10 for the Chairman: Episode 12 (2014.03.17)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hello everyone uh welcome to another episode of temp for the chairman for those of you that don't know about it or haven't watched it yet this is where i take 10 questions from subscribers and answer them to the best of my ability uh so subscribers are the the part of the community that are kicking in extra money every month to enable us to do extra community content so this show in windshanger also a bunch of the other stuff we do jump point uh which trickles down to the general community base so thank you very much subscribers for allowing us to do a lot of this extra sort of video content and communication so let me just get straight to it um here um with my

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   questions so the very first question comes from stoge when hiring npcs to crew our ships what degree of variation will there be between different npcs will i be able to go out and find a skilled ship gunner for my freelancer and if someone who's a great pilot but not a great gunner if i pay him to sit in the gunner seat for a while will he slowly get better at it so there will definitely be variations between npcs will have some level of sort of uh skill for the npcs and probably uh there will be some progression for the mpc so if they fight a lot of battles and they managed to be on the winning end of them then they will actually get better um and their cost of uh like hiring the crew will be dependent on their sort of skill level so you know you could go for a cheaper

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   crew but they may not be as good as a sort of veteran or an elite crew um so on that level the npcs will have some level of sort of typical uh rpg progression although obviously as a player you yourself don't so i guess the question is if he does seat in the is sit in the gunner seat for a while i managed to hit a few things and you do all right then he will slowly get better at it okay next question comes from cc corp who asks will there be any benefits for ejecting out of your ship before it explodes like less of a financial loss or will you be unable to abandon ship as said ship is burning down so yes there will be benefits for ejecting out of a ship just before it explodes not all ships will have that capacity uh capability uh the hornet has it the 300i will have it but something like the aurora which is much more of a basic ship doesn't have the ability to eject some of the bigger ships will have

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   escape pods that if you get to before the ship goes out you'll be able to get out before the ship goes up in a big ferry explosion and the benefit of ejecting uh rather than going up an explosion is that it sort of saves uh a life so to speak so if you refer back to my death of a spaceman write-up that i did a while ago the concept in star citizen is that there's a progression in uh your character's life so it's you you don't always respawn at the same level of health and as time goes on um your body sort of takes wear and tear and so every time you say uh get killed in a dog fight you'll end up waking up in a med bay so think of it like luke skywalker and um

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   the empire strikes back and uh you know maybe you've got a bit of a prosthetic arm or you've got a scar here and then after that happens so many times your body just can't get sort of built back up or revived and that character will um pass away and all your possessions and family name or whatever you want will pass on to your sort of uh designated successor the benefit of um ejecting is that you sort of get to try and preserve a life uh which uh something you probably would wanna would want to do and you know we may or may not have some level of uh you know maybe your medical bills are less because you don't have to get fixed up as much um i guess it depends whether we have national health in in our world but we haven't made a decision on that particular aspect but definitely you would want to eject

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   before your ship blows up if you possibly can or have a ship um that will give you that because it will give you an edge and by the way on the aurora you also if it's about ready to go you just would have to get out of your seat and go out the airlock uh manually versus hitting an ejection button uh okay next question comes from theos who says i was wondering if there were any plans to let us design our own costumes for our characters in a manner similar to how we can design our own ships to be considered for implementation in the game so uh well definitely on the modding side i think would we would let people to be designing their own costumes for the characters um we're definitely gonna have a high level of customization uh in terms of outfits and stuff that you can do for your character in the game um so i guess those two things together uh will sort of be blended i mean i think if we were gonna let someone have their own

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   costume in the game itself in the persistent universe we would have to moderate it just to make sure that it sort of abided by the the quality standards and the technical standards that we would need um which is kind of why we're doing like the next great starship because we're having some teams build it but it's to the standards that would fit in the game and they would go from there okay next question comes from viperion who asks how do you and cig define alpha testing most of us have alpha access and most of us seem to be pretty unclear about what that actually means does cig see us as primarily stress testers or mostly finished assets are we going to be actually testing the unfinished version of the game and bug hunting you'll definitely be testing the unfinished version of the game because we're sort of releasing the game in these modules that are only part of the functionality of the final game so you

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   know the dogfight model modules coming up before that we have the hangar module and we'll have some other ones like for the first person combat or on the planet side and so the the primary point of having the community play it is for twofold one for people to sort of play it and you know we get a sense of like feedback in terms of yes this is working though this is not working these are the things we would like to tweak so it's like a super massive focus group and then there's stress testing sort of uh bug testing so so we have our own dedicated group of testers but of course on a game that this big without you know this many different things you can do it's impossible even if we had a testing department of 200 people to to really cover it deep now luckily we have a testing department of 200 000 people at the moment that uh obviously makes a a

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   big uh difference because you sort of just about people banging away at it means that we'll probably flush out most of the problems and most of the bugs most of the issues at a much earlier stage than you normally do in the in game development so normally in game development it only really goes super wide once the game's released and then it's already out there and and you know then you start to see some things that you didn't even see in your own testing so hopefully we'll be flushing that much earlier in our process which is sort of why we have the whole early module and the whole alpha testing so i would say that it's a combination of sort of feedback and stress testing uh and figuring out uh you know sort of finding maybe some bugs we haven't seen now it doesn't mean that like once someone finds a bug in the community that um you know they write up a full bug report or anything like that because that's

