For those who haven't stumbled over this vid yet: its worth the time.
But for sure, its a lot of talking stuff with no eye candy in it, not even beer. Thus, if you can't stand this, here's the transcription:
Dutch Bar Citizen: Dan Trufin Interview Written Saturday 14th of January 2017 at 03:43pm by CanadianSyrup, StormyWinters and NYXT, Sunjammer, Erris
Hello everyone! Today we bring you a special interview provided by the folks at the recent Bar Citizen in Utrecht, Netherlands on December 10th.
The people who made this video possible are Swift Omnium, Obi-Joop Kenobi, Asuna Akira, Case_C,and Facerafter. Transcription was provided by Relay. Enjoy the video!
Full Transcript
Swift Omnium (SO): Hi there, thank you having us and giving us the time. Can you maybe make a small introduction about yourself?
Dan Trufin (DT): Yeah I’m Dan, I’m the Lead System Designer here in Foundry 42 Frankfurt and I generally deal with everything that’s relating to gameplay mechanics and generally making the game fun.
SO: Okay, great! We have some questions from the community, it’s a lot of them and we will just go through them and if you can answer them and else if you don’t, if you cannot then we just skip one.
DT: Alright
SO: Okay then first question: With the exploration of planetside has become a reality in the not too distant future, what can we expect in the longevity of these unexplored terrains. With thousands of players scanning a planet for its secrets and resources, it won’t take too long for an entire planet to be mapped. With space, for dimensions it’s easier for point of interests to get lost or forgotten. How will this work in a physical place like planets? Will items, place of interests on a planet persist and will the coordinate data get lost over time? Or is there something else planned for planets?
DT: So we’re planning to have various types of persistence when it comes to both space and planets. Everything that’s massive and it’s a recognizable element or it’s big enough that it won’t disappear in a few moments will be persistent, it will always be there. Once you find it, you will have the coordinates for it and you can always get there fast, not fast, but get there easily without having to find it again.
We will also have missions and points of interests that are not so big like a crashed ship in a desert. That is a ship that you find today,tomorrow, the sand might come over it again. So we’re okay with that disappearing and being phased out. So there will always be new things we generate on those planets so the more you find stuff there, we’ll try to spawn more and more and the system will try to balance between… so stuff doesn’t get completely discovered on a planet.
On the other side, planets are still pretty huge. I mean planets if you think in other games, they’re small, our planets are proper planetside. You have to consider how long it would take you to map the earth, you know it would take quite a while. There’s 6 billion of us and we still don’t know a lot about the Earth so hopefully it will be that rich, our planet's will be that rich.
Also you will find three points on this planets, he will find three points, everyone will find other things. How you share that information with each other is all up to you. You might sell that information for money, you might only keep it because it offers you a tactical advantage over your enemies so there won’t be one person that knows everything about the planet so all this will change and it’ll keep moving and whatever information you have will be useful, but it’s not everything, you can’t know everything.
SO: So it’s like an endless game in a certain way/
DT: Hopefully. We’re planning for this game to offer content as long as there are people to play, it should keep refreshing itself. That’s why we’re adding all this procedural generation to be able to generate content as fast as you guys can play it.
SO: Yes.
DT: Otherwise we wouldn’t bother with it.
SO: True. Next question is about sourceable goods. In the Persistent Universe we will see different kind of goods as sellable wears. Since these products are mostly physical albeit in boxes or containers, will players of having the option of hoarding large quantities of a certain good in a location other than in their ship or hangar. Perhaps on remote moons with massive warehouses full of wares for the less legal citizens among us. Or in rented warehouses in UEE controlled space.
DT: So the short answer is yes you’ll be able to hoard goods. You’ll be able to take items, just I want to hold 500 million bars of soap because I want to be the owner of all the soap in the universe. If you can afford them, that to buy it and if you can afford the storage space because renting a storage space will cost money, the bigger the storage space, the more money it will cost; If you can afford to do that, yes you’ll be able to do that. You will not be able to break the company because we are the not the 100% player driven economy where it’s an economy that we control and the NPCs have a very heavy stake in it. You’re just one person in the universe, this gigantic universe with billions and billions of people, they will have a say in it, so if you start buying all the soap in the universe cause you want to hoard it there’ll be a lot of companies going ‘I’ll start producing soap now’ and they’ll put more soap on the market, so it’ll be very very hard to crash the market.
