10 for the Chairman - Episode 13 . March 24th, 2014

Chairman, Chris Roberts, answers your burning questions.

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Roberts Space Industries is a spacecraft manufacturer within the persistent-world game "Star Citizen" and its companion single-player spaceflight sim, "Squadron 42." RSI is also your portal for information, updates, and purchases of your very own spacecraft with which to trade, plunder, and protect the citizens of Star Citizen.

Be sure to visit Roberts Space Industries here and on your favorite social platform:

RSI - http://RobertsSpaceIndustries.com
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/RobertsSpaceIndustries
Twitter - https://twitter.com/RobertsSpaceInd
Google+ - https://plus.google.com/115090625624883320504/posts

Chris Roberts: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of 10 for the Chairman.

For those of you who haven't watched it before,

this is where I take 10 questions from our subscribers in general and try to answer them as best I can.

For those of you who don't know, the subscribers are the portion of our community who

kick in a little extra money every month to allow us to do a lot more community content.

This show, Wingman's Hangar, Jump Point, which even though subscribers get first,

eventually a lot of the articles and back ground information that we have in Jump Point,

which is 50-60 pages each month, a pretty impressive magazine size, trickles down to the community as a whole.

This is our way of giving back to the subscribers a little bit and saying thank you for enabling us to do all this.

So I'll get right to it. The first question of the 10 comes from SlackR:

In the DFM, where is our hangar located? Are we already in space on a station?

If so, how do we get the ship out of the hangar without creating a vacuum?

That is a good question, but the concept with the Dogfighting Module is actually that you're flying,

essentially a simulation inside your hangar.

So what will happen is, you'll be in the hangar, you'll get inside your Hornet,

or any of the other ships that we'll have available for Dogfight v1,

if you don't have any of those ships, we'll loan you a ship to fly in Dogfight v1.

You'll climb in, and basically fire it up and at that point your HUD comes up and creates a "Joining sumulation" interface.

So we mentioned Arena Mode as a part of the game, where it allows you to practice flying around,

fighting with your friends, but not taking your actual ship out into space and risking loss of equipment or life.

That is what we're calling "Arena Commander," it's a bit of a nod to a game I may have made in the past.

You connect up through there and it's all done in fiction that you're connecting up to a battle net,

and you will fight against other people.

So what happens is you step into the ship in your hangar, connect up, then the outside of the ship once

you've connected, you come back out, and bam you're out in a virtual space, flying around dogfighting.

Once you've finished the battle, you return back into your hangar,

and of course there won't be any bullet holes on your ship because it was all a virtual simulation.

It is the beginning of the stub of the Arena Mode which will be in the game, throughout the game.

So it's one of the features that will be useful, and I think longer term people would probably use this feature to

do e-sports or challenge each other without having to lose their precious cargo or precious ships.

So we don't have to worry about a vacuum at the moment because it's all virtual.

Next question comes from Kallashnikov who asks:

Given all the focus on the Oculus Rift, will similar time be given to technologies like TrackIR and CastAR?

Do you expect basic head-tracking functions to be available for the DFM?

We've already announced that we're gonna be supporting TrackIR, so that's definitely on our list.

CastAR, I would have to take a look at 'cause we haven't announced support for it necessarily at the moment.

If something's cool, we're pretty peripheral agnostic, we want to support a lot of different options.

Whether it's a HOTAS outfit, or keyboard and mouse, gamepad, regular joystick, Oculus Rift, TrackIR,

rudder pedals, that's part of the spirit of PC gaming, so CryEngine is quite good at having a lot of different inputs.

In the Dogfight Module, when you play you'll be able to have your HOTAS set up, and a mouse and a keyboard,

and all the rest, you can be flying them all--using them all at the same time if you want.

So we'll do that. As far as the head-tracking functions for the Dogfighting Module, I'm not sure about Dogfighting v1.

We'll probably have the Rift working for it, 'cause we already have the Rift working in the hangar,

but we're really trying to do some extra stuff on the Rift to have proper

stereoscopic dual rendering as opposed to a post-stereoscopic rendering.

And there's still some head lag issues that we're dealing with.

We've made it better, but there's some that we're dealing with at the engine level that we're working with Crytek on.

I don't think we'll have TrackIR and stuff ready for the Dofight v1, but that is definitely on our list of stuff to work on.

So you can see that come in along the line when we start to patch stuff.

Ok, next question comes from Jomanda who asks:

What do you envisage the "end game" to be for the industry side of the game?

Especially for players that are more focused on that aspect?

Well first of all I hope there isn't any particular "end game" in Star Citizen.

I don't think people think there's a necessary end-game in EVE.

Maybe it's running your corporation, but there's always someone trying to take your spot,

or push you off that top perch, which is pretty much the way I think Star Citizen is gonna work.

So I think if you're into the economy side and you want to be more of an entrepreneur,

and build up businesses or industries, that's really going to be around buying and owning a production node.

Which essentially is a factory, and then running that in terms of making sure that you're getting the right raw materials,

and you're doing well, then perhaps you can expand and

buy another production node somewhere else and build up your economic empire.

