star citizen is, fundamentally, a game about waiting.
Every MMO ever made has time gates.
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
This sort of "time gate" isn't even a major one. They give you a way to mitigate the injury penalties right off the bat, and it's a whole let better to have the option of waiting for a medship to patch you up than just dying like before and losing your stuff.
I'd feel better about this going in now if 100% of my deaths in the past three patch cycles hadn't been the result of falling through geometry into the center of a planet.
I'm excited for it, but I'm gonna wait until they discuss how equipment is handled next week to be sure. I'm curious how this will impact weapons and gear that people have paid for with actual money. They've said in the past that at some point special guns or armor would just be skins that you would apply to normal gear, but as it stands right now if you die while holding that cool looking Citizencon SMG that you paid $3 cash for its gone forever (or until the next patch or character reset). Being able to put your gear somewhere "safe" (like stored in your ship, or eventually stored in your permanent hangar) would be good, this way you wouldn't be walking around carrying all of your favorite guns and risk losing them all to something as simple as a griefer or a bad fall.
The video showed the option to loot a body, so if this means we can loot players and NPCs that will be nice if the inventory is physicalized and persistent. Doing the bunker missions (or the 890 Jump rescue) currently means you can pick up an armful of P4-ARs and Shotguns if you want (more than enough to fill up the gun racks in a Cutlass), but they're not "yours" so they disappear whenever you log out. If they stayed as part of your inventory, and if you could additionally loot ammo, armor, or drugs from dead NPCs that would make some missions a lot more desirable.
Some of the hospitals on planets are a long way away from the Spaceport. If you've picked someone up but you don't have the means to heal them than I hope there will be some option to have EMS meet you there and whisk them away to the hospital, otherwise its going to be really awkward dragging your half-dead friend out of a ship, through a hangar, onto an elevator, through a lobby, down some stairs, into a train, then waiting on the train, then dragging them out of the train, up some stairs, through some alleys, across an enormous plaza, and finally into a hospital. Their ass armor is gonna be covered in scratches, is what I am saying.
I just question how many medics are going to be running around, but guess we'll see. Everyone in the PU will be a walking pharmacy maybe!
I used to see a lot of posts on forums or whatever from people who were excited about future SAR gameplay. They kinda quieted down after a while because medical ships were released but had no actual medical gameplay, but now that Death of a Spaceman is coming I'm sure it'll get those people excited again.
Well, if anything at least there's a downed state now. If you're in a party and get bopped by janky physics desyncs you can just get picked up instead of needing to respawn and spend 10 minutes catching up.
However, the downed state should be the focus. There's not enough to support/justify losing all your stuff right now (They even said as much in the dev video). Well see what they say next week with the inventory stuff, but I doubt its to a state that makes navigating this not agonizing.
I'm iffy on it because if anything one of the biggest issues the game currently has is a kind of huge TTGSD factor.
Like we spawned my Reclaimer during the Xeno event for funsies and just getting out of atmo took 10+ minutes.
Some of this will get better as development goes on and some annoying bugs get fixed (nothing like having to fly to another station because the game won't let you pull a ship) but ultimately if half of of the playtime in a given session is just waiting on things I can see it having trouble building a player base.
I could be totally wrong and maybe there will be enough people flying around as medics but as it stands I'm kind of skeptical.
The spawn areas in the cities are really detailed, and full of cool atmosphere, but they do present a bit of an impediment to actually getting into your ship. I appreciate the fidelity, but I can understand that taking multiple elevators and trains to get to a hangar so you can ask for permission and then have to fly through an atmosphere so you can qt to a place and finally get started doing the pew pew bits could test some people's patience. Resetting your spawn to a space station is a workaround, but eventually there will be player housing and you'll be able to set up shop directly on some planetoid's surface, be right next to your hangar, and only have to do a 10-15k climb before you can fire up your quantum drive.