SO: Next Question is about, let’s see, docking I believe. The localized physics grids on ships were a great step forward for the development of star citizen. Next big step in that respect will be docking. By joining two or multiple different ships together, with the release of the caterpillar and its capability to attach and reattach its cockpit with the hull, we hope to hear more about the development of this technology, and there’s one other question that’s very similar, in what form can we expect docking to first release? Will this be with larger ships to space stations where physics grids can be meshed like the Idris shown docked at Port Olisar, or any ship with a docking port anywhere in space with another ship?
DT: So, I’m not sure if all of it will get released as one chunk, it depends on how our development cycle goes and what we manage to finish in time, but we’re definitely working right now on this docking between, we started with docking between two ships, and then we started to figure out oh yeah, we need to start docking with stations, we need to start docking with big big capital size ships, cause those ships are not going to be able to just dock and land anywhere, so you will be able to have transports coming to a big ship, picking up stuff, taking it to the station and do this taxiing between all the cargo cause they cannot fit in the station. So we’re definitely working on this, it’s been a bit of a problem initially, because we started with a lot of art that was done without this in mind, so all our, not all our docking ports are aligned right now. They kinda, the RSI ones are kinda the same size, but we need to standardize this. It needs to be, you can’t have them all the same size, but there need to be a few classes of docking ports, and you know this ship can dock with this ship at any point, cause their docking rings can meet together and lock and create a seal cause they’re the same size ship.
SO: Same manufacturers maybe?
DT: Yes, we’re kinda thinking of standardizing them beyond manufacturing, because it would be weird if you have an RSI ship, he has a drake ship, you’ll never be able to dock with each other just because it’s a different manufacturer. I mean, we're thinking a few hundred years in the future, even now everything gets standardize. People would standardize a docking ring so they know, oh, we’re a class A docking ring or class B, so we’re definitely going to do this. As to release, if it all gets released as one or not, that will have to see, probably it will be in stages as with everything we do. It’s easier for us cause we release a small part, see how it works, then we adjust, and then adjust also what hasn’t been released, and keep making better and better rather than giving everything at once and then we have to do a big chunk of rework.
SO: So you’re talking about class A and B docking ports, is that something that you’re looking at right now, to name it like that? Class A and class B?
DT: No, it’s just an example, they don’t have definite names right now, but they will be, it might be that the docking port becomes a component of it, but we’re still looking into this, because it would be weird if that docking port is always there on some ships, if people don’t need it, so then it might become a component, it might not, it depends on, we’ll see how this works in gameplay, so lots of experimentation. Because if I can put the docking port there, or I can put something else instead of the docking port that benefits me more cause I never want to dock with people, maybe that’s a better way. We’re always looking towards this modularity.
SO: So if you worked docking ports modularity, there can be something else..
DT: Yes, I mean, don’t take this for gospel, but this is, we’re always experimenting with this. If it works good, if it doesn’t, then we fall back to having it fixed, which is the easiest solution.
SO: Yes, okay, next question. What is the player cap you’re aiming for in 3.0 release, and can you elaborate what fleet combat sizes you’re looking for in 3.0, or 3. Releases?
DT: So right now there’s a lot of refactoring happening in the code, the networking code, for 3.0 we don’t know yet if what measure that refactoring will be effective. WE’re constantly looking on increasing the player count and, especially allowing players to jump from one server to the other based on their location, on who their friends are, stuff like this. But for now I can’t really predict this one. It’s in the works, that’s all I can tell you, but whether it will be ready for 3.0 release or it’s a bit further…
SO: It’s a netcode question
DT: Yes, so, even they would not be able to tell you exactly when. It’s a matter of when it’s working properly. So, it’s, it’s in the works, we’re pushing forward with this and it just takes time.
SO: Yeah.
DT: Yeah.
SO: Eventually.
