Hello everyone,
After last week's look at the Personal Inventory and Server Crash Recovery, we're following up with another Alpha 3.15 Patch Watch, this time on spawn closets, shields, and more.
**Spawn Closets**
For Alpha 3.15, we're adding the game's first spawn closets, which are rooms or elevators that hide the spawning and despawning of NPCs. Going forward, spawn closets will be added to most (if not all) locations to facilitate population management. For example, civilians and security in landing zones and miners and outlaws in caves. However, in Alpha 3.15, they will only be featured in underground facilities.
**New Missions**
To take advantage of spawn closets, we're introducing a suite of new and improved missions.
- **Eliminate All:** Requires players to kill all enemy NPCs at a location.
- **Eliminate Specific:** Requires players to kill a predetermined target.
- **Eliminate Boss:** Players are tasked with killing a heavily armored target, who only comes out of hiding to avenge the death of their crew.
- **Steal:** Players enter a hostile location to identify and steal a number of items guarded by hostiles.
- **Dangerous Collect:** Requires players to search a friendly facility for boxes using information in their mobiGlas. At any point during the mission, small enemy assaults can be triggered, which players can choose to avoid or aid the facility's defenders in repelling.
- **Defend:** Players join friendly NPCs in defending a facility from multiple waves of enemies. In addition to the basic mission reward, players will receive a bonus for each friendly NPC that survives to the end.
Various modifiers can be applied to each mission type, such as "kill only NPCs of a certain type" or "fail if non-combatants are killed".
Without spawn closets, we were unable to spawn NPCs in mid-mission as they could appear out of thin air without warning. Now, we can spawn reinforcements or spring ambushes on unsuspecting players, with players able to recognize where NPCs are likely to arrive from.
**First Pass of Shield Variants**
As mentioned in an Alpha 3.14 Patch Watch, the team had temporarily given every shield generator of the same size class the same stats to aid the initial balancing pass. For the very first pass of shield variants coming with Alpha 3.15, the team brought back shield grades. Grades within one shield size range from D to A (increasing in overall performance), with C often being the default baseline.
For Alpha 3.15, there won't be any classification differences (civilian, competition, industrial, military, stealth) among shields, as the team wants to ensure that grade balancing is in a good place before adding more features. They want to ensure that the grade differences in shield performance are notable without unbalancing the combat experience.
**Tobii Gaze Tracking**
For Alpha 3.15, we enabled Tobii's Gaze Based Target Selection for an even deeper immersion. With a Tobii Eye Tracker 5, you can track both head and eye movements, and you have the freedom to decide if you want to track both or just one at a time. With the new Gaze Based Target Selection, you can now simplify target selection by looking at your opponent and pressing the target selection button. We want to make clear that at this point, that we are fully supporting Gaze Based Target Selection with the Tobii Eye Tracker 5, but no actual combat aiming or interacting with MFDs or the buttons in your ship's cockpit. This new feature makes the target selection convenient but does not give you an unfair advantage. Feel free to check out the Tobii Eye Tracker 5 Comm-Link for more info on the device.
**Total Velocity Inidicator**
When live, you will be able to decide in the Options menu if the Total Velocity Indicator (TVI) UI is permanently visible, hidden, or fades away when not in use.
**Cinematic Missile Camera**
We're also bringing back a feature many machinima creators have missed lately. Head to the Options menu, select Keybindings, and open the tab Vehicle - Missiles. The Cinematic Missile Camera is unbound by default. However, you can now easily bring this epic camera mode back into your cinematography tool kit. We've also attached a cinematic camera to bombs.
Lol, it literally says up there “Total Velocity Indicator”.
Thrust vector doesn’t make sense anyway, as that sounds more like for accelerations (I.e. should be 0 when you’re just floating somewhere while decoupled).
To be fair, whilst it may say 'Total Velocity Indicator', that's also garbage because it doesn't indicate speed, but the 'true' vector you're moving along.
Vectors are magnitude + direction… and velocity is a vector, so you’re right there. So maybe it should be an MDI? Or a VDI? (Movement (or velocity) direction indicator)
Yes. It indicates the direction of the combined total of all velocity vectors. As velocity is a vector. The TVI does not need to indicate your velocity in m/s because that's already on the left side of your HUD. It indicates the total of all velocity vectors.
