WHERE WE WERE : The Cutlass Takes Flight!

by John Crewe

The Cutlass Black became flight ready with the release of Arena Commander v1.0 back in December 2014, but the road to getting it flight ready was an admittedly rocky one. After the initial block out by the ship team in Austin at that time, the Cutlass was worked on by a variety of people, including internal staff and several different outsource companies. The ship pipeline at the time was both young and extremely complex, and in review the resulting work had not been completed in a way that made it easy to implement in game. The unfortunate truth was that the asset that you’d had sitting in your hangars for some time had some serious design flaws in relation to its thruster placements; chief of which being the lack of any that could believably provide lateral thrust for strafing and yaw rotation. The only thrusters that could achieve this were the gimballed central ones, and because they were only centrally located, they unfortunately just couldn’t provide sufficient rotation as needed.

In addition to this, the Cutlass also required some new thruster setups that had never been created for any of the Star Citizen ships before, and as such this new ground was being tread right up unto the release. We had for the first time in our development main thrusters that could rotate and act as the thrusters that provided retro thrust. We also had those central thrusters which could not only pitch/yaw but also roll, and at certain angles would limit rotation in other axis! The final part of the thruster issues with the Cutlass is having child thrusters, which the main thrusters are supposed to have but have been absent since the flight ready release. Long story short: the original IFCS system was never written to account for thrusters with thrusters on them and the handling behavior would degrade completely, so we’d removed them until we had a chance to look at that system; work which will be included in the forthcoming model update.

John Pritchett and myself spent many evenings in the build up to release trying to solve these issues and whilst they solved a lot, a few persist to this day, which required some non-ideal solutions at that time, like the incredibly fast rotating thrusters and the fairly slippery handling that results from non-optimal thrusters.

The final bump in the road for the v1.0 release was the delivery for the damage states and LoD’s was massively behind schedule and came in very late, barely days before the v1.0 release date leaving very little time for implementation, evaluation and optimization. This is always an unfortunate occurrence in game development, but because we knew this was the beginning of things and not the end, we implemented the best interim solutions we could at that time.

Post Release Rework Begins

It is safe to say the Cutlass has suffered from a lot of issues, but we’re intent on making amends (read on to find out how!) It became clear after its flight ready release that a lot of work had to be done to get it to the standard required and as such Foundry 42 was tasked with investigating a review and revamp of it.

The designers at Foundry 42 took a look at it and worked up a proposal to keep the unique exterior shape but allow as much interior modularization as possible. At that point the ship was split up into four sections. Here are some bullet point features we want to implement in each section:

Cockpit/Storage

Contains the cockpit and a small utility area comprising personal storage and weapons locker.

Separated from the next section via a bulkhead door.

The second seat was moved to a single display screen allowing engineering/remote control functionality to be given.

Really bring in the cramped feeling but using up lots of the dead space above the passageways which are wasted currently.

Consistent between all variants.

Crew Living Quarters

Contains a pair of escape pod beds on one side and a utility area on the other side.

Small additional weapons locker, shower/toilet and turret access.

Storage built into space between current interior and exterior hull, especially for smuggling.

Turret access is retained in this area although the entry hole will be made to the new standardized 2m, to match Docking Collars and as such if destroyed makes the perfect extra docking point for enemies.

Central Modular Room

Provides the basis for all three existing variants whilst giving potential for more in future.

Default option for the Cutlass Black gains a cargo lift on which all cargo is stored.

Cutlass Blue comes equipped with a set of cells.

Red variant has a pod recovery system which can tractor escape pods in from outside through an airlock in the floor.

Other proposed variations included a drop ship version, similar to the Retaliator drop ship module.

Rear Ramp

Similar to the current rear of the Cutlass but have the docking collar move to the ceiling rather than being on the floor of the cargo bay.

Sealed from modular room to allow it to open during flight without depressurizing the entire cargo bay.

The docking collar is also moving to the new standardized size of 2m wide which will allow 1SCU crates plenty of space to be transferred through and the ramp is wide enough to support larger items as well as being directly loaded onto the cargo lift.

In addition to this, there was a small selection of exterior adjustments decided to aid the overall handling such as bringing the rear engines more in line with the front canard wings and adding better placed/integrated thrusters to the front of the ship as well.

Once the initial design pass had been done it was passed over to the concept team who started doing paint overs using the existing white box designer geometry. Some of these concepts were released during the Cargo Design Doc and the rest are included throughout this post.

Shortly before work was due to commence on the “Cutlass rework” the priorities on the ship schedule changed, and as such the Foundry 42 Ship Team (at the time, only a few people) were moved on to finishing other ships such as the Gladius, Gladiator, Retaliator and Idris, which you have all now seen at CitizenCon as well as a few others you are yet to see.

Because of this, the task of creating the revamped Cutlass was given to an outsource studio with guidance from the team. In an effort to avoid the same mistakes that were made with prior outsource partners, they were actually embedded within the F42 studio for a fortnight so we would have the proper oversight and be able to provide the most immediate feedback.

Unfortunately, as happens in game development, the priorities changed again, as we realized that other needs at that time trumped the rework of an existing flyable ship, and as such around June the Cutlass Black rework was put on the back burner as other ships came through the pipeline. This is an unfortunate reality of development, as there are only a finite number of resources available, and getting more ships built allows other members of the team complete their work sooner, as opposed to slowing multiple departments as they wait on one team to rework the Cutlass.