DT: Regarding fleet engagements, we would like to get it as big as possible. The main problem that comes here for us is that it’s not you’re fighting 10 ships vs. 10 ships or something like this, it’s just a matter of, for us, we have multiple people on those ships. So we have a multicrew ship, we have to sync to a lot more clients now, so we have to see what will limit, what can the guys in the ship received from all the other. Do we sync everything, do we sync less for them because maybe it’s not important that we sync every little thing that’s happening in the ship to ship combat, for them it’s more important that they manage the shields correctly and they see the situation on the ship, or they deal with the boarding party,so that's more important for the guys on the ship, so maybe that will take priority, it’s… again. Network code guys would be able to give you a lot more detail in how this will go eventually, but it, kinda that’s the idea behind it. It will take a while.
SO: Yeah, yeah, in the homestead demo, we were shown a huge sandstorm moving across the planet. Will we also see other natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and volcanic eruptions?
DT: So, what you saw there was an example of what we planned to do with our weather system, which is have a constantly changing weather on the planet, and the sandstorm actually travelling around and moving like a normal weather front. Whether we go into natural disasters more like on the planetary scale, it’s a bit more complicated. We would like to do earthquakes and all kind of random events, but like meteor showers and stuff like this. There is room for that, we’re looking into it, but when it comes to you mentioned volcanic eruptions or floods, those are a bit harder to do. I mean, we would love to do them, but there’s so much tech involved in having water physics wash everything or lava start flowing through the, in most games where we see lava it’s very, it’s either simplistic like in, I don’t know, minecraft type of game, it’s nice, gameplay wise, but it’s not looking to the standards of where we want Star Citizen to be. Or you have very scripted things, where it always flows exactly where it needs to flow and that’s the script of the movie. So, we, if we cannot reach our standards of quality, we’ll probably not go that way. We’ll have to see how far we can push the tech and if we manage to get the tech then eventually yes.
SO: So, meteorite showers…
DT: That is something that I’m… in my estimations, should be doable. It’s, even with the current tech we just, we don’t need that much to get something like that done. Sandstorm again was an example where, yes, there was a lot of work behind it, but it’s doable with current tech. When we’re talking lava rivers flowing and burning stuff down, that is far outside of what we have right now as tech
SO: Yeah, okay. Right. Will multicrew aspect of the game be touched anytime soon, for example different stations inside the ship's, better turreting, mechanics or working Merlins, etcetera? This hasn’t been touched in a while and only saw very little progression.
DT: Yes, definitely. It’s one of the things we’re looking at heavily right now. We’re looking at having multiple stations including engineering, tactical, we’re looking mainly from the perspective of capital ship, and namely the Idris for us right now, as it’s the main staging platform for SQ42, and we have guys working from the tactical battlesphere to how power gets routed inside the ship and how you can turn certain things on and off. There will be stations with controls where you can see when things overheat, things require more power, things have various problems and they need a maintenance crew being sent there.
So there will be these stations where you can command all these things. So we definitely- I mean, the first proper implementation of multi-crew was just the idea of having multiple people on that ship being able to do various things but it was a very early implementation - we definitely aren’t there yet, we’ve never thought that was the end of it, it was just the first step in a multi-crew direction.
I mean while they are functioning - you can say “yeah, there are turrets on the ship”, we never liked the idea of being completely “when the pilot goes the turret aiming goes completely ‘woah, I lost track of where everything I was doing because the pilot just took a sharp turn’”. That is something we’ll correct and we’ll try to have that turret have a bit of a smart ring where it tries to, when the ship goes left, the turret still still says in the same rather than following with the ship-
SO: Like modern tanks?
DT: Exactly, modern tanks already do this, they have the turrets completely independent from the tracks - so we will have that just as a matter of time with priorities of what to implement first but that is one of the first things that we will change for the multi-crew ships.
Yes, things will evolve from here, this is just the beginning of the multi-crew stuff. Especially- we’re thinking capital ship because once we have that working, we will have a lot of the items we need for the smaller multi-crew ship. Once this is done, all the small ones will benefit from that. It is our moment of glory when we have that Idris - all the stations on that Idris functioning as they should.