I think that a lot of people will also be essentially "living on their ship" as the number of ships with beds and food prep/hygiene areas grows. Being able to log out and log back in while in space is nice. It currently has a few issues where you and your ship may not be in the same place that you logged out of (sometimes I'll spawn in the direct center of the system), and it also causes trouble with the server's desire to "clean up" (the server will sometimes remove ships that don't have players in them to free up resources, starting with the oldest ship on the server. Logging out and logging back in in your ship carries your ship's original spawn time, meaning it will almost assuredly be the oldest ship on the server even though you just logged in, meaning if you land somewhere it may disappear a second or two after you step out of it), but these bugs should get ironed out over time (and the server cleanup shouldn't be an issue once server meshing is implemented anyway).
There are a lot of ships in the starter/starter+ price range that have beds (including the cheapest ship in the game) and a decent amount that have full facilities, so that will help.
As for whether there will be enough people flying around as medics, as it stands now you only need to have one player per server, and once server meshing is in any sort of distress beacon could be picked up by anybody who is online and assumedly in your area. What we don't know yet is what that's going to look like economically - Are you going to have to pay a fee to be rescued? If not, how will SAR careers earn money? Will they be paid by the government based on the number of medical jobs that they perform (like a sort of taxpayer funded space rescue service)? Will you have to pay the player to rescue you? Will the player be able to determine the price? Will they try and gouge you since they're the only ship in the area and you'll basically have to pay whatever they want or bleed out alone on some cold, lonely, godforsaken asteroid somewhere in the inky void of space?
Some of the hospitals on planets are a long way away from the Spaceport. If you've picked someone up but you don't have the means to heal them than I hope there will be some option to have EMS meet you there and whisk them away to the hospital, otherwise its going to be really awkward dragging your half-dead friend out of a ship, through a hangar, onto an elevator, through a lobby, down some stairs, into a train, then waiting on the train, then dragging them out of the train, up some stairs, through some alleys, across an enormous plaza, and finally into a hospital. Their ass armor is gonna be covered in scratches, is what I am saying.
I believe they've said that hospitals will have their own landing pads for patient drop-offs, so you shouldn't have to drag your buddy's unconscious body through the spaceport. I don't know where these landing pads will actually be, but they've definitely shown (can't find it now) the "express elevator" where you can just plop the body onto a table and it whisks them away to be treated. So I don't know whether that means they'll have dedicated landing pads or if there'll be one at the spaceport or what.
I also hope they take the time to implement missions where we can rescue NPCs like this, maybe expand the "find the corpse in a cave" missions to sometimes have them be unconcious but alive and you have to extract them and bring them to a hospital.
Yeah, cave rescue missions would be cool. As would missions to find survivors of wrecks. People who might have gotten clear or jettisoned before impact.
I've run into the same person a few times (or at least I assume it's the same person) who waits for you to land and power down and then attacks your ship.
Except they're flying an M50.
Which means they accomplish nothing and promptly get pasted by turrets.
I've stood in the doorway and watched it happen at least a half dozen times by now and each time all I can do is sit here slowly shaking my head because... why
The M50 is the ship I really, really want to buy because its super rad and I love the way it sounds and its fast as hell.
However, I have zero interest in racing in Star Citizen, and I already have a small, fast, red, single seat racing ship that can't carry any boxes and only has 2xS1 hardpoints (the Mustang Omega), so I can't really justify spending the money.
So from right now with medical gameplay and physicalized inventory on the table for 3.15, the list of gameplay loops still needed is shrinking. At least from a “first pass” perspective. Obviously a lot of iteration, and expansion are still going to be necessary.
But just off the top of my head, we need:
-Salvage
-Exploration
-Data running
-Live-capture bounties
And of course server meshing. But in terms of needed gameplay loops the list is very small at this point. Maybe this is a little too optimistic on my part, but I think 2023 is a very plausible window for moving into a beta stage of the game. That’s where they’ll start cranking out missions and filling in the meat of the content.
Welp. CitizenCon came and went. It was the first one I've watched live, but I was pretty disappointed.
The one and only panel that mattered out of the whole show was the server meshing one, because that's the one that will blow the game wide open and allow a greater than 50 person cap, and it's the one that will relieve server strain and make it so enemy AI actually works, and it's the one that will allow them to add more star systems and expand the verse, and it's the one that will the game to actually work as intended.