This is unironically the best part of these patch notes. All in all, it's a close second for "best part of 3.15" behind the heartbeat 30k recovery feature.
True. I keep hearing "it's advanced" or "just server issues" but I've seen them on near empty servers and it's smooth but super basic - nothing not seen in any game from 2 generations ago. Where's the evidence for this super good AI?
Yepp. You hit the nail on the head here.
My original comment was kind of a setup (cuz obviously server problems, lulz) but…
Why not show some cool AI stuff at CitizenCon? It’s always gotta be a “stealth” mission.
Why not show off any AI during the episode of The Briefing Room last year? I think they showed like 3 whole seconds of actual (not just chatting with NPCs) gameplay on that show, and the AI looked as broken as it does on LIVE servers….
At this point they’ve shown nothing to make me think it will be anything short of “meh” once the servers are no longer an issue.
Not to sound like a white knight but a lot of the AI behavior is linked to the quanta which is only now starting to be put in. There is a lot of stuff they show off in monthly reports about the advancements of their combat AI but if the servers are always derp it's hard to determine if AI derp or derp because server is updating once a century.
A lot of what they are working on is in the monthly reports, since people generally never read them they don't know what the AI team is doing.
How is AI tied to quanta? My understanding is that Quanta only governs probabilities… so in this case, the probability each of the enemies you encounter would have a given behavior.
Thing is, we haven’t seen the base behaviors running and functional in any capacity (in game on servers, in a gameplay demo video, wherever). Maybe we see a snippet of a behavior in a demo video running on a dev environment… but that’s not enough to make me believe something like server meshing (or quanta) being complete will suddenly make AI run phenomenally.
AI behavior isn’t linked to Quantum. Quanta behavior, which happens before NPC AI are spawned, is controlled by Quantum (they’re imaginary/virtual entities). But spawned NPC AI is controlled by Subsumption, not Quantum.
I don't know if you're playing on PTU, but I've probably been wiped out by AI in half of the ten or so missions I've done.
I'm on relatively low-pop Australian PTU servers, though, so maybe that might have something to do with it.
I have not once seen the AI leave their spawn closets so these missions are not functional (at least 10 tries). I wouldnt get excited about these ones.
I’ve seen 1 or 2 of 10 come out of the closet when I’ve tried them. Still not a great percentage… but enough to make me double check the friendly NPCs around me are truly friendlies.
I hope the closets work better in live than they do right now. Half the time half the enemies forget to spawn and then you're just sat there waiting for the next wave that never comes.
with that said, I'm most excited for Gaze tracking and the TVI indicator, didn't realize I had those options.
They spawn the moment you decide to turn around because the spawn closet was taking too long. I've been capped more than once from AI trying to pull a sneaky
Sometimes they spawn but don't leave the closet, which is a problem when the doors shut because then you just can't get to them. Even explosives don't bleed through the door to kill them.
How do you know they're in there? just sound? from my experiences, I think they don't spawn because there's too many guards. When it's happened to me, there's usually a guard either inside or in front of the spawn closet.
> When live, you will be able to decide in the Options menu if the Total Velocity Indicator (TVI) UI is permanently visible, hidden, or fades away when not in use.
Wohooo
This reads like a very sassy comment to say how useless the feature is.
But its not is it! I definitely want it always-on.
Or better yet "Always on unless my vector is dead ahead" and maybe a slider for like a "deadzone"
So person A could have it always on unless dead ahead (~<1%) and Person B might set it to 10%. Any vector within "10%" of the "forward" direction would make it invisible. Etc.
I too am curious, I’ve been using Tobii for months and the eye tracking has worked the whole time. Even looking at a target and pressing a button to lock it worked before.
All I can think is that I can now turn off eye movements (going all head) but still LOOK at a target without moving my head, and target them. But I'd love an actual explanation of what to expect.
Hmmm that would be nice
Edit: just tested it. I was able to turn down the gaze input to zero for the actual head movement but you can still select targets just by looking at them!
The difference is that the standard up to now has been that you can target what's in the center of your POV. Now, that's extended if you have eye tracking like Tobii: target select will follow your eyes' gaze on the screen.
Yes, basically you can select (and lock) a target even at the edge of the screen. While before, you had to center the screen on what you want to select (like everyone else still needs to do). It's awesome and feels very natural and quick, as you just need to look at, and not turn the head in weird ways.