SO: Do you have any info on the non-combat game mechanics - it has been a while since we saw a design post about mining, engineering, etc. are those articles still up to date or did they drastically change during the process?
Hello everyone! Today we bring you a special interview provided by the folks at the recent Bar Citizen in Utrecht, Netherlands on December 10th.
The people who made this video possible are Swift Omnium, Obi-Joop Kenobi, Asuna Akira, Case_C,and Facerafter. Transcription was provided by Relay. Enjoy the video!
Full Transcript
Swift Omnium (SO): Hi there, thank you having us and giving us the time. Can you maybe make a small introduction about yourself?
Dan Trufin (DT): Yeah I’m Dan, I’m the Lead System Designer here in Foundry 42 Frankfurt and I generally deal with everything that’s relating to gameplay mechanics and generally making the game fun.
SO: Okay, great! We have some questions from the community, it’s a lot of them and we will just go through them and if you can answer them and else if you don’t, if you cannot then we just skip one.
DT: Alright
SO: Okay then first question: With the exploration of planetside has become a reality in the not too distant future, what can we expect in the longevity of these unexplored terrains. With thousands of players scanning a planet for its secrets and resources, it won’t take too long for an entire planet to be mapped. With space, for dimensions it’s easier for point of interests to get lost or forgotten. How will this work in a physical place like planets? Will items, place of interests on a planet persist and will the coordinate data get lost over time? Or is there something else planned for planets?
DT: So we’re planning to have various types of persistence when it comes to both space and planets. Everything that’s massive and it’s a recognizable element or it’s big enough that it won’t disappear in a few moments will be persistent, it will always be there. Once you find it, you will have the coordinates for it and you can always get there fast, not fast, but get there easily without having to find it again.
We will also have missions and points of interests that are not so big like a crashed ship in a desert. That is a ship that you find today,tomorrow, the sand might come over it again. So we’re okay with that disappearing and being phased out. So there will always be new things we generate on those planets so the more you find stuff there, we’ll try to spawn more and more and the system will try to balance between… so stuff doesn’t get completely discovered on a planet.
On the other side, planets are still pretty huge. I mean planets if you think in other games, they’re small, our planets are proper planetside. You have to consider how long it would take you to map the earth, you know it would take quite a while. There’s 6 billion of us and we still don’t know a lot about the Earth so hopefully it will be that rich, our planet's will be that rich.
Also you will find three points on this planets, he will find three points, everyone will find other things. How you share that information with each other is all up to you. You might sell that information for money, you might only keep it because it offers you a tactical advantage over your enemies so there won’t be one person that knows everything about the planet so all this will change and it’ll keep moving and whatever information you have will be useful, but it’s not everything, you can’t know everything.
SO: So it’s like an endless game in a certain way/
DT: Hopefully. We’re planning for this game to offer content as long as there are people to play, it should keep refreshing itself. That’s why we’re adding all this procedural generation to be able to generate content as fast as you guys can play it.
SO: Yes.
DT: Otherwise we wouldn’t bother with it.
SO: True. Next question is about sourceable goods. In the Persistent Universe we will see different kind of goods as sellable wears. Since these products are mostly physical albeit in boxes or containers, will players of having the option of hoarding large quantities of a certain good in a location other than in their ship or hangar. Perhaps on remote moons with massive warehouses full of wares for the less legal citizens among us. Or in rented warehouses in UEE controlled space.
DT: So the short answer is yes you’ll be able to hoard goods. You’ll be able to take items, just I want to hold 500 million bars of soap because I want to be the owner of all the soap in the universe. If you can afford them, that to buy it and if you can afford the storage space because renting a storage space will cost money, the bigger the storage space, the more money it will cost; If you can afford to do that, yes you’ll be able to do that. You will not be able to break the company because we are the not the 100% player driven economy where it’s an economy that we control and the NPCs have a very heavy stake in it. You’re just one person in the universe, this gigantic universe with billions and billions of people, they will have a say in it, so if you start buying all the soap in the universe cause you want to hoard it there’ll be a lot of companies going ‘I’ll start producing soap now’ and they’ll put more soap on the market, so it’ll be very very hard to crash the market.
