Star Citizen Live: Mission Features Q&A

21 April 202301:02:381,600 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody Welcome we're back uh Star Citizen live I'm your host Jared Huckabee and uh this is our weekly live stream where we take a about an hour out of the end of our week and we hang out with some of our developers uh we talk about the stuff they're working on sometimes we ask to answer questions from the community sometimes we have somebody on just to get to know them and learn a little bit about their history sometimes we do an AI Sprint report like we did the last episode a couple weeks ago uh and sometimes I don't write an intro and I just wing it joining us on the show this week are two members from our esteemed Mission features team we've got Ed and Elliot Ellie how you doing yeah hello good yep so uh you're no strangers to scl you're one of the few people who've actually
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had a a return visit here uh to the spaceship you know we've only been on the spaceship for you know X number of months now so we haven't actually had a lot of people cycle back through so you're actually I think you're one of the first people to ever to return I'm on it three times well I know wait this is Elliot's third time third time oh never mind no bye oh Ed just uh because every show is somebody's first show let's take a let's take a little bit of time before we get into the questions introduce yourselves tell everybody who you are and what you do for Star Citizen and and we'll start with you since you've done it three times so you should be a pro by now go ahead I'm gonna fool a bit uh hi uh I'm uh Ellie Moby I am a lead designer on the mission feature team I make missions and we make systems and revolving missions and me and Ed work together a
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lot of the time that's me there you go look and dead okay yeah my name is Edward Fuller and I am also a lead designer on the mission mission features team and uh obviously I work alongside Elliott and there are other designers who report to us and make missions with us and uh yeah I mean we'll go into all the details when we get to our questions I guess okay and the Lord was about buses and in Manchester yeah how was that I didn't get to make really fun met a lot of people met some content creators um just a really fun environment and it just helps to motivate you more because people come in like oh my God what you do is so cool can I have a picture and you're like just make video games for a living yeah that was what that last weekend was weekend before that something like that yeah I can't
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remember I uh drank too much yeah no you know I've been here this is actually day 365 today that I've been here in the UK so I hit my one year tomorrow and I'd been waiting for a Manchester bar citizen uh I've been waiting for a Manchester bar assistant the entire time here and they finally do it and it's when I'm on vacation yeah out of the country and I'm like it was it was really nice like I when I was there I met um when I'm in twitch chats there's a person in there all the time called a Slough dog and I was walking back from the toilets and this guy looked at me in points and he's like Ellie I was like oh hello and he's like I'm slow dog I was like oh my God hello because uh he also tests on eBay okay so we see a lot of his reports and we speak to him quite a bit as well yeah I think most of us who've been to at least two of our
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citizens have a story of meeting a backer in the coming from the bathroom it's they're always creative it's like okay I can't wash my hands first uh that's good I went to the Paris bar citizen uh on my vacation and that that was that was great it's the first time in Paris I met a lot of people we actually have a couple things uh added to the uh a set that they were given we've got some uh new coasters that with the Eiffel Tower and stuff on the bar citizen logo and a goblet back there um all right so this week's show is a little different than our normal format uh this this is a Community Q a show so for this week's show we put up a thread on spectrum and we collected a bunch of questions from from uh from our backers and uh you guys went through and selected the questions uh selected the questions and were kind enough to to send me the list and whatnot and thank
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you for including their name so we're going to read off the names of the people who asked the questions and whatnot but before we jump in I want to talk a little bit about what the mission feature team does and doesn't because that's going to color quite a few of the answers to these so let's talk about what the mission feature team does first uh well mentioned feature team we uh we take features made by other teams and we make missions that use them so um it tends it kind of like we definitely also make the mission uh system itself but um so the so it's often the the confusion comes is that why haven't you
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made this Mission yet you know and the reason is often well we don't actually make the features that is the backbone of how that feature of what the mission could even be of is yeah well like the bow at the end of the the present right so when uh gameplay teams create salvaging yeah when you make missions they make they create mining you go and make commissions that do mining uh one of the questions here from nine toes is asking about where's the data running missions and the answer is when a gameplay team creates uh data running as a as a gameplay system as a loop then you guys can create missions yeah because like on that it'd be sort of we could fake it but what's the point in that we might as well wait and give you
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the real true intended experience instead of like almost like yeah because we might we might invent things that the the the real owner of that feature doesn't necessarily want it to be so we do two things we basically mess with expectations of players um we also waste work on us we um annoy people who are also developers and then in the end result we have to backpedal um all of our work and redo it once they've done the feature and then we also have egg on our face so it kind of is a is pretty pretty bad way of working one of the terms we use internally is is Downstream it's a down you're kind of kind of you're not as Downstream as like audio is audio has to wait for everybody to do their stuff
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before they can get in there because they you know before they make the sound of a ship they need to they need to see the profile then you see how big it is then you see how aggressive it looks they need to see how Jane Inky it looks or how slick and smooth it looks you know and then they build a profile that matches that matches that you guys are you guys are somewhere in the middle but still Downstream of a lot of other teams Downstream of at least the gameplay yeah you know the gameplay design teams I mean we still make stuff ourselves and sometimes we we own those things like law system or even the spawn closets is part of our team no spawn closets is part of a team which is why it ends up in like a lot of missions why it works perfectly yeah so it's perfect for us but yeah so so that's our backdoor answer for for for nine toes here who asked about you know you know I think the question was specifically you know hey we've got a Herald we've got an MSR where the heck are our data running is