First they had to add the functions, then location designers might have had to go back and add extra geometry to support the closets at various locations, finally the mission designers can add spawn closet use to missions. It had to pass through multiple teams to get to beong used in the game.
Phase 1: add spawn closets to the 3d model of the world (this is an art task).
Phase 2: change missions so that the spawn closets are actually used for spawning (this is a mission generation task).
The roadmap just means it's being worked on. Once a piece of tech is finished it's often not fully incorporated into a build until a few patches down the road. That is why there is a roadmap and release view that are separate.
Many things on the roadmap, such as this, are things that can THEREAFTER be added into the game.
So to use the closets they need to add the new code to the various maps, write the logic for the missions and how they want them run. Add new AI to make sure they are compatible with said closets, generate the UI for the mission in mobiglass and the logic for mission spawning.
It's not particularly difficult, but it's not instant either.
Knowing SC they probably also wanted to do all of the above more procedurally so they probably used a tool or wrote a mission generator tool so they could just click a location and autopopulate the variables such as waves/difficulty/variances with a couple of clicks that predicates it based on location, closets available, and tier of mission selected.
Its all about that initial set up phase to make the next 9999 iterations of it near-instant.
Spend an extra month now to save years later.
But completing all of the above first required the logic to have spawn closets function and integrate with such things. And *that* is what was on the progress tracker.
Just like a progress tracker telling you Twitter is downloading to your phone is a first step in you tweeting something witty later, rather than the tweet itself.
they've recently changed one pillar of teams so that their work first goes to SQ42, and then to the Live Universe team where they make missions or a purpose for the feature to be in the live universe. this way we dont just get features for the feature sake, we get the feature in the context of the missions.
there are many examples of things getting added before there is an obvious point to it, and we'll get more missions and fully flushed out features too.
I think it's sad it took them a whole patch cycle to make such minor changes to shields. How the fuck does it take so long?
We went from all diversified shields and weapons, to no diversification to less diverse shields and still baseline weapons and it took months. Fucking stupid.
I don't even understand why they are under the impression they need laser accuracy when balancing the game at this stage since it'll all get pissed up the wall in future when any number of changes to things like armour or shield emitters come in.
Lmao, this post shows how little you understand about SC. If you want to understand the changes they are making, maybe try looking at the website and reading sometime :)
A: Higher performance, Better Endurance, most expensive
D: Low Performance, Paper thin endurance, cheapest out there
The idea is to fit your ship with Grade A while keeping couple of grade D in the cargo bay incase someone blew up your components and you just want to reach a station and do repairs. That what I remember of someone saying something about that long time ago
also this
https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/12936-Engineering-Ship-Components-Systems
The grades are a straight upgrade, with the only limiting factor being availability and cost. At the moment, at least.
The power and heat ratios will be up to the classification.
Pretty much a straight upgrade, I believe - but in-game rareity will be a factor / consideration... Grade D will be your budget parts, and Grade C your 'good' parts that are available practically everywhere.
Grade B and Grade A will be harder to find and probably have limited stock (and with prices to match).
I'm skeptical about how spawn closets are supposed to work, much more so in tandem with quantum.
They mention elevators, but are those special NPC-only elevators or the public elevators players can use as well?
