- 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
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I’m glad they’re moving forward with the ability for multiple people to jump through the jump point.
In the tech preview it felt a little hacky to get multiple people in at the same time and you had to worry about colliding with them in/at the end of the tunnel.
With this we shouldn’t have to worry about lines getting too long for people who want to jump from one system to the next.
Sounds like they’ve also addressed the problem with having a pileup at the end of the tunnel so you won’t have to worry about slamming into a wreck at the exit (which happened a lot).
I’m not a huge fan of the whole “they are natural but you still need to call ATC” idea but that’s a minor annoyance at best. If it helps with potential griefing/trolling I’ll be more than happy.
What was the problem with exit pileups? I thought the idea was to make a large enough exit spread to not spawn people in the same place - was that not the case initially?
So, to open/activate the jump point, you needed to use a ship with a Quantum Drive (if the quantum drive was removed, you wouldn’t be able to activate it). Calling the ATC triggers the events needed to sync your drive with the jump point, it would then expand and you would be given the go ahead. Ships without a jump drive could fly in at this point without needing to contact the ATC (as long as someone else had gone through the effort of opening it up).
It kind of makes sense that you need to call the ATC at these major points considering there will be a decent amount of traffic. If you aren’t organized, and go in at the wrong time, that “repelling” feature of the wormhole would slingshot you back at terrifying speeds (for anyone in a large ship as well as anyone in its path). I’m assuming that they’ve dialed down the slingshot effect…
I doubt there will be an ATC at the discoverable jump points that they mentioned in the video. So, they will probably just leave those points open to anyone and as long as you lock your quantum drive onto the jump point, your ship will tell you when it’s safe to proceed.
The exit pileups will be fixed by implementing the mechanics they described in the video. That was not the case initially. During the tech preview, the problem we ran into with the exit pileups was that you would exit at a high speed at mostly the same point as everyone else. If another ship got too close (whether jumping with you, or someone turned around to get a closer look) you could easily slam into them causing wreckage to be left behind in the direct path of anyone else exiting the jump point. This was mostly a problem for larger ships (since they aren’t as maneuverable at high speeds). We ended up having to organize some Salvage ships to break up the wreckage so that jumping would be safe for large ships again.
It sounds like (from the video) we still won’t be able to control our ship’s speed during the jump, but we will be able to maneuver. So, we’ll still exit at some currently unknown speed, but at least it sounds like it should be at far enough distances that you couldn’t predictably/easily camp the exit point.
The jump points (during the test) were one way trips, you couldn’t turn around and go back in, and it would dump you out at the other end of the solar system from the jump point that gets you back into Stanton (or vice versa). I imagine this will change so that it does get you closer to the return point… But we’ll see.
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).