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missions that is you know when uh when eupu or whomever does maybe it's Austin whomever uh you know you know gets the data running you know gameplay systems up then you guys will absolutely jump in to make missions yes it's the same as you're doing with Salvage like that yep so all right let's jump into these questions here uh uh our first one is from uh Kaden hi Kaden uh says will there be more FPS missions besides the generic bunker and Cave missions that involve killing every enemy maybe something that involves ground Vehicles like a convoy assault mode so you snuck a suggestion in there uh who wants to Elliot sure yes we're obviously we're going to want more variety when it comes to FPS missions the you know when it comes to
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stuff like Convoy of assault again with us being like a downstream dependency it requires things like you know AI to be able to drive a convoy for assaulting one that's already in process um it comes with other things like you know making sure that we have a route set up and we can send you to intercept uh the main one is like trying to enforce yes a mission with ground view yeah that's where we have to say you have to use a ground vehicle we have to contrive yeah we have to why would you stay in that around there you've got ships you know just put the ground vehicle on the ship and we do it it's very difficult we've talked about stuff like having like like electrical storms on planets and things like that but you know their feature requests that are in and when we get the time and scheduling we'll get to them
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and we'll be able to do this sort of stuff because we need to have a some sort of situation education that goes to the player kind of like how we did with Siege where we go you can't use your ships you can only use this method of vehicle to be able to ensure that you that was our contrivance in that scenario to enforce a kind of gameplay scenario we really wanted to achieve yeah but as again as gameplay teams and other feature teams you know add things like the electrical storms like that that create situations then you won't have to fake a situation yeah no you won't because it will be a systemic thing and and it will all work as you would expect it to yeah you know in Siege if we took away the no-fly zone someone will bring a Carrick and just like mow down the entire platform and then just drive bombs on it yeah bomb it and it'd be so having a reason to remove that ability even though obviously the
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game is massively about ships it's about having multiple gameplay thousand catering to everyone I I remember the early testing a lot of the early testing on Siege when when people were trying you know you know you obviously you had the no-fly zone but people were trying to get up enough speed in their ship you know to kind of coast in and even crack use the ship as a weapon and just like see how many how many uh NPCs they could take out with you know the crash and ships we have fun like conversations with that where someone's like what happens if they fly above the platform and drop a tank uh or a vehicle we don't want on it and we're like well if you can manage to drop a vehicle all that way and manage to just go fine that that's your reward yeah I mean admittedly you know until uh until a lot of the physics improvements that are underway work on a lot of our ships kind of just fall and bounce off the ground
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anyways I just want to say one other thing about those ground Vehicles is that right now we have um we have ai working on uh making it so that they will be able to drive those vehicles on the planets and stuff but it still obviously some possibly some distance from them being competent in both firing and driving so there are other reasons like we could probably have static vehicles but you might argue what's the point it's so much fun blowing up static vehicles uh our next question is from Eliminator or lemonator Eliminator lemon is in capitals uh what happened to Dynamic Mission givers it seems the ones we have need some love and the ones that were once on the roadmap have never been seen again what happened to Eddie Parr I'm not going to ask about Tessa banister
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they'll come when it comes what happened to Eddie Parker what happened to the app uh yeah so the the thing that happened with the mission givers is that the the team that owned Mission givers uh went through uh some uh movement around of personnel and so the ownership kind of uh fell fell away a little bit but the uh the narrative team now own mission givers which makes a lot more sense because I mean they designed the characters they probably they write their their words they build their law so it makes a lot of sense that they would own it um so they also have they're also building their own uh designers in the narrative team so so there's actual people who design stuff and make things so now they also have people to work on them and improve them so there is definitely a focus on on getting them up
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working better and uh you know maybe introducing more or improving um various things about them so yeah yeah they will come back and they will get better um yeah I know you're part of the uh um we're in the process of uh we're uh you know still building out our UK office here and uh you know there's still areas that are under construction which is why we haven't shown you our nice comprehensive to where we want to wait until it's all done but a lot of the artwork has been going up in the last couple weeks and and yeah a lot of it is based on our great Mission givers and whatnot and so it's it's actually there's actually this internal sense of we walk past like oh gosh remember remember this guy like this guy was going to be cool and oh yeah you know a potato she was going to be usually going to be real cool it's like it's it's
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there's this movement internally we would really like to get that going and get those back I know the narrative team have so much uh intended for these people including Tessa Bannister to add a little bit more to to it the Credence to those designers like the designer working on it is our former embedded QA yeah he became a designer and he saw his he came from our strong stock yeah so he's uh you know we trust his abilities to to bring the best it's never overstate the value of you know starting in a QA and as a as a launching pad for almost every discipline and pretty much 99 of all developers come from QA and QA are the backbone fundamental to every game studio so go QA yeah I mean I worked I started in QA but not at this company