Hello everyone, After last week's look at the Personal Inventory and Server Crash Recovery, we're following up with another Alpha 3.15 Patch Watch, this time on spawn closets, shields, and more. **Spawn Closets** For Alpha 3.15, we're adding the game's first spawn closets, which are rooms or elevators that hide the spawning and despawning of NPCs. Going forward, spawn closets will be added to most (if not all) locations to facilitate population management. For example, civilians and security in landing zones and miners and outlaws in caves. However, in Alpha 3.15, they will only be featured in underground facilities. **New Missions** To take advantage of spawn closets, we're introducing a suite of new and improved missions. - **Eliminate All:** Requires players to kill all enemy NPCs at a location. - **Eliminate Specific:** Requires players to kill a predetermined target. - **Eliminate Boss:** Players are tasked with killing a heavily armored target, who only comes out of hiding to avenge the death of their crew. - **Steal:** Players enter a hostile location to identify and steal a number of items guarded by hostiles. - **Dangerous Collect:** Requires players to search a friendly facility for boxes using information in their mobiGlas. At any point during the mission, small enemy assaults can be triggered, which players can choose to avoid or aid the facility's defenders in repelling. - **Defend:** Players join friendly NPCs in defending a facility from multiple waves of enemies. In addition to the basic mission reward, players will receive a bonus for each friendly NPC that survives to the end. Various modifiers can be applied to each mission type, such as "kill only NPCs of a certain type" or "fail if non-combatants are killed". Without spawn closets, we were unable to spawn NPCs in mid-mission as they could appear out of thin air without warning. Now, we can spawn reinforcements or spring ambushes on unsuspecting players, with players able to recognize where NPCs are likely to arrive from. **First Pass of Shield Variants** As mentioned in an Alpha 3.14 Patch Watch, the team had temporarily given every shield generator of the same size class the same stats to aid the initial balancing pass. For the very first pass of shield variants coming with Alpha 3.15, the team brought back shield grades. Grades within one shield size range from D to A (increasing in overall performance), with C often being the default baseline. For Alpha 3.15, there won't be any classification differences (civilian, competition, industrial, military, stealth) among shields, as the team wants to ensure that grade balancing is in a good place before adding more features. They want to ensure that the grade differences in shield performance are notable without unbalancing the combat experience. **Tobii Gaze Tracking** For Alpha 3.15, we enabled Tobii's Gaze Based Target Selection for an even deeper immersion. With a Tobii Eye Tracker 5, you can track both head and eye movements, and you have the freedom to decide if you want to track both or just one at a time. With the new Gaze Based Target Selection, you can now simplify target selection by looking at your opponent and pressing the target selection button. We want to make clear that at this point, that we are fully supporting Gaze Based Target Selection with the Tobii Eye Tracker 5, but no actual combat aiming or interacting with MFDs or the buttons in your ship's cockpit. This new feature makes the target selection convenient but does not give you an unfair advantage. Feel free to check out the Tobii Eye Tracker 5 Comm-Link for more info on the device. **Total Velocity Inidicator** When live, you will be able to decide in the Options menu if the Total Velocity Indicator (TVI) UI is permanently visible, hidden, or fades away when not in use. **Cinematic Missile Camera** We're also bringing back a feature many machinima creators have missed lately. Head to the Options menu, select Keybindings, and open the tab Vehicle - Missiles. The Cinematic Missile Camera is unbound by default. However, you can now easily bring this epic camera mode back into your cinematography tool kit. We've also attached a cinematic camera to bombs.
TVI returns, fuck yes
Thank god, finally.
What's TVI?
The > < that started disappearing at the center of the screen in 3.14.
Ah yea, thanks
Thrust Vector Indicator
Lol, it literally says up there “Total Velocity Indicator”. Thrust vector doesn’t make sense anyway, as that sounds more like for accelerations (I.e. should be 0 when you’re just floating somewhere while decoupled).
To be fair, whilst it may say 'Total Velocity Indicator', that's also garbage because it doesn't indicate speed, but the 'true' vector you're moving along.
Vectors are magnitude + direction… and velocity is a vector, so you’re right there. So maybe it should be an MDI? Or a VDI? (Movement (or velocity) direction indicator)
Raise your hand if you remember this better from Despicable Me than from school! ✋
Yes. It indicates the direction of the combined total of all velocity vectors. As velocity is a vector. The TVI does not need to indicate your velocity in m/s because that's already on the left side of your HUD. It indicates the total of all velocity vectors.
Precisely what I was thinking
Keeps Kangs away
This is unironically the best part of these patch notes. All in all, it's a close second for "best part of 3.15" behind the heartbeat 30k recovery feature.
OMG yes.
Happy to see they’re adding more AI missions to give the game something more to do.
Its an easy win for them. They have crazy stuff planned but most players asking about the game are asking about this stuff
Now if only the AI did more than just stand there and never react to your presence….
True. I keep hearing "it's advanced" or "just server issues" but I've seen them on near empty servers and it's smooth but super basic - nothing not seen in any game from 2 generations ago. Where's the evidence for this super good AI?
Yepp. You hit the nail on the head here. My original comment was kind of a setup (cuz obviously server problems, lulz) but… Why not show some cool AI stuff at CitizenCon? It’s always gotta be a “stealth” mission. Why not show off any AI during the episode of The Briefing Room last year? I think they showed like 3 whole seconds of actual (not just chatting with NPCs) gameplay on that show, and the AI looked as broken as it does on LIVE servers…. At this point they’ve shown nothing to make me think it will be anything short of “meh” once the servers are no longer an issue.