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    probably not that practical with that many people but what it does mean is that it's sort of a good uh place to sort of find problems and then we on the development side can sort of put our dedicated you know engineers and our internal test staff going okay well that's what we need to fix we didn't see that before and and so it just gives us a great um head start and we'll probably build in some sort of automated sort of bug report tool uh at some point it won't be on the dogfighting v1 but down the road it will okay next question uh comes from azuvia who asks when we are in a fight will a wreckage from another player become a navigational hazard to watch out for while we finish the fight so yes the answer is yes absolutely so as the ship uh you know ships blow apart they uh you know leave um large chunks

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    of uh wreckage uh so we're not gonna have like you blow up a ship and it just explodes in a fireball and it goes away sometimes you'll see a big explosion because they say the power plant went critical or whatever but a lot of times it can just be like a you know sparking um badly scarred hornet that's sitting there floating dead in space and uh you'll have to watch out because if you hit it while you're flying around it will uh you know you will do it'll do some damage to you um okay next question comes from uh matu who asks will star citizens take full advantage of six and eight core cpus what about more than eight or sixteen gigabytes of ram 32 gigabytes for instance yes uh the game will definitely take uh advantage of multi-core cpus cryengine already has multi-threading in

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    it so it runs the renderer in a separate um render thread so it runs a rendering a separate cpu thread it runs the physics in actually several cpu threads animations running another cpu thread main game loops in another game thread i think we've got networking and other threads so uh in general um the engine's already fairly multi-threaded and longer term we're sort of working at adding and doing more of that to take advantage because that's the that's just the way um you know monday pc uhs are going so it's it's less about faster clock speed and more about more cpus memory definitely i mean you know more memory the better we'll be able to pre-cache more and you'll have like higher resolution textures so if you're if we're running low on the

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    memory side you'd probably reduce down the textures say whereas if you had 16 or 32 bits you may get them at the full 4k resolution in some cases or there'll be less disk loading like we'll be able to pre-cache more into memory so i would definitely recommend having a multi-core cpu and lots of memory i mean most of my machines all have 32 gigs or more um i think you have to because there's a lot of developments we have lots of applications open at once and uh you know usually we've got six six core or eight core machines here um okay uh next question comes from uh ini who asks will we be able to use inertia in order to advance in some direction to avoid using fuel so yes definitely uh you will 100 be able to so the flight

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    mode uh has the sort of fully sort of controlled uh flight um that's sort of the intelligent flight system that we've talked about and then you'll also be able to change um the flight uh sort of change the modes on it so you can just change your orientation without changing your actual velocity vector and then also you'll be able to change your velocity vector without changing your orientation uh and that'll be easily available from your sort of flight controls so you'll be able to do all sorts of uh maneuvers where you can start out in a sort of kind of computer controlled um you know flight controlled manner with full fly-by-wire and then you turn off aspects of it and move around so it should be fun i'm actually kind of interested to see how people do with the dog fight when we get put in people's hands because i it's going to have a lot more ability and options than any game i've done before

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    okay so crevator asks my question is will jump points tend to be near the edges of solar systems or will we have the possibility of dangerous jump points such as coming out near a sun or an asteroid field yeah no jump points are going to be kind of all over the place uh you know i think our fiction is that the jump points are sort of created by a different space anomaly and uh you know so sometimes that could be close to a sun and uh also you know maybe there's one near an asteroid field and that's more of a navigation hazard so it's gonna sort of depend there'll be different types of jump points ones that can sort of sustain bigger ships one that can only take smaller ships um and so you know think of them like mountain passes so some mountain passes are easy and some are more dangerous than others comes from flash bolts uh will it be

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    possible to rent ships either from an npc corp or between players i would say probably so we we already have in the ga like in part of the design we're anticipating that potentially you can work for hire so you can hire another player or another npc to do jobs for you would and let them use your ship you definitely will be able to lend ships to people so it makes sense that you should be able to sort of rent some ships too kind of like it is in real life so yes i would think it is going to be possible okay last question of the 10 here is player to up can we get a close-up look tour of the model behind your desk so yes i think we definitely can so to let you know this is the snake here um model from the wing commander movie and it's actually not a model that

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    you saw per se in the uh in the in the film uh it was built by the art department on the film as a reference for the 3d modelers uh to build um their 3d model which is what you would have seen in the film uh muddled out um we actually used maya uh well basically the very beta even before maida 1.1 for the wing commander movie um and uh after i finished the film i had it shipped out from pinewood uh which is where we where it was built and had it a digital anvil and now have it here at uh cloud imperium um and uh it's uh it's pretty uh it's pretty cool i i quite quite like it um so hopefully you guys do too all right so uh thanks very much uh for joining me for

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    uh this uh episode of 10 for the chairman um hopefully you found some of the questions interesting enlightening and again thank you to all the subscribers out there and thank you to all the backers and community in general for enabling us to make the game of my dreams and i think the game of pretty much hopefully your guys dreams i would assume it would be uh but we're having a lot of fun uh this is a totally different way to make games and uh it's a pretty brilliant way to make games so anyway i'll see you on the next episode of time for the chairman thank you bye [Applause]