Reverse the Verse: Episode 2.09 is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. Enjoy!



Reverse the Verse: Episode 2.09

They do everything centred around ships, from concept stage where they work with Concept Artists and Ben and writers to make sure the ship will do what it needs to. Once they start getting art in, they start putting in engines and weapons, making seats work, making sure everything that moves and shoots work. They set up the moving parts of the ship.

Jonny’s more traditional, working on the setup process, where as Andrew is working on tuning flight and balancing weapons.

[What have you been working on recently?] Johnny’s been working on system design, looking at missile and weapons systems and refactoring them a little, especially in the case of missiles, and making some tweaks to weapons to make them feel more unique. Andrew’s been working on weapons as well, defining their roles and working out ranges and factors like speed, lifetime of projectile, damage, etc… They put them in game, figure out how they work, lots of excel work, getting into game, trying it out, going back, etc… lots of back and forth testing.

[What’s the flight model and what are we doing with it?] They’re not making changes to the flight model per-say, the flight model is realistic physics based as much as it can be. It’s about opening up the flight model to designers to change some parameters of ships, to more easily modify some aspects of ships, speeds, stop times, etc… The model is the program that takes all the numbers, crunches them, and outputs results. They’re changing the numbers that go into the flight model, not the flight model itself. They’re doing everything live, changing things around to see what works best. They try to get a lot of the testing out of the way in studio. They’re not changing the work that John Pritchett and others have done on the flight model; they’re changing stats that go into the model; speeds, stop times, weapon damages and such.

[Will the new flight model be different in AC than in the PU?] No. Everything’ll be the same across all modes. Something they didn’t have before was cruise speeds in Arena Commander; with the changes, making things slower, and making AC areas bigger eventually, cruise speeds will be important, as will spawn points. They don’t want to have much of a disconnect between the two modules.

[Were different controller setups taken into consideration with the rebalance?] Andrew’s desk is covered with all sorts of peripherals. Steering wheels, HOTAS, mouse, controller, etc… they have all kinds of feedback.

[Flight speeds are slowing down across the board, to make combat less about jousting, make it a little more immersive. Will missiles also be slowed down?] They’ve halved the SCM speeds, but you still have access to afterburner speeds, you can still cruise, they’ll have to playtest missile speeds. They don’t want people to be able to escape from missiles too easily. They’ll probably come down a bit, but they’ll have to do testing.

[Seems like there’s barely 10 seconds of boost fuel, will this be updated?] They are making some changes to how boost and afterburner work. They want to give more fuel so you can use afterburner a bit longer; they want it to be more important in a combat situation. They’ll probably give it less of a draw rate and a slow climb back up.

[Have changes trickled down and impacted larger ships; Idris, Javelin, etc…?] Not so much, because of the sheer mass of the ships. When they’ve had them flying it’s been ‘lets push it to the extreme’, longest acceleration, slowest rotation, etc… it’s still like moving a juggernaut through space.

[Do the new speeds affect blackout or redout thresholds?] No; they’re still where they were. Afterburner covers those areas. You’ll still black out if you’re pushing too hard. They want to make it more playable. It’s a normal part of game dev. They’re trying it out; they’ll get it out to Evocati, PTU, and live, and they’ll get feedback from everyone, and if changes are still necessary, they’ll make them. Nothing is final.

[How will weapon ranges be adjusted?] In general they’ll change on a per weapon basis. Weapons used to have very similar fire rates and ranges. Range wise, Cannons are long-range options, they’ll be increased, repeaters are in the middle, and gattlings are at the lower end. They’re still going back and forth on the ranges required; they’re putting the values in and testing them today. Ranges were coming down; combat is slowing so they’re trying out ranges lowered to test if they still feel right. The Cannon’s still 4-5000 range, and that’ll get larger as the gun gets larger as well. s5 cannons would have greater range for example.

That’s it for Johnny and Andrew. They’ll be coming back with John Crew and Will Maiden.

John Crewe – Lead Technical Designer, and Will Maiden, Technical Designer. John’s been on AtV and RtV before, back when they did the first Starfarer tour. Will’s done a few AtV’s but it’s his first RtV.

[Will, why are you trying to change the game to Golf Citizen?] It’d be more relaxing.

[Will – scope of work?] Will’s been looking at cargo and radar scanning. Before that he was designing the Terrapin and doing the Q&A for that, but that’s because it’s an exploration ship and he hopes to look at exploration and data gathering soon.

[John?] Working lots on Cit Con, looking to do Star Marine stuff, 2.6 balance changes, etc… it’s gone from just being John to being a team of 8 over there in the past two years.

[Seems lots of people don’t agree with the golf swing style of scanning. Why golf swing?] The ‘golf swing’ is a first-pass implementation. The thinking is they want a way of exposing hidden ships. You’ve got a sabre hiding, the idea is to charge a pulse and release it, and you can find the ship for a few seconds, then the ship fades. There needs to be some gameplay where the hunting ship can expose the hiding ship. The system shown yesterday is a first pass. What they want is a system that will build the energy you’re putting into a radar, and the longer you hold it the more it’ll generate and the wider it’ll fetch information from, but there’s a risk of it blowing up in your face. They want a system where you can fail. You thought you were the hunter, but you’ve just blown your radar, and can’t see anything for two minutes. They want a system where it’s not a done deal; you don’t just press ‘ping’ and everyone’s available. One thing that separates SC from other projects is they’re showing the first implementation of systems. This is the first implementation of a non-combat system on a combat ship. It’s how it’d work on a dogfighter; not necessarily if you’re in a crew station on a Connie or Idris. In a single-seater, you control everything. You control scanning, radar, guns, everything. There’s lots to do so they simplify things. The Terrapin has utility mounts and separate scanning stations. their job is to use the tools. Combat ships don’t need those, they need a simple, approachable system that combat pilots can use that they can build upon for bounty hunting and exploration etc… Lots of people are worried it’ll just be sitting at a station pressing a button, but that won’t be it. There’ve been suggestions of being able to scan really far away, using long-range sensors to see beyond limits. Radar is just what’s around you; they have plans for long-range sensors that regular equipment can’t pick up. They’ve only shown the earliest glimpse of an implementation of a larger system. It’s only possible now with items 2.0 coming soon, because ships now have thermals. Before it was either ‘you can detect it or you can’t’, now you can maaaybe detect ships, maybe not, etc… It’s only been in the last few weeks that they’ve been able to start implementing the scanning system. When it’s fully implemented, it’ll be a measure of finesse, because the guy being hunted maybe doesn’t know where the guy hunting him is. It’s like submarine warfare. If you ping, you give yourself away, etc… When you charge the pulse it’s going to leave you exposed, your radar’s gone because all your power’s going to the pulse, etc… Item 2.0 setup in ships will start allowing a lot more systemic gameplay in multicrew ships. The whole, “why can’t I slave my turret to the pilot seat”, that stuff will come directly out of this. It’s almost here.