But they made the server meshing panel so complex and high-level engineering speak that it was a pretty useless panel. They basically spent 45 minutes to say "it's still not ready."
Seemed honestly like a giant waste of time. They told us all the problems and obstacles they have/had to overcome, and they told us that once the tech is fully ready, then it will have to be disseminated to the entire company and adopted by every team and every little piece of the game, and the game is going to have to be basically re-engineered in every aspect to utilize this new tech. The whole thing left me feeling pretty hopeless, which feels like the opposite of what a hype show should be.
They announced the Pyro system, and announced that it will be coming in 4.0 with server meshing. But then they pretty much stated that server meshing is still an unknowable distance in the future. So that means Pyro is also an unknowable distance in the future.
Nearly 8 hours of pre-recorded panels and none of it matters because server meshing is still nowhere in sight.
Salvaging and refueling is supposed to be around the corner (closer than anything they showed), and they said nothing on that. I figured those would be a given, considering they're supposed to be well progressed by now? Aside from the planetary cloud tech, the demo was basically just the 2019 microtech stealth mission all over again. Basically the game is dead in the water for another 1.5 - 2 years because of server meshing.
It feels like they've been holding up server meshing as the holy grail that will make every dream come true for quite a number of years at this point, with little to show for it.
It feels like they've been holding up server meshing as the holy grail that will make every dream come true for quite a number of years at this point, with little to show for it.
Today is literally the first time I've heard them using the phrase "server meshing", much less some level of imminence about it being ready. I've never heard of larger server sizes as anything more than than a natural next step to get more players on a server, much less this "holy grail" nonsense.
0
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
It feels like they've been holding up server meshing as the holy grail that will make every dream come true for quite a number of years at this point, with little to show for it.
Today is literally the first time I've heard them using the phrase "server meshing", much less some level of imminence about it being ready. I've never heard of larger server sizes as anything more than than a natural next step to get more players on a server, much less this "holy grail" nonsense.
They've been talking about it for years. They didn't call it "server meshing" in the beginning, but they've have been calling it "server meshing" for a lot of years now. At least 4-5 years.
Their dream is literally impossible without it.
The server mesh technology, if/when, they can get it to work it will be game changing not just for Star Citizen but any online game.
The money they'll make off of just licensing that tech would almost certainly be an ocean next to the bucket that is Star Citizen's potential revenue.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
Server Meshing has been touted as a crucial piece of technology for quite a while. Its essentially the lynchpin for the game being able to function as a massively multiplayer game but without any point in the universe being overloaded with players and causing issues. This is also what would stop any one group of players from becoming too powerful and negatively impacting play for the rest of the playerbase (so no massive Goonswarm style shenanigans) and will make it easier for CIG to adjust things like NPC density and economic factors behind the scenes.
They've talked in the past about how they want to synergize data between servers when different players make impacts to the universe (the old "if you leave an apple on a planet's surface, fly off, then come back a month later it will still be there") as well as determining which players out of the entire population you will be able to "see" at any given time while playing (being more likely to encounter players who are part of your org, as an example).
Getting server meshing to work has been a major impediment to development, because the type of implementation they want literally doesn't exist yet and they have to custom build it. Star Citizen, during its protracted development, has led to the creation of quite a bit of new technology that was never thought possible in videogames, the biggest example being the ability for an engine to seamlessly render the galactic scale required for players to transition from a planet's surface to orbit to space and back again on the other side of the star system without any load screens or major hitching.
SmokeStacks on
+4
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Ah, yes. Let's actually go over that because there's some gems in there
In AI:
"The AI team spent part of the month rolling out the T0 engineer behavior to a key location, which is now fully functional with only a few minor remaining bugs. The workzone usable used by NPCs repairing things received a large refactor, making it easier for the designers to use within their locations. The team also created the ability to inspect, inspect with datapad, and inspect with welding tool at various angles to make it as useful as possible.
September saw AI deliver the Aciedo usables using blockout animations, with motion-capture animations currently in the polishing stage. Search spot, railing lean, stare spot, and several others are now considered final and ready to be used throughout the level.
