships in and deposits them, then players would fly out of the roof or side door. In fact this is almost certainly how public hangars and landing zones will work, like we have in game now but maybe a little more polished so they spawn and despawn ships out of your sight.
Private Hangars will be customizable, with you being able to store ships, flair and other items there. We don’t know at this stage if we need or can buy additions to a hangar for more cargo space or to store more ships. One of the concepts for hangars was to allow the addition of extra rooms & facilities to be added on.
Some Ships come with hangars like a Aurora coming with a self land hangar for example, these will be choose-able locations in the future in UEE space. Though it’s possible some of these hangars maybe in other zones too.
There will be a limited selection of areas. As far as I am aware these hangars are permanent assets, they even still sell upgrades for them in the Store still.
Larger Capital Ships won’t be able to land or be stored in these Hangars. Though they have previously talked about safe areas to log off with Capital Ships & Players all logging off with enough beds on a ship allowing the ship to despawn safely and respawn once you log back in. Larger ships will be able to dock with certain stations using their docking ports, the obviously need to be able to transfer cargo, fuel and get repairs.
Some ships are homes for the player, pretty much anywhere with a bed is. It allows safe logging out and in. Players don’t need a hangar really, after they have spawned their ship, they can just use public hangars to do all their business if so needed.
Once we have full persistence, once ships are spawned in they exist there and can’t be spawned in elsewhere, unless they are put into storage, then they can only be spawned from that location where they are stored. They did confirm you’d be able to spawn any vehicles or parasite ships / docked ships at the same time you spawn a ship, I assume eventually it will be set as part of the ships loadout before you spawn it.
For those worrying about Physicalized hangars and habs and space, don’t worry there is a huge amount of space for cities and areas to expand to in the Verse.
Also Economy wise, they can raise prices for docking fees, rental on habs and hangars and costs of fuel, rearming and repair in areas so that the market helps balance the amount of players that want to live or operate in a particular area.
Ships on landing pads, like at Levski are likely to stay there until they timeout. Though if a ship is breaking the law by staying on a pad for too long maybe they’d get shot. Some form of tow-truck would actually make sense for clearing pads, or a if it’s there for too long it’s free salvage.
As hangars and habs are planned to be physicalized you should be able to give access to other players, potentially even share them with org mates and parties, again this is unconfirmed BUT probable.
In the CitizenCon 2948 – Panel: The Mod Squad they talked about how they built the Habs for Lorville and as these are what we are getting next I wanted to give a quick summary of that too.
The habs in Lorville are built in modular sections.
A hab room, that players will spawn and live in is built out and is it’s own object container.
It’s then placed in a hab block.
Habs will have very different looks and feels between planets, brands and sometimes even between buildings on the same planet.
They build out the areas very roughly by mapping out the space for metrics then they break it up into sections and assets needed.
A hab might be very barebones, utilitarian or more luxurious, you might have very basic toilet/shower combo or cooking areas with a microwave OR a fully featured kitchen with all the future convenices. These assets and areas are white boxed out and moved around to make a hab room. If all the rooms are on the same metrics, sometimes they build a few base variants with beds or areas moved around a bit, but they will all contain the same base features, plus in the short term some additional clutter, assets & character.
There are loads of modular parts that go into each of the hab rooms though, both interior and exterior and all of these parts can be reused for each room & similar buildings. All parts are built with very specific metrics using metres squared typically, then each block can be a 1×1 or a 1×2 & built together like lego.
The animated elements like openable doors on cupboards are added separately. Then they add little props to help with the character and story telling of the environment. Annoyingly they move props slightly and offset them to be more realistic, THAT’S NOT REALISTIC IN MY HOUSE, keep things in their place XD
This is awesome because it looks like this will allow for a huge amount of customization to our rooms, being able to swap out whole sections of walls with functional kitchen worktops.
Areas can be built very easily, add a couch (which is itself modular and be expanded to any length), a TV and a table and they have a viewing area. With the RTT tech, this can allow for some awesome potential gameplay in the future.
Some of these hab block buildings will have very rough basic connections from the entrance to your door, others will have vast open lobbies & scenics.
They can change vastly the way walls and modular pieces look by changing their materials or primary, secondary and tertiary colors or even the lighting of the area.
Also VFX are added, you might have fans moving, dust, fog, sparks.
The habs we are getting in 3.3.5 are small, but significantly larger than what we have previously had. Also they are starting to show us what potential there is for the future of player living spaces. Customizable Persistent Player Spaces are super important to get right.
As we’ve seen it’s easy for the Devs to change colors and add parts to a hab, hopefully players will get the ability to do full interior design of their rooms… as Star Citizen is pushing that Space Sim 2nd life universe Simulation now. I’d love to be able to fully change colors, add worktops, change walls into wardrobes and utilities.