In that case I would think you would probably be spending a fair amount of time

managing resources and hiring other people to do the work.

Like bring cargo from A to B, have people to defend it, and all that stuff.

So I would say that would be the high level game if you're interested in that level of the game verses

just the flying around, combat side.

Next question comes from Elijah "ZoolooS" Parsons who asks:

Will I be able to see pilots/organizations agression status in relation to myself/my organization?

(Like red = foe, orange = pirate, green = friendly, grey = neutral, blue = friend, etc.)

The game tracks all the relationships between the organizations.

Either the game defined ones, which will be the NPC ones, or the player ones.

It tracks whether you're friendly or you're not friendly, and all of that will translate, when you're flying around,

in your radar you'll see the friendlies, the default friendlies would be green, and a hostile would be red.

So the status of relationships between organizations whether it's NPC or player,

is mapped to friendly/not friendly/neutral, and that maps to colors in your HUD.

I think it's automatically handled would be the best way to say it.

You can of course in your organization say "I'm not friendly with this organization,"

and when you see them they will come up as enemies or hostiles to you.

So to that level you could potentially set the aggression status.

The next question comes from ShoGun who asks:

Will the Mustang and other ships not yet available for pledge be made so before the alpha?

It looks pretty cool and I would like to add one alongside my Aurora LN and Cutlass.

We are working on all the ships that we've announced at some level.

Some are in the concept stage, some are in the modeling stage, but there's a lot of work happening.

We've got a lot of artists, but there's even more work than we've got artists, and also for the Dogfight,

there's a lot of extra work that goes into building all the different damage parts and models of the ships,

and LoD's, which you don't necessarily see the benefit of until you're in the Dogfight.

So a fair amount of our artists are focused on that.

But the idea is as the ships get built and put in the engine,

we'll make them available in the hangar, and then you can fly them.

So when they're available in the hangar, you should be able to pledge for it and put it in your own hangar,

and then once we have all the damage states and the LoDs, you'll be able to fight with them in the Dogfight Module.

I would say that they'll probably be available before the game is finished, definitely.

Probably not by Dogfight v1, but probably sometime thereafter.

So the Mustang we are working on right now.

Next question comes from Garrosian who asks:

If I happen across some cargo that has "fallen" off the back of a Freelancer,

is it fair game to any who can pick it up, or is it considered stolen?

Will "stolen" merchandise be automatically identifiable by the authorities and other players?

That's a good question.

We've actually had a debate about that because we're in the process of fleshing out the cargo system.

That would be what the standardized sizes of the cargo are, how you load and unload your ship,

how you're able to dump it in space if a pirate says "give me your cargo or else I'll kill you,"

how are you able to bring cargo in from space back into your hold.

We've been working on all those aspects, some pretty cool design stuff.

So one of the things we were talking about was, you could have a fancier basic cargo container.

Think of our basic cargo containers as containers in the real world right now.

If you see what gets put on trains or container ships or trucks driving around,

normally for example someone makes a bunch of TVs in Korea, they pack 'em up and put them in a big container.

Then the container gets taken by a truck to the train station. The train station takes it to the boat and puts it on.

The boat comes across to America and then they unload it and it gets put back onto a train and then

it goes to a distribution center, then on a truck and it's in Best Buy, an electronics store, or Amazon delivers it to you.

So we have the same concept of containers, just because it's simpler to have uniform sizes.

There can be bigger ones and smaller ones, but they all have volumes that are defined that our holds are built for.

And the fancier ones, if you want to invest in a more expensive container,

we were considering having tracking, like Lo-Jack on it or something.

But most of them won't have that. Most of them, if the cargo's floating out in space and you come across it and

take it in, then at that point it's finder's keeper's unless it's marked.

Obviously if you were the person that forced the cargo to be in space by illegal pirate attack and you're in a

well regulated or policed areas and someone saw you do this or the ship you attacked got a distress call out,

then you probably will be wanted for the piracy act.

So there you are, I guess if you happen to find some cargo floating there because of some other battle,

and you pick it up, you'll be ok so long as it's not tagged with the more fancy container stuff.

Alright, next question comes from Gharskull who asks:

Regarding star maps: Will organizations be able to apply their own markers & notations on the star map

so that all selected members of the organization can share information such as resources,

nodes held by allies/enemies, troop movements, etc.?

Yeah, one of the ideas with your navigation map is, as you fly around...

Most navigation have the basic trade routes or locations noted down. Like the main planet in the system or whatever.

But there's a lot of the system that will not be mapped in your basic navigation map,

and if you fly around, this is one of the things that explorers can do.

If you fly around in different areas, you may find an asteroid field which isn't on the navigation map or something else,

then you essentially map that on your map and you have it as your localized navigation point/coordinate/area of interest

and you can write your own notes about it, then share it with members of your organization.

So if you discovered an asteroid field that has some rich minerals to mine, and no one else has seen it,

you can broadcast that to everyone else in your organization and say "hey let's go here an do this mining,"

and everyone else won't know about it.

Now of course you would be able to sell some of that to a general cartographer company.

