- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Guests:
- Edward Fuller, Senior Principal Systems Designer
- Rick Porter, Design Director
- David Haddock, Narrative Director
- Ali Ahmadi, Senior VFX Artist I
- Jake Dunlop, Senior Environment Artist I
- Dan Meadowcroft, Senior Sound Designer I
- Guillaume-Roch Pinard, UI UX Designer Senior I
- Alistair Brown, Senior Director of Graphics and Procedural Tech
TL;DW:
- sound and visuals are obviously work in progress, there are some visual target images shown during the video
- there are two different jump point types:
- permanent
- always available
- on well traveled routes
- surrounded by infrastructure
- no more circular gates (present in old concept art) around jump points
- usable by all ships
- transient
- need to be found
- unknown destination
- various sizes (small, medium, large)
- unknown presence (might last a long time or a single jump)
- permanent
- patch 4.0 will only contain the Stanton - Pyro connection
- security and turrets near permanent jump gates
- you need to call ATC before jumping through permanent jump gates
- jumps are grouped so if you want to jump with a party you need to make sure you’re grouped together (queuing as a party planned in the future)
- jumping requires you to align with the jump direction, failing to do so will lead to jump cancellation and losing your place in a queue
- alignment is followed by a attunement process
- entering/exiting a jump gate is completely automatic, you’re committed at this point
- any obstructions between you and the jump gate during attunement process will pause it
- trying to get close to the jump gate without attuning will push you away to prevent deliberate obstructions
- can’t control your speed during the jump but you will have to navigate
- you’ll see ships traveling in the same directions but not those going the other way
- bumping into the tunnel walls/obstructions will fill a “distortion bar” of your quantum drive, when it’s full you’ll be dropped out of the jump (destination depends on how long you spent in the tunnel but it’ll be on the edge of one of the systems you were jumping between)
- current planned jump duration is 3 minutes, might change depending on various factors
- exit point of a system is not the same as the jump gate entry between systems
- exit on the Pyro side has a “normal and safe” R&R station, like the ones in Stanton
- transient jump gates will have more difficult routes
- there will be more testing in a preview channel before 4.0
- 4.0 is scheduled to release “in a few months”, not “before end of the year” as they’re still targeting a date earlier than that
- credits with all the people who took part in previous episodes of all the shows, from Wingman’s Hangar to Inside Star Citizen
I understand the reasons given by CIG for the ATC contact, I just don’t think it makes sense from an immersion perspective after they got rid of the man-made structure making it usable. It’s like they want to have it both ways, lore wise.
I’m a bit surprised previous version didn’t have a scattered exit simply because it’s something they’ve mentioned quite a long time ago. I’d expect them to implement it before giving it to players but guess I was wrong.
Thanks for the insight on the test. I tend keep my eyes on stuff that’s closer to public release so that’s something I didn’t really look into back then.
No problem. The previous version barely had an animation for entering the jump point (it was still really cool), but everything after that was just greybox.
They’re usually ok with giving Evocati some really raw builds where the mechanics are barely in place. Most of this was just to prove that jumpgates were working for a larger player base rather than having all the details worked out.
Sometimes there are builds where you can’t even make it to your hangar and the entire 3-4 hour test is like a “Ground Hog Day” of waking up, crash to desktop, wake up, 30k, wake up, take off, teleported back to the spaceport, ctd, game fails to load, etc. It’s definitely not the kind of stuff an average player would want to do.
Usually they give Evocati a heads up of something like, “don’t spawn at A18, because you’ll wake up and fall through the ground” so that we can avoid the worst bugs, but sometimes we just end up finding bugs where even seeing a specific NPC will trigger a server crash, or playing with the power settings on your ship will crash the entire server, or dropping a bomb from an A2 will crash the game for anyone in the immediate vicinity…
But sometimes we also experience hilarious bugs (like when water physics were first introduced) where dropping an A2 bomb in the ocean would cause the water to splash/extend out to space. Other times you get to chill on a ship with some of the devs and tour the solar system with far more players in the game than Live has ever seen.
Anyway, the TL/DR of it is, it’s not very surprising if Evocati ends up with some placeholder mechanics while we test something out (at least not to us).