SO: Next Question is about, let’s see, docking I believe. The localized physics grids on ships were a great step forward for the development of star citizen. Next big step in that respect will be docking. By joining two or multiple different ships together, with the release of the caterpillar and its capability to attach and reattach its cockpit with the hull, we hope to hear more about the development of this technology, and there’s one other question that’s very similar, in what form can we expect docking to first release? Will this be with larger ships to space stations where physics grids can be meshed like the Idris shown docked at Port Olisar, or any ship with a docking port anywhere in space with another ship?
DT: So, I’m not sure if all of it will get released as one chunk, it depends on how our development cycle goes and what we manage to finish in time, but we’re definitely working right now on this docking between, we started with docking between two ships, and then we started to figure out oh yeah, we need to start docking with stations, we need to start docking with big big capital size ships, cause those ships are not going to be able to just dock and land anywhere, so you will be able to have transports coming to a big ship, picking up stuff, taking it to the station and do this taxiing between all the cargo cause they cannot fit in the station. So we’re definitely working on this, it’s been a bit of a problem initially, because we started with a lot of art that was done without this in mind, so all our, not all our docking ports are aligned right now. They kinda, the RSI ones are kinda the same size, but we need to standardize this. It needs to be, you can’t have them all the same size, but there need to be a few classes of docking ports, and you know this ship can dock with this ship at any point, cause their docking rings can meet together and lock and create a seal cause they’re the same size ship.
SO: Same manufacturers maybe?
DT: Yes, we’re kinda thinking of standardizing them beyond manufacturing, because it would be weird if you have an RSI ship, he has a drake ship, you’ll never be able to dock with each other just because it’s a different manufacturer. I mean, we're thinking a few hundred years in the future, even now everything gets standardize. People would standardize a docking ring so they know, oh, we’re a class A docking ring or class B, so we’re definitely going to do this. As to release, if it all gets released as one or not, that will have to see, probably it will be in stages as with everything we do. It’s easier for us cause we release a small part, see how it works, then we adjust, and then adjust also what hasn’t been released, and keep making better and better rather than giving everything at once and then we have to do a big chunk of rework.
SO: So you’re talking about class A and B docking ports, is that something that you’re looking at right now, to name it like that? Class A and class B?
DT: No, it’s just an example, they don’t have definite names right now, but they will be, it might be that the docking port becomes a component of it, but we’re still looking into this, because it would be weird if that docking port is always there on some ships, if people don’t need it, so then it might become a component, it might not, it depends on, we’ll see how this works in gameplay, so lots of experimentation. Because if I can put the docking port there, or I can put something else instead of the docking port that benefits me more cause I never want to dock with people, maybe that’s a better way. We’re always looking towards this modularity.
SO: So if you worked docking ports modularity, there can be something else..
DT: Yes, I mean, don’t take this for gospel, but this is, we’re always experimenting with this. If it works good, if it doesn’t, then we fall back to having it fixed, which is the easiest solution.
SO: Yes, okay, next question. What is the player cap you’re aiming for in 3.0 release, and can you elaborate what fleet combat sizes you’re looking for in 3.0, or 3. Releases?
DT: So right now there’s a lot of refactoring happening in the code, the networking code, for 3.0 we don’t know yet if what measure that refactoring will be effective. WE’re constantly looking on increasing the player count and, especially allowing players to jump from one server to the other based on their location, on who their friends are, stuff like this. But for now I can’t really predict this one. It’s in the works, that’s all I can tell you, but whether it will be ready for 3.0 release or it’s a bit further…
SO: It’s a netcode question
DT: Yes, so, even they would not be able to tell you exactly when. It’s a matter of when it’s working properly. So, it’s, it’s in the works, we’re pushing forward with this and it just takes time.
SO: Yeah.
DT: Yeah.
SO: Eventually.
