NPC Crew – Combat Stations & Schedules
Welcome to some more Star Citizen looking at NPC Crews, Ship Settings Persistence & Seat Heights, this is a summary of Calling All Devs – NPC Nature and Seat Stature.
NPC Crew & Schedules
NPCs including any NPC Crew you have will have a schedule, they are not locked to a single spot.
They will have times they are “on duty” “off duty”
A turret gunner will not be at their gun 24 7.
They will need to eat, shower, sleep and drink.
If you have enough crew you may have a rotation of gunners always at a post.
This is true of any station/system.
IF the ship goes into combat/prepares for combat then all the NPCs will switch to their combat schedule, this overrides anything else they were currently doing & they will man their appropriate station.
NPCs will get more skilled the more they do a task.
You could set them to always be combat ready / red alert BUT then moral will slowly drop & their performance will decrease.
Ship Settings/Controls Persistence
The fundamental tech of being able to save controls, settings, MFD layouts, ship power & system configurations is in game now, they can either right information like this to your local computer or have them saved to the cloud.
They are currently working out priorities and implementations of this, each feature team will be looking at what data they want to persist in this fashion and how to do it.
Seat Height & Cockpit Views
They want pilots to see 2-4 mfds on screen at a normal seating position.
They’d like to allow players to adjust their own seat height, there are challenges though
UI’s would need to be dynamic to your height, which requires some more tech as they are currently static in ships.
Animations & IK would need to be dynamically adjusted for the actual hands in the cockpit BUT also for entering and exiting the vehicle.
These are all solvable issues, with the UI being the most cumbersome to get working with this.
In the shorter term expect them to adjust the position and height of seats in ships based on feedback, if something is sitting to high, low or views are obstructed.
Loir Lesor, YouTuber Law has a video up Crytek Loses. Star Citizen Wins. Which gives the legal perspective of the recent Updates to the Crytek v CIG Lawsuit and basically says it’s pretty much over in favor of CIG. I have poked him with some follow up questions which I’ll update you with if he has time to answer.