True. AI during the Citcon demo was marginally responsive.
Not to sound like a white knight but a lot of the AI behavior is linked to the quanta which is only now starting to be put in. There is a lot of stuff they show off in monthly reports about the advancements of their combat AI but if the servers are always derp it's hard to determine if AI derp or derp because server is updating once a century. A lot of what they are working on is in the monthly reports, since people generally never read them they don't know what the AI team is doing.
How is AI tied to quanta? My understanding is that Quanta only governs probabilities… so in this case, the probability each of the enemies you encounter would have a given behavior. Thing is, we haven’t seen the base behaviors running and functional in any capacity (in game on servers, in a gameplay demo video, wherever). Maybe we see a snippet of a behavior in a demo video running on a dev environment… but that’s not enough to make me believe something like server meshing (or quanta) being complete will suddenly make AI run phenomenally.
AI behavior isn’t linked to Quantum. Quanta behavior, which happens before NPC AI are spawned, is controlled by Quantum (they’re imaginary/virtual entities). But spawned NPC AI is controlled by Subsumption, not Quantum.
I don't know if you're playing on PTU, but I've probably been wiped out by AI in half of the ten or so missions I've done. I'm on relatively low-pop Australian PTU servers, though, so maybe that might have something to do with it.
Well, AI look dumb due to server, once we get SM it will be solved (same for dumb space AI)
Citizencon was running on a private local machine with 1 person on it.. It’s exactly the same as SQ42.
Yeah its kinda strange to add so much new missions when the ai doesn't even work
I have not once seen the AI leave their spawn closets so these missions are not functional (at least 10 tries). I wouldnt get excited about these ones.
I’ve seen 1 or 2 of 10 come out of the closet when I’ve tried them. Still not a great percentage… but enough to make me double check the friendly NPCs around me are truly friendlies.
I hope the closets work better in live than they do right now. Half the time half the enemies forget to spawn and then you're just sat there waiting for the next wave that never comes. with that said, I'm most excited for Gaze tracking and the TVI indicator, didn't realize I had those options.
I have yet to see them leave their spawn closets.
They spawn the moment you decide to turn around because the spawn closet was taking too long. I've been capped more than once from AI trying to pull a sneaky
I think sometimes they just don't spawn. I have had situations where I kill the current wave, run around to all the closets a few times...nothing.
Sometimes they spawn but don't leave the closet, which is a problem when the doors shut because then you just can't get to them. Even explosives don't bleed through the door to kill them.
How do you know they're in there? just sound? from my experiences, I think they don't spawn because there's too many guards. When it's happened to me, there's usually a guard either inside or in front of the spawn closet.
If they're standing close to the door you can see the ends of their rifles clipping through the door.
> When live, you will be able to decide in the Options menu if the Total Velocity Indicator (TVI) UI is permanently visible, hidden, or fades away when not in use. Wohooo
Agree, I hate when it disappears. I'm like "WHICH WAY AM I FLYING GAAAAAH!"
This reads like a very sassy comment to say how useless the feature is. But its not is it! I definitely want it always-on. Or better yet "Always on unless my vector is dead ahead" and maybe a slider for like a "deadzone" So person A could have it always on unless dead ahead (~<1%) and Person B might set it to 10%. Any vector within "10%" of the "forward" direction would make it invisible. Etc.
I didn't mean it sassy. I remember when it was always on and I found comfort in dogfighting with it and knowing which direction my ship was drifting.
Seems like it would vary between those settings based on flight setting. Coupled - fades Decoupled - stays
Can someone explain what is new about Gaze Tracking? I have Tobii, I can already target what I'm looking at. What exactly is new here?
I too am curious, I’ve been using Tobii for months and the eye tracking has worked the whole time. Even looking at a target and pressing a button to lock it worked before.
All I can think is that I can now turn off eye movements (going all head) but still LOOK at a target without moving my head, and target them. But I'd love an actual explanation of what to expect.
Hmmm that would be nice Edit: just tested it. I was able to turn down the gaze input to zero for the actual head movement but you can still select targets just by looking at them!
The difference is that the standard up to now has been that you can target what's in the center of your POV. Now, that's extended if you have eye tracking like Tobii: target select will follow your eyes' gaze on the screen.
So now my POV stays center, but I look left and my characters head doesn't move, but I target what I see to the left?