The hygiene behavior was updated and is now complete, with new animations added for the toilet and shower cubicle. This was rolled out, with bug fixing underway.
Work also began on a new gunner behavior. Currently, NPCs find and use ship turrets. The next step will allow them to rush to turrets if their ship is under attack."
Pretty much all of this is... Silly. Apparently for a single player mission based game, we need... Fully simulated bathroom behaviors. Including in showers. And having turrets that work isn't enough, we need to simulate each individual AI going to their stations organically.
The Animation and Art segments are just working on animations.
Engine is pretty dry, though the talk of cloud shadowing made me quirk a brow a bit. And there's this bit:
"The team also supported server meshing by decoupling code so that it can run as a standalone service."
Why in the fuck are we worrying about server meshing for a single player game again?
Features (Gameplay) has oft been the domain of TrackView, which, based on previous updates covers such things as "a new frame of reference where the content creators can specify what the entities in a sequence are relative to so, when the sequence moves, everything else in the sequence automatically moves relative to it. For example, in an elevator sequence moves, the carriage and all the characters inside move along with it." Such is the same this month.
The Gameplay Story section is a riot:
"The Gameplay Story team started the month polishing utensil interaction in several mess hall scenes before achieving a technical breakthrough by getting NPCs to walk correctly while holding helmets under either arm.
“Having managed to solve the helmet problem, we then did a rapid sweep through all our scenes with helmets to update them accordingly. It’s been great to see so many scenes take a leap forward and to see our characters holding and interacting with their headwear in a realistic way in-game.” Gameplay Story"
They managed to figure out how to make people walk with a helmet under either arm. Truly we have now entered uncharted territory in video gaming with this "technical breakthrough". Never before in video games have we had people walk with a helmet under first their left arm, and then their right. Also they're continuing to make people using their eating utensils properly; obviously of great concern in a single player campaign of space dogfights.
Graphics, obviously, is mostly just covering shader improvements, cool.
Level Design is also just general improvements.
Narrative is mind-boggling. Notes of working on dialogue to convey intended gameplay-- when so many of these gameplay systems don't even exist yet, how are they actually working on that dialogue?
QA, UI, and VFX round it out with more generalized statements.
Basically: Squadron 42 is not going to be released any time soon, but at least the AI onboard the ship you're strafing will be able to politely excuse themselves and put their salad fork on the correct side of the plate, stand up, pick whichever arm they prefer to hold their helmet under, and run to their turrets to shoot at you. Which you will never see.
Narrative is mind-boggling. Notes of working on dialogue to convey intended gameplay-- when so many of these gameplay systems don't even exist yet, how are they actually working on that dialogue?
*snip*
Well, this seems an incredibly bad faith reading of what Narrative was doing.
They were retasked to assist Art & Design because the gameplay systems don't exist for them to work on the in-game narrative stuff. They also planned to plan out resuming what they were planning on doing before the pandemic happened.
See? They were totally doing stuff!
Erlkönig on
| Origin/R*SC: Ein7919 | Battle.net: Erlkonig#1448 | XBL: Lexicanum | Steam: Der Erlkönig (the umlaut is important) |
They managed to figure out how to make people walk with a helmet under either arm. Truly we have now entered uncharted territory in video gaming with this "technical breakthrough". Never before in video games have we had people walk with a helmet under first their left arm, and then their right. Also they're continuing to make people using their eating utensils properly; obviously of great concern in a single player campaign of space dogfights.
Work also began on a new gunner behavior. Currently, NPCs find and use ship turrets. The next step will allow them to rush to turrets if their ship is under attack."
Pretty much all of this is... Silly. Apparently for a single player mission based game, we need... Fully simulated bathroom behaviors. Including in showers. And having turrets that work isn't enough, we need to simulate each individual AI going to their stations organically.
