Star Citizen LIVE – Vehicle Tech Team
we’ve had a load of info’s on various Ship and Vehicle Features coming to Star Citizen from Physical Damage, breaching, deeper scanning and more with the Star Citizen LIVE that featured the Vehicle Tech Team… Let’s take a look at what was talked about, summarize it and give a bit of context where sensible.
What updates can you give us on physical damage, physicalized components, or any other interior sources of damage?
The Plan is to have all materials have their own stats and then this to affect damage and projectiles penetrating them. But this will also take into account thickness and have the projectiles path be important, you could hit a ship clean and go through the hull but that could cause no damage to components and none were there, tho that could expose a room to space.
Titanium, Aluminium or the made up future materials are all going to react differently to different types of damage… it touches a huge amount of the teams working on the game.
Art effectively informs damage… it’s a big undertaking.
Mass of these materials affect the flight model.
Potentially parts of ships could be ripped off from impacts.
How’s it going with the new cockpit experience, the buttons and MFDs?
There are UI Updates coming for ships including new Scanning, Radar and Missile Operator Updates.
They are building towards having all the buttons and switches in ships have animations associated with them and the general cockpit experience of ships having logic and be immersive.
You flick a switch, it does something, if you look at a dashboard you could work out what going on just from where the switches are…
Vehicle Content are working on this, the Gladius is the first ship getting the treatment but it still needs more work. The basics of the tech are all built out already.
How do you envision breaching to work? Will we be able to blow a hole in the armour to board, turret breaching?
Entry Points like doors or turrets will be able to be damaged, destroyed or otherwise opened to allow for breaching.
Physical Damage in the future might allow damage and entry more freely potentially.
The Room and Atmosphere system needs to be completed, they want vacuum to suck the atmosphere out of the ship, they want working and sealing doors/airlocks.
At the moment Rooms don’t transfer gases and share atmosphere appropriately.
They want to hook the system up so players can see exactly what’s going on more appropriately with atmosphere and give warnings if atmosphere is venting.
There are life support systems that produce oxygen and good atmosphere.. Pretty slowly… you can suffocate still… but it also takes away the bad gases… like too much carbon dioxide.
There are compressors on airlocks that switch the atmosphere in the room, breathable to external environment.
They give an example of changing the compressors oxygen with a toxic gas and causing people to pass out on the ship.
Scanning and radar, where are we at, what are our goals, what are we pushing towards now?
Scanning needs more work. They are making it easier to find and scan down entities AND then when you are closer you’ll be able to get a load more information on that object.
This is both Ship and FPS Scanning too.
Ships will be scanning typically other ships, vehicles, mineables and the like. They want to show weapons, armor, cargo, lifesigns…obscure shielded areas, vehicles in ships,
You’ll be able to scan stations and other objects too.
They first need to expand this out so the system can track and find more and for that to be a good player experience and this to be unified across all forms of scanning.
Signatures are part of this and more passive Electronic warfare… CS, IR, EM and they are all catered for and the are expanding to appropriately use DB (Sound too) which is more FPS based.
You’ll be able to hide in or near or behind other signatures.
Formation flying will help obscure signatures.
Running around on foot, you might be detected if you are too noisy BUT might be able to hide near noisy machinery.
UI’s are being developed to really convey this info to convey meaningful data in a good way as well as group and filter it. We could see cargo specific scanners or bio/medical scanners.
If you are a big mining ship you might not want to see the smaller hand mineables.
Are we going to get more door and light panels for all or most of the ships?
It’s defined for each ship… the tech allows any ship to make use of that in the same way the MSR does. Some might have proximity sensors and lots of buttons and control… others not so much.
They can also control multiple doors and lights remotely or from other panels if they want.
It’s all going to be down to manufacturer and specific ship.
Ship in ship spawning, what is the next step?
They had a prototype working in 2020 with the Starfarer and a Rover.
The main thing that is holding it back is the player facing way that you actually spawn the vehicle within the ship. They don’t want it to be messy or long winded. There are some technical challenges working out how other peoples vehicles in your ships react and are handled by the system. How is cargo and vehicles in the way handled? The Cargo system needs to understand this… they are working on some bits for this now.
Ship on ship or the P52 to Connie Docking is some of this tech in action.
New Cargo Updates are coming with Physical Inventories in the future too.
Can we change the light colours in our ships?
They have a prototype… maybe?
Any hope for landing cameras?
Ship Landing Cameras are being talked about, we know that they are having a Docking Camera in the Shorter Term at least.
The little drones that used to repair ships, are they coming back?
Repair needs a huge overhaul. There will be a wielding and repair gun in the future.
We might see the little drones back in the future… maybe.