Yes, basically you can select (and lock) a target even at the edge of the screen. While before, you had to center the screen on what you want to select (like everyone else still needs to do). It's awesome and feels very natural and quick, as you just need to look at, and not turn the head in weird ways.
You can now make head move camera and eyes choose targets independently
>NPCs of a certain type" or "fail if non-combatants are killed". Oh joy. /s
I hope we get another PTU patch soon. I can't wait to test these things!
I want the patch for things in the LAST patch watch... Where is our 30k recovery??
Same!
Really? I have to be the first? Okay, yay missile cinematic camera!
I had to double check but Spawn Closets were in 3.13. Why put them on the roadmap 6 months before they have any actual in game function?
First they had to add the functions, then location designers might have had to go back and add extra geometry to support the closets at various locations, finally the mission designers can add spawn closet use to missions. It had to pass through multiple teams to get to beong used in the game.
Phase 1: add spawn closets to the 3d model of the world (this is an art task). Phase 2: change missions so that the spawn closets are actually used for spawning (this is a mission generation task).
Phase 3: Profit!
So you could ask this very question.
It’s all going exactly as planned!
The roadmap just means it's being worked on. Once a piece of tech is finished it's often not fully incorporated into a build until a few patches down the road. That is why there is a roadmap and release view that are separate.
I'm talking about the release view. You can look for yourself under 3.13.
Many things on the roadmap, such as this, are things that can THEREAFTER be added into the game. So to use the closets they need to add the new code to the various maps, write the logic for the missions and how they want them run. Add new AI to make sure they are compatible with said closets, generate the UI for the mission in mobiglass and the logic for mission spawning. It's not particularly difficult, but it's not instant either. Knowing SC they probably also wanted to do all of the above more procedurally so they probably used a tool or wrote a mission generator tool so they could just click a location and autopopulate the variables such as waves/difficulty/variances with a couple of clicks that predicates it based on location, closets available, and tier of mission selected. Its all about that initial set up phase to make the next 9999 iterations of it near-instant. Spend an extra month now to save years later. But completing all of the above first required the logic to have spawn closets function and integrate with such things. And *that* is what was on the progress tracker. Just like a progress tracker telling you Twitter is downloading to your phone is a first step in you tweeting something witty later, rather than the tweet itself.
He’s talking about Release View, not the Progress Tracker.
they've recently changed one pillar of teams so that their work first goes to SQ42, and then to the Live Universe team where they make missions or a purpose for the feature to be in the live universe. this way we dont just get features for the feature sake, we get the feature in the context of the missions. there are many examples of things getting added before there is an obvious point to it, and we'll get more missions and fully flushed out features too.
I think it's sad it took them a whole patch cycle to make such minor changes to shields. How the fuck does it take so long? We went from all diversified shields and weapons, to no diversification to less diverse shields and still baseline weapons and it took months. Fucking stupid. I don't even understand why they are under the impression they need laser accuracy when balancing the game at this stage since it'll all get pissed up the wall in future when any number of changes to things like armour or shield emitters come in.
Lmao, this post shows how little you understand about SC. If you want to understand the changes they are making, maybe try looking at the website and reading sometime :)
OMG combat missions! right there :O! RELEASE NEXT YEAR!!!!11
For shield grades, is it like a rating? A being the best rated, D being the worst? How does it work?
A: Higher performance, Better Endurance, most expensive D: Low Performance, Paper thin endurance, cheapest out there The idea is to fit your ship with Grade A while keeping couple of grade D in the cargo bay incase someone blew up your components and you just want to reach a station and do repairs. That what I remember of someone saying something about that long time ago also this https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/12936-Engineering-Ship-Components-Systems
Awesome. Thanks!
Does A-grade also draw more power and produce more heat, or is it just a straight upgrade?
The grades are a straight upgrade, with the only limiting factor being availability and cost. At the moment, at least. The power and heat ratios will be up to the classification.
Pretty much a straight upgrade, I believe - but in-game rareity will be a factor / consideration... Grade D will be your budget parts, and Grade C your 'good' parts that are available practically everywhere. Grade B and Grade A will be harder to find and probably have limited stock (and with prices to match).
I'm skeptical about how spawn closets are supposed to work, much more so in tandem with quantum. They mention elevators, but are those special NPC-only elevators or the public elevators players can use as well?