Cargo Interaction

Xander Hayes in Games, Sci-fi, Star Citizen 0 comments 25 APR 2015

To date, Star Citizen’s Arena Commander module has put much of the focus on pure action: the thrill of deep space dogfighting. While space battles are a core element of the Star Citizen experience, they are the beginning and not the end of creating a vast, interactive world. And one of the next, most important steps is developing a cargo system that allows players to more fully interact with their environment than any previous space game.

On first consideration, making cargo sexy might seem like a difficult challenge. The excitement of combat is self-explanatory, while shipping goods from star to star is a different kind of challenge, potentially more of a slow burn. The average pilot would be forgiven for having more interest in a dogfighting module than a cargo demo… but the reality is, cargo is deeply important to expanding Star Citizen’s gameplay. Whether you’re using it to customize your environment, to build a shipping empire or to run black market goods from Advocacy patrols, a comprehensive cargo system is going to enable Star Citizen to build a real world full of varied gameplay opportunities.

How do we do it? In the past, space games have solved this problem by separating the player from what was being transported. Shipping a load of tungsten in Privateer or hydrocarbons in Freelancer meant selecting an icon in a menu and being told your ship had been loaded with that particular good. For Star Citizen, we wanted to do more than just give you a cargo manifest; it stood to reason that in our First Person Universe, you would need to be able to fully interact with whatever you happen to be shipping! With this in mind, we’ve set out to create a system that allows for maximum interaction directly with in-game objects.

How Interaction Works

The Star Citizen design team has determined that there are five essential ‘use cases’ for cargo objects in the game environment. Each of these cases must be developed in the game to give you full control over your cargo and items. Uses cases are as follows:

  1. Player to Item: The player must be able to physically manipulate objects in the game world. Whether it’s a frag grenade, a Chairman Roberts bobblehead or a Xi’an space plant, your character must be able to grab objects with one or two hands and then place them where desired.
  2. Player to Massive Item: In development terminology, a massive item is any one that is too large for a player to reasonably interact with themselves. Think a ton of steel, a replacement Hornet wing or a multi-meter torpedo. Massive items differ from standard items because they will require in-game tools for handling: anything from cargo drones to loader suits.
  3. Player to Container: Current Star Citizen pilots are likely most familiar with the Stor-All container found on some models of Aurorae. Under the hood, there are two types of containers: crates and tanks. Crates are containers that can hold the loose items used in the previous use cases. You might fill a container (like the Stor-All) with anything: weapons, electronics, artifacts, personal effects… even live animals! Tanks are an alternative form of container that hold anything the player wouldn’t naturally interact with: fuel, ore, scrap, nitrogen and the like. To simplify the loading process, every container in Star Citizen will include a port for a cargo jack allowing it to be manipulated directly using an array of anti-grav pulsers. Players will load their containers (or acquire them pre-loaded) and then position them aboard or attached to their spacecraft.
  4. Player to Pallet: Especially important for larger ships (like the Hull C, D and E) which would otherwise take ages to load, the player to pallet use case is how you will be able to stack alike containers. This allows containers to move as a group, as long as the stack is entirely within the locking plate on the top of the lower container. This holds true for grav pallets, which are giant mobile locking plates, and allows for cargo to be moved in bulk.
  5. Player to Cargo Bay: This final state is how players interact with their entire collection of cargo on any given ship. This is where we develop formal mobiGlas and environment tie-ins to give pilots control over their entire cargo manifest. From the manifest view, they can view and track all containers and items on a particular ship.


Source: Star Citizen Cargo Interaction

Xander Hayes
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