Having a mission where you are hanging out in the mess hall and have to respond to an alert by running to the hanger to launch your fighter all while everyone else is running to their duty stations sounds really cool, but having it be 100% organic, so to speak, means it has to work perfectly otherwise you could end up with a situation where pathing glitches mean that half the turrets aren't manned or something else that wrecks whatever balance the mission was designed around. And if you design things so that once the player leaves the ship things happen automatically (something so that once the PC isn't on-board everyone just magically teleports to where they need to be) then... I'm not so sure about putting ludicrous amounts of effort making sure NPC#143 gets to turret station #14. Just populate the halls with randos running so it looks busy and call it a day.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Posts
Every MMO ever made has time gates.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
The video showed the option to loot a body, so if this means we can loot players and NPCs that will be nice if the inventory is physicalized and persistent. Doing the bunker missions (or the 890 Jump rescue) currently means you can pick up an armful of P4-ARs and Shotguns if you want (more than enough to fill up the gun racks in a Cutlass), but they're not "yours" so they disappear whenever you log out. If they stayed as part of your inventory, and if you could additionally loot ammo, armor, or drugs from dead NPCs that would make some missions a lot more desirable.
Some of the hospitals on planets are a long way away from the Spaceport. If you've picked someone up but you don't have the means to heal them than I hope there will be some option to have EMS meet you there and whisk them away to the hospital, otherwise its going to be really awkward dragging your half-dead friend out of a ship, through a hangar, onto an elevator, through a lobby, down some stairs, into a train, then waiting on the train, then dragging them out of the train, up some stairs, through some alleys, across an enormous plaza, and finally into a hospital. Their ass armor is gonna be covered in scratches, is what I am saying.
I used to see a lot of posts on forums or whatever from people who were excited about future SAR gameplay. They kinda quieted down after a while because medical ships were released but had no actual medical gameplay, but now that Death of a Spaceman is coming I'm sure it'll get those people excited again.
However, the downed state should be the focus. There's not enough to support/justify losing all your stuff right now (They even said as much in the dev video). Well see what they say next week with the inventory stuff, but I doubt its to a state that makes navigating this not agonizing.
Like we spawned my Reclaimer during the Xeno event for funsies and just getting out of atmo took 10+ minutes.
Some of this will get better as development goes on and some annoying bugs get fixed (nothing like having to fly to another station because the game won't let you pull a ship) but ultimately if half of of the playtime in a given session is just waiting on things I can see it having trouble building a player base.
I could be totally wrong and maybe there will be enough people flying around as medics but as it stands I'm kind of skeptical.
I think that a lot of people will also be essentially "living on their ship" as the number of ships with beds and food prep/hygiene areas grows. Being able to log out and log back in while in space is nice. It currently has a few issues where you and your ship may not be in the same place that you logged out of (sometimes I'll spawn in the direct center of the system), and it also causes trouble with the server's desire to "clean up" (the server will sometimes remove ships that don't have players in them to free up resources, starting with the oldest ship on the server. Logging out and logging back in in your ship carries your ship's original spawn time, meaning it will almost assuredly be the oldest ship on the server even though you just logged in, meaning if you land somewhere it may disappear a second or two after you step out of it), but these bugs should get ironed out over time (and the server cleanup shouldn't be an issue once server meshing is implemented anyway).
There are a lot of ships in the starter/starter+ price range that have beds (including the cheapest ship in the game) and a decent amount that have full facilities, so that will help.
As for whether there will be enough people flying around as medics, as it stands now you only need to have one player per server, and once server meshing is in any sort of distress beacon could be picked up by anybody who is online and assumedly in your area. What we don't know yet is what that's going to look like economically - Are you going to have to pay a fee to be rescued? If not, how will SAR careers earn money? Will they be paid by the government based on the number of medical jobs that they perform (like a sort of taxpayer funded space rescue service)? Will you have to pay the player to rescue you? Will the player be able to determine the price? Will they try and gouge you since they're the only ship in the area and you'll basically have to pay whatever they want or bleed out alone on some cold, lonely, godforsaken asteroid somewhere in the inky void of space?
So many questions.
I believe they've said that hospitals will have their own landing pads for patient drop-offs, so you shouldn't have to drag your buddy's unconscious body through the spaceport. I don't know where these landing pads will actually be, but they've definitely shown (can't find it now) the "express elevator" where you can just plop the body onto a table and it whisks them away to be treated. So I don't know whether that means they'll have dedicated landing pads or if there'll be one at the spaceport or what.
