- cross-posted to:
- starcitizen@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- starcitizen@lemmy.ml
Hi there,
Jump Points is a big feature, there is a lot going on in the design, more than could be communicated in one ISC, so there is some bits of info that I realised afterwards that we managed to gloss over and some of these seemed to have caused a lot of speculation/controversies, so I’d like to attempt to rectify some of those and clarify some others.
Transient Jump Points do not have or use ATCs. Transient Jump Points are free for all experiences, you align, tune and the activate the Jump Point and then are pulled in.
As you can see from Transient Jump Points. The inclusion of ATC in the permenant Jump Points flow is not a techinal requirement needed for transitioning players between systems or anything like that. They are part of the flow solely for gameplay reasons. The ATC exists here for fairness to all jumpers, a fairness intentionally omitted in the Transient flow. The permenant Jump Points will likely be busy high volume routes. We dont want slower ships being trumped to jump by faster ships all the time, we also want to make sure we protect those ships who have waited and determine who is at fault for doing something obstructive, ATC will help us do this.
Additionally the ATC exists to imply and actually impose some level of decision making on those who choose to skirt the law or play outright criminally. Those player may instead choose or have to seek out Transient Jump Points to make their journeys in order to avoid this extra scrutiny.
I also want to clarify how ATC also makes sense as part of a bigger picture. Think of Permenant Jump Points as known controlled border checkpoints between systems. If you were the UEE authority in charge of protecting a system like Stanton from lawless systems that you know you border with, like Pyro, would you operate an open borders with them? I dont think you would, you’d find a way to control it.
In this sense ATC is being used as the gate keeper. How does it do that I see you all asking. If ATC hasnt granted you permission to jump yet then by default they actively jam jump drives from tuning. Once you have permission to jump they selectively choose to stop jamming your jump drive, whch then lets you tune and jump, simple.
Finally, I wanted to clarify an error in one clip of footage. You don’t shoot the jump point with a gun to activate it, but you do initiate the opening with an activation step. The footage showed this as a physical shot from a gun but it was wrong to be depicted like that, I’m sorry I didnt spot it in the edit before the video was released, as if I had done so I would have sought its removal. So, please dont worry we didnt add combat to opening a Jump Point.
Thanks for reading,
Edward Fuller, Senior Principal System Designer
I agree, I’m not a fan of the QD jamming.
I kind of see why they’re doing it though. What we saw in the tech preview was that smaller ships have an advantage over bigger ships. What would happen is that a big ship would activate the jump and then smaller ships (with our without QDs) would quickly rush in, if the bigger ship was too slow the jump point would “shrink” and then they would be bounced back (and everyone in its path would have to evade like mad).
I’m hoping that it’s still possible for people to “cut the line” as long as the ATC can hand out fines/CS to those that jump the line (mostly because I want ships without Quantum Drives to still be able to go through).
I’m not sure cutting the line will be a thing (well, maybe if they rework the system in the future). Both the ISC episode and this clarification make it sound like CIG is really dead set on making jumping through permanent JPs to be an organized procedure, with free flow jumping limited to the temporary ones. I might be just interpreting too much though.
Your story about ships without QD stealing jumps sounds weird. I know evo gets rough builds etc. but did they really not think to prevent ships without QD from entering the JP? A lot of what they do sounds like there are severe planning/design problems at CIG - not in a “why wasn’t it already perfect” kind of way but rather “why didn’t you think about this elementary thing”.
Man, I’d do some dirty deeds for an unfiltered documentary/postmortem about the project. It’s such a mess (at times?).
I’d say this was more of a feature rather than an issue. A quantum drive was necessary just to “activate” the jump point, but anyone could go through once activated (for a short window).
While smaller ships could technically “steal” the jump, this wasn’t the case every time, multiple ships could enter at the same time if we timed it correctly.
So you could have had a large ship (like the Hull-C) enter the jump point with an escort/smaller fighter providing cover.
Most of this testing was just to test the actual mechanic of jumping between systems, it wasn’t meant to be something that was released to the larger player base.
A common saying I’ve heard among other programmers is “Crawl, Walk, Run”. Basically take little steps when experimenting with new code/features so that you can make changes as you see fit and so that it’s easier to debug. So, something that you may see as an elementary thing may not be something that they see as a basic necessity just to test out this mechanic.
This isn’t like building a house where you have blueprints and everything works the first time you put it up. It’s more like being told to take the existing model of a submarine and converting it into a something that will keep you alive in space. At a glance, there are aspects of the design that are useful, but there’s a lot that can be easily overlooked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUBRd1O2dU
That being said there are a lot of moving parts and the more people you have involved in a project, the harder it is to keep everyone on the same page. I think this image summarizes the process pretty well:
I’m familiar with how the sausage is made but I do appreciate the lengthy (and easy to understand!) explanation. I think my confusion in our convo stems from a misunderstanding of the time frame we’re talking about, specifically on my part.
For some reason I defaulted to thinking we’re talking about jumping in a form closer to the current(ish) version, with some of the more concrete mechanics already implemented rather than the very basic version from the early tests. That’s why I was a bit surprised about your previous description. Feel free to correct me if I’m still wrong on that.
Thanks for taking the time to write all this. It was an interesting read either way.