Think of the navigation computers as a modern day GPS, you get an updated the disk of locations to drive in.

So another option is explorers could go around mapping stuff out, then when they've mapped out the system fully,

they can go and sell that and that could become available for purchase for

a large group of people in the same way that we talked about for jump points.

That's all things you can do, so you should be able to share map information between the members of your organization.

The next question comes from Otack Kulandinglar. Kulandinglar, that's quite a mouthful of a word:

Can you share any of the plans for orgs 2.0?

As an org leader, I have concerns about how multiple org memberships will work, and how I can manage my people.

Unfortunately I'm not the best person to answer that, because that would really be Ben Waur at Turbulent,

but the stuff that we've talked about for orgs 2.0 is multiple organization membership is a must.

We're not going to have a friend's list per say, so basically you'll be members of multiple organizations,

and one of the organizations can be "my friends."

There will only be one primary organization,

and then the other organizations will be affiliates of the primary organization that's the authoritative boss one.

Whoever runs the primary one can say

"if you're a member of this organization, I won't accept you," "You can't have that as an affiliate."

So you can dictate as an organization, "you can be part of my organization and a member of the merchant's guild,

that's ok, but you can't be part of my organization and a member of the pirates guild."

Or whatever it is, I don't know if the pirates would have a guild, but that's the approach you could do.

So I think as an org leader, you can control who are members of different organizations.

And there's some other mechanics that we haven't quite revealed in that which I think we'll make some fun of.

I'll just say there's a concept that could potentially be a "Special Ops" side of an organization,

where you can do some sort of clandestine spying stuff, and misrepresenting some stuff.

Anyway, we're gonna put tools on both sides,

'cause we think that could be a bit of a meta game and it could be kind of fun.

We're not revealing too much of that just yet, so there you go.

Next question comes from Zengrinn who asks:

Given how the universe/instance server is being setup to match-make on the fly and determine who will see who when

entering a given area of space, are we guaranteed to instance with pilots in our friends list & organization

(preferred method), or will there be some gameplay mechanic (such as creating a squadron

or something similar) required in order to force that to happen?

No, the whole point of having organizations and being members of them like I mentioned in the previous answer,

essentially your friends list would be an organization, it would just be a less formal organization.

Here's my list of friends, and that would probably be something you would keep as an

affiliate organization when you're a member of a primary organization,

which would would be the Imperium or something like that.

So what it does when it match makes and you're flying around, it looks around and says

"I'm going in here, and these are the other members that are a part of your organization,"

and it tries to put people together that you know,

it tries to put people together that you've designated as a person of interest.

You can also, before you start out, you can basically hook-up and say we're flying as a group.

Say me and this friend, this friend, and this friend, this is our little unit that's flying as a group,

to let the game know that you're flying together.

Then it will do things, like determining based on ping would be another criteria,

but of course if you say "I'm flying with this group," that takes priority over everything else.

Then also what your preference is in terms of combat,

whether you want to be doing PvP or want to be fighting NPCs in PvE.

That depends on what sort of area of space you're in, but we're not going to match up someone who just wants to be

doing PvE in a fairly safe area with someone who just wants to be doing hardcore PvP,

'cause that wouldn't necessarily be a lot of fun for the PvE side, and on the PvP side,

there'll be plenty of opportunities to fight other people because we're making sure that

there's a lot of benefit to being in the less regulated areas.

More risk, more reward so to speak.

But all those criteria are factored in when we're doing the instancing.

So we decide, this group of players is coming from here to here, and they may intersect this other group.

You run through the matchmaking criteria, and if you determine that they should see each other,

you create an instance, you put the groups into it and let the conflict resolve itself, then they go back onto their journey.

Ok, so last question comes from Commander Keen who asks:

Question about PC touch screen support (not tablet). With PC OS such as Win8 now natively supporting touchscreen,

has there been any thought put towards allowing this same support in Star Citizen directly?

No, not yet.

It would probably be something that we would consider, although everyone hates Windows 8 here.

We're mostly developing on Windows 7.

I have it on a few of my laptops, it's kind of cool to scroll around, but most of the things that have the touch screen

don't usually have the--they're the small sort of tablet like or netbook like computers--

which don't have the computing power to do Star Citizen.

So that's not necessarily a focus of ours, I'm not saying that we wouldn't potentially do some

exploration in support of it down the road, but I would say that would be a later task.

I mean already the game's got a huge amount of stuff to get done, and there are so many features to do,

that would be one of the less critical ones, and would probably fall to once the game has finished.

Maybe we'll take a look at it, and who knows, Windows 9 could be much better.

It's always the odd ones that are the good Windows and the even ones suck, so we'll see.

Alright, so that's been another episode of 10 for the Chairman, thank you guys for listening.

Hopefully my answers were informative to all of you out there, and again I want to thank all of the subscribers for

basically providing the funds to allow us to do a lot of this community content,

and the backers and community in general for supporting the team, helping us build this hugely ambitious project.

We're having an immense amount of fun doing this with all your guys participation, so I will check in next week.

Thank you very much, bye.