I also hope they take the time to implement missions where we can rescue NPCs like this, maybe expand the "find the corpse in a cave" missions to sometimes have them be unconcious but alive and you have to extract them and bring them to a hospital.
Except they're flying an M50.
Which means they accomplish nothing and promptly get pasted by turrets.
I've stood in the doorway and watched it happen at least a half dozen times by now and each time all I can do is sit here slowly shaking my head because... why
However, I have zero interest in racing in Star Citizen, and I already have a small, fast, red, single seat racing ship that can't carry any boxes and only has 2xS1 hardpoints (the Mustang Omega), so I can't really justify spending the money.
I've been a backer since 2013. I'm going to say for the record that this type of injury system was NOT always part of the plan.
But I'll leave it at that.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
ya i backed day 1, golden ticket and everything, and what we have now *sigh*
I don't want to get into it
Nobody else wants you to get into it either.
https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-death-of-a-spaceman
posted in February 2013
What part of the upcoming medical system wasn't in that post?
yes, which is why I didn't.
Good content!
But just off the top of my head, we need:
-Salvage
-Exploration
-Data running
-Live-capture bounties
And of course server meshing. But in terms of needed gameplay loops the list is very small at this point. Maybe this is a little too optimistic on my part, but I think 2023 is a very plausible window for moving into a beta stage of the game. That’s where they’ll start cranking out missions and filling in the meat of the content.
I think this is the first look at the new inventory system coming with 3.15.
Solasta learned inventory options is good, you can do it Star Citizen!
The one and only panel that mattered out of the whole show was the server meshing one, because that's the one that will blow the game wide open and allow a greater than 50 person cap, and it's the one that will relieve server strain and make it so enemy AI actually works, and it's the one that will allow them to add more star systems and expand the verse, and it's the one that will the game to actually work as intended.
But they made the server meshing panel so complex and high-level engineering speak that it was a pretty useless panel. They basically spent 45 minutes to say "it's still not ready."
Seemed honestly like a giant waste of time. They told us all the problems and obstacles they have/had to overcome, and they told us that once the tech is fully ready, then it will have to be disseminated to the entire company and adopted by every team and every little piece of the game, and the game is going to have to be basically re-engineered in every aspect to utilize this new tech. The whole thing left me feeling pretty hopeless, which feels like the opposite of what a hype show should be.
They announced the Pyro system, and announced that it will be coming in 4.0 with server meshing. But then they pretty much stated that server meshing is still an unknowable distance in the future. So that means Pyro is also an unknowable distance in the future.
Nearly 8 hours of pre-recorded panels and none of it matters because server meshing is still nowhere in sight.
Still have a dinky throttle, but they don't need to know that.
Today is literally the first time I've heard them using the phrase "server meshing", much less some level of imminence about it being ready. I've never heard of larger server sizes as anything more than than a natural next step to get more players on a server, much less this "holy grail" nonsense.
They've been talking about it for years. They didn't call it "server meshing" in the beginning, but they've have been calling it "server meshing" for a lot of years now. At least 4-5 years.
Their dream is literally impossible without it.
The server mesh technology, if/when, they can get it to work it will be game changing not just for Star Citizen but any online game.
The money they'll make off of just licensing that tech would almost certainly be an ocean next to the bucket that is Star Citizen's potential revenue.
They've talked in the past about how they want to synergize data between servers when different players make impacts to the universe (the old "if you leave an apple on a planet's surface, fly off, then come back a month later it will still be there") as well as determining which players out of the entire population you will be able to "see" at any given time while playing (being more likely to encounter players who are part of your org, as an example).
Getting server meshing to work has been a major impediment to development, because the type of implementation they want literally doesn't exist yet and they have to custom build it. Star Citizen, during its protracted development, has led to the creation of quite a bit of new technology that was never thought possible in videogames, the biggest example being the ability for an engine to seamlessly render the galactic scale required for players to transition from a planet's surface to orbit to space and back again on the other side of the star system without any load screens or major hitching.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
ahahahahahahahahahahaha
Only the emailer thingy they sent out to folks 6 days ago.