DT: Regarding fleet engagements, we would like to get it as big as possible. The main problem that comes here for us is that it’s not you’re fighting 10 ships vs. 10 ships or something like this, it’s just a matter of, for us, we have multiple people on those ships. So we have a multicrew ship, we have to sync to a lot more clients now, so we have to see what will limit, what can the guys in the ship received from all the other. Do we sync everything, do we sync less for them because maybe it’s not important that we sync every little thing that’s happening in the ship to ship combat, for them it’s more important that they manage the shields correctly and they see the situation on the ship, or they deal with the boarding party,so that's more important for the guys on the ship, so maybe that will take priority, it’s… again. Network code guys would be able to give you a lot more detail in how this will go eventually, but it, kinda that’s the idea behind it. It will take a while.
SO: Yeah, yeah, in the homestead demo, we were shown a huge sandstorm moving across the planet. Will we also see other natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and volcanic eruptions?
DT: So, what you saw there was an example of what we planned to do with our weather system, which is have a constantly changing weather on the planet, and the sandstorm actually travelling around and moving like a normal weather front. Whether we go into natural disasters more like on the planetary scale, it’s a bit more complicated. We would like to do earthquakes and all kind of random events, but like meteor showers and stuff like this. There is room for that, we’re looking into it, but when it comes to you mentioned volcanic eruptions or floods, those are a bit harder to do. I mean, we would love to do them, but there’s so much tech involved in having water physics wash everything or lava start flowing through the, in most games where we see lava it’s very, it’s either simplistic like in, I don’t know, minecraft type of game, it’s nice, gameplay wise, but it’s not looking to the standards of where we want Star Citizen to be. Or you have very scripted things, where it always flows exactly where it needs to flow and that’s the script of the movie. So, we, if we cannot reach our standards of quality, we’ll probably not go that way. We’ll have to see how far we can push the tech and if we manage to get the tech then eventually yes.
SO: So, meteorite showers…
DT: That is something that I’m… in my estimations, should be doable. It’s, even with the current tech we just, we don’t need that much to get something like that done. Sandstorm again was an example where, yes, there was a lot of work behind it, but it’s doable with current tech. When we’re talking lava rivers flowing and burning stuff down, that is far outside of what we have right now as tech
SO: Yeah, okay. Right. Will multicrew aspect of the game be touched anytime soon, for example different stations inside the ship's, better turreting, mechanics or working Merlins, etcetera? This hasn’t been touched in a while and only saw very little progression.
DT: Yes, definitely. It’s one of the things we’re looking at heavily right now. We’re looking at having multiple stations including engineering, tactical, we’re looking mainly from the perspective of capital ship, and namely the Idris for us right now, as it’s the main staging platform for SQ42, and we have guys working from the tactical battlesphere to how power gets routed inside the ship and how you can turn certain things on and off. There will be stations with controls where you can see when things overheat, things require more power, things have various problems and they need a maintenance crew being sent there.
So there will be these stations where you can command all these things. So we definitely- I mean, the first proper implementation of multi-crew was just the idea of having multiple people on that ship being able to do various things but it was a very early implementation - we definitely aren’t there yet, we’ve never thought that was the end of it, it was just the first step in a multi-crew direction.
I mean while they are functioning - you can say “yeah, there are turrets on the ship”, we never liked the idea of being completely “when the pilot goes the turret aiming goes completely ‘woah, I lost track of where everything I was doing because the pilot just took a sharp turn’”. That is something we’ll correct and we’ll try to have that turret have a bit of a smart ring where it tries to, when the ship goes left, the turret still still says in the same rather than following with the ship-
SO: Like modern tanks?
DT: Exactly, modern tanks already do this, they have the turrets completely independent from the tracks - so we will have that just as a matter of time with priorities of what to implement first but that is one of the first things that we will change for the multi-crew ships.
Yes, things will evolve from here, this is just the beginning of the multi-crew stuff. Especially- we’re thinking capital ship because once we have that working, we will have a lot of the items we need for the smaller multi-crew ship. Once this is done, all the small ones will benefit from that. It is our moment of glory when we have that Idris - all the stations on that Idris functioning as they should.
SO: Do you have any info on the non-combat game mechanics - it has been a while since we saw a design post about mining, engineering, etc. are those articles still up to date or did they drastically change during the process?