WHERE WE ARE : The Cutlass in Alpha 2.0

For Alpha 2.0 the Cutlass Black is receiving an interim update for a variety of reasons, primarily performance. It was by far the single most expensive ship in the game in terms of memory usage, as everyone will have experienced playing AC with the severe hangs whenever one spawns or dies. We managed to improve that somewhat over subsequent patches from the programming side by pre-caching it, but at the end of the day the raw assets just weren’t optimized enough to be suitable going forward.

We decided a few months ago that rather than rushing to try and get the reworked Cutlass out for 2.0 we’d spend the time “upgrading” the old version to improve the experience for everyone when one is involved in combat. Not only have we totally redone the damage setup using the new damage shader system but we’ve also added in the basics of the new Multi Crew UI screens as seen in the Constellation and Retaliator. By doing this work the actual source .max file has shrunk from just under 2GB down to 550MB, the in game .cga assets have also been reduced from two assets totaling 405MB down to a single asset under 30MB. Not only is this better for the game but also massively better for us developers as it was taking nearly 40 minutes to commit the .max file to Perforce previously on our old office connection, now it’s under a minute.

The result for players is that it allows the Cutlass to be managed just like those larger ships and gives us valuable feedback on the usability of those screens on a much smaller scale ship, both in terms of size and crew count. The Pilot has a revised cockpit display with new multi-function displays and the co-pilot seat has an all new single 16:9 display allowing oversight to many features whilst controlling specific engineering style tasks. In addition to the UI screens we’ve also done a quick usability pass on the ship, tightening up the interaction prompts for all the buttons and adjusting the button locations to be not quite so jammed in and making the external buttons a bit more visible. There should be no more cases of trying to open the cockpit door, whilst accidentally lowering the turret or ending up in the jump seat!

On top of the multi-crew update the ship has also had a complete thruster balance pass to go with the new IFCS system which should help limit some of the more unexpected behavior you experience in AC today along with improved speeds and handling allow you to catch up with your prey easier.

Lastly and most importantly, we are bringing back the cockpit fans which have been missing in action since v1.0. We expect this was the only aspect of the rework anyone was interested in, so let’s consider the Cutlass “finished.”

Just seeing if anyone is actually reading this. We’re kidding, of course. But not about the fans. Those are really back. =)

WHERE WE’RE GOING : Plans for the Cutlass Going Forward

With the split of ship manufacturers between studios, the Cutlass (being a Drake ship) has moved over to LA for them to implement the above design rework alongside their work on the Herald and Caterpillar. The current ship schedule is very full, with all the ships required for S42 taking priority and most being done at Foundry 42, as such the interim update to the Cutlass for 2.0 fills the need we have for it in the short term.

As the concept and designs for the rework have been finished, this reduces the amount of time needed for the eventual Cutlass rework to be completed. It’s just a case of finding time in the schedule to complete that work, especially when it has to compete against other ships which are not flight ready in any form, yet.

In addition to the rework the Cutlass will benefit from all the ongoing updates to ships such as the new component system rollout which will allow players to customize their ships much more than is currently possible, and we hope to have a more thorough design post on this exciting system soon. Other updates that will be coming online will be updated turrets and mounts to allow a variety of weapons, the first recently released was the S4 fixed mount allowing Cutlass users to wield the hefty Behring cannon. The plan has always been to allow players the choice of setting their ship up how they want, but in v1.0 the turret was slaved to the pilot simulating a remote control turret. For 2.0 it is now a dedicated manned turret which in future will allow it to be slaved to either seat, manned directly or controlled by AI.

The Cutlass is designed to be operated by two people (MAX Crew is NOT the same as REQUIRED or OPTIMAL Crew,) with a pilot and another who can choose between sitting in the RIO seat and managing ship systems or taking direct control of the turret to provide offensive capabilities. That doesn’t mean you have to roll with just two people, you can always recruit a bunch of your buddies to ride in the back to take on any jobs you see fit although there are only two escape pods…

VARIANTS : Talking about the Red and Blue

One of the most popular questions/complaints is about the variation in stats for the components in the Red and Blue versions and as always our answer is “All stats are subject to change” and the Red & Blue are no exception.

The current stats for the variants will be reviewed when the Black revamp takes place as that will dictate the base level for the variants, expect the Blue to still have some edges as you’d imagine from a Law Enforcement variant.

The Red version will still maintain its search and rescue capabilities with an integral escape pod recovery mechanism in the central modular room along with medical pods and hospital equipment. The turret will also be swapped for the scanner array and of course its exterior paint job.

The Blue version still retains its additional missiles and prisoner cells although their arrangement is still to be decided. They currently sit around the edge of the hull but may move onto the central cargo lift to allow all of them to be lowered out of the ship together for easier prisoner loading/unloading.

In regards to the exterior styling there will be a push towards unification of the base meshes between all three versions so that one exterior can be used across them all with only small “bolt on” pieces like you find in the Vanguard series to differentiate them, along with their recognizable paint jobs of course. This means the cockpit geometry will most likely be different than to what is currently there whilst we find the best compromise between them all, but rest assured: no more bars through the viewline!