In AI:
"The AI team spent part of the month rolling out the T0 engineer behavior to a key location, which is now fully functional with only a few minor remaining bugs. The workzone usable used by NPCs repairing things received a large refactor, making it easier for the designers to use within their locations. The team also created the ability to inspect, inspect with datapad, and inspect with welding tool at various angles to make it as useful as possible.
September saw AI deliver the Aciedo usables using blockout animations, with motion-capture animations currently in the polishing stage. Search spot, railing lean, stare spot, and several others are now considered final and ready to be used throughout the level.
The hygiene behavior was updated and is now complete, with new animations added for the toilet and shower cubicle. This was rolled out, with bug fixing underway.
Work also began on a new gunner behavior. Currently, NPCs find and use ship turrets. The next step will allow them to rush to turrets if their ship is under attack."
Pretty much all of this is... Silly. Apparently for a single player mission based game, we need... Fully simulated bathroom behaviors. Including in showers. And having turrets that work isn't enough, we need to simulate each individual AI going to their stations organically.
The Animation and Art segments are just working on animations.
Engine is pretty dry, though the talk of cloud shadowing made me quirk a brow a bit. And there's this bit:
"The team also supported server meshing by decoupling code so that it can run as a standalone service."
Why in the fuck are we worrying about server meshing for a single player game again?
Features (Gameplay) has oft been the domain of TrackView, which, based on previous updates covers such things as "a new frame of reference where the content creators can specify what the entities in a sequence are relative to so, when the sequence moves, everything else in the sequence automatically moves relative to it. For example, in an elevator sequence moves, the carriage and all the characters inside move along with it." Such is the same this month.
The Gameplay Story section is a riot:
"The Gameplay Story team started the month polishing utensil interaction in several mess hall scenes before achieving a technical breakthrough by getting NPCs to walk correctly while holding helmets under either arm.
“Having managed to solve the helmet problem, we then did a rapid sweep through all our scenes with helmets to update them accordingly. It’s been great to see so many scenes take a leap forward and to see our characters holding and interacting with their headwear in a realistic way in-game.” Gameplay Story"
They managed to figure out how to make people walk with a helmet under either arm. Truly we have now entered uncharted territory in video gaming with this "technical breakthrough". Never before in video games have we had people walk with a helmet under first their left arm, and then their right. Also they're continuing to make people using their eating utensils properly; obviously of great concern in a single player campaign of space dogfights.
Graphics, obviously, is mostly just covering shader improvements, cool.
Level Design is also just general improvements.
Narrative is mind-boggling. Notes of working on dialogue to convey intended gameplay-- when so many of these gameplay systems don't even exist yet, how are they actually working on that dialogue?
QA, UI, and VFX round it out with more generalized statements.
Basically: Squadron 42 is not going to be released any time soon, but at least the AI onboard the ship you're strafing will be able to politely excuse themselves and put their salad fork on the correct side of the plate, stand up, pick whichever arm they prefer to hold their helmet under, and run to their turrets to shoot at you. Which you will never see.
Well, this seems an incredibly bad faith reading of what Narrative was doing.
They were retasked to assist Art & Design because the gameplay systems don't exist for them to work on the in-game narrative stuff. They also planned to plan out resuming what they were planning on doing before the pandemic happened.
See? They were totally doing stuff!
Who hurt you?
Having a mission where you are hanging out in the mess hall and have to respond to an alert by running to the hanger to launch your fighter all while everyone else is running to their duty stations sounds really cool, but having it be 100% organic, so to speak, means it has to work perfectly otherwise you could end up with a situation where pathing glitches mean that half the turrets aren't manned or something else that wrecks whatever balance the mission was designed around. And if you design things so that once the player leaves the ship things happen automatically (something so that once the PC isn't on-board everyone just magically teleports to where they need to be) then... I'm not so sure about putting ludicrous amounts of effort making sure NPC#143 gets to turret station #14. Just populate the halls with randos running so it looks busy and call it a day.