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years ago you know so yeah yeah blizzard uh let's see next question sloth astronaut I should look at these names beforehand slastronaut says any plans you can share for emissions suitable for larger groups or organizations uh yeah so the way we think about um missions that would be aimed at like large groups or organizations is that uh we kind of have a sort of a philosophy that the more complex the objectives are the more you know the more they're intended for for larger groups right now a lot of our missions are quite simple on their their combination of objectives um or the number of objectives you have
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to do at the same time obviously something like Siege of Iverson is a good example of something with multiple things and the intention there is multiple players play together however outside of dynamic events um we we want to make sure that we have content that is suitable to divvy up to a crew of players and whatnot so um so we we're aware that players like this because they've demonstrated we demonstrate it in like Xeno threat and Siege where people play they do different things at different roles and so we're aware that there's an appetite for example uh uh one of our missions that's fairly newly announced it's on the road map now the the data highest mission that one is uh is a mission that a skilled player probably would be able
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to do on their own but it it's one of these missions that puts a lot of stress on that one player if they were to do it you've got to like um you've got to first you've got you've got like enemies that you're going to be contending with in the ugfs um on top of that there'll be um there'll be you're basically uh uploading data to a Handler like an off-site hacker and to do that you um you basically uh I'm losing my train of thoughts you're gonna have to take over oh what was the date I am losing my train of thought so you're gonna have to either one of them um yeah uh so so you've got those the guys with the FPS guys then you've got
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these downloads that can be interrupted sorry they can be interrupted and when they're interrupted someone needs to run around looking for codes to enter to servers to prevent them from being like losing their data and then you've got to get to them before they they uh they overheat and then you lose the data and you lose the mission anyway point is single player you know is doing a lot of stressful things in one go but um a crew of players like a bunch of players who want to play together and make the most out of that well-oiled machines probably gonna like work their way through that and have one person doing this one person doing that you know coordinating well and and and that mission is is clearly designed probably better to be worked on as a group um and in addition to that like a mission like that if we were to make it
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and we are making it like that we would make sure that we we'd put pay you know could reward on it that would be meaningful for a group of players obviously single player great payday I just did but you did a lot of work for it yeah whereas a group of players you're working to get the best uh out of it and not be so stressed but the payoff is still worth your time so yeah it's a consideration it's uh and well undoubtedly uh do something in our ASC where we you know dive deeper and show more of the development of that I'm sorry I just I just lost my train of thought it's it's one of those things when you're in a live show it's like and then you go off a cliff it happens all the time and they tell people know it's live oh yeah [Laughter] yeah it's like he's he's avoiding switching my camera because there's a
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lot I'm gonna show that I'm you know parched and drinking water I get thirsty during the show too it's all part of being alive quite surprised in that monologue you didn't switch to like an insane in Game of someone looking at a monster like you did to me out of the editing you did on my uh modular Mission thing where you all did me dirty and everyone just sat there waiting looking at the camera and everything and everyone's getting up and walking up and I'm just saying you're like we'll talk we'll do a little behind the scenes on that though so so so we shot it we shot earlier it's interview first oh we're off track we'll have to what why do you mind if we put a few minutes okay well he says that's one uh we shot Elliot's interview and he did that he did that entire explanation one shot one take no interruptions knowing if we hadn't cut to the other people it you would have seen that it was a completely
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uninterrupted take no teleprompter no notes offside it was awesome but while he's doing it I'm just I'm just sitting here like well I said I'm like I'm just imagining the reactions that some backers would have if we put this on there completely uninterrupted so so then you know he left and then we brought in uh yorit and Lars everything and I'm like after they did their interviews I'm like okay I need you to do some reaction shots for me and they're like what I just need you to look at the camera and I need I need you to imagine you're listening to Elliot for about seven minutes straight and I didn't have to do any other directing after that they were just like so no it was etching uh some twitch to us about twitch stream is react to when I watched uh Devin Devin Aubry I think her name is
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and as you were showing like the clips of Dem gun oh my God she literally went uh yeah this guy goes on a bit dummy and I was like sat there and chill oh my God you wanted to do it that way though no no no no no I wanted to go over just talk because I didn't I didn't want to like actually wait to explain it all I didn't want to lose anything cut away I wanted to have it all complete you know uh next question from Xperia compared to the number of PVE missions there are very few PVP missions can we expect to see any PVP missions in the future yeah um PVP missions in our Gamera a bit more uh of a challenge to do because it always relies on two people wanting to do the same thing so what we try to do instead
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is not give you an objective that's directly like killed yeah it's it's instead we put you in a sort of a mission flow that has parts of vulnerability to where the player can do these sort of acts like for example jump town we only want you to deliver maze whatever bloodthirsty murdering you do is strictly on you as a person and your choice there so plenty of people exactly and and you know that's fine so Our intention is to put you in a situation that allows you to take advantage and think right well if I if I kill this person I could come out on top you know the risk versus reward so that's sort of things we're trying to do jump town Korea we have other things in the pipeline that are going to also try to pull this sort of this gameplay in with
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the new um a resource Rush stuff the asteroid mining we've talked about that is an open area where people will go in and fight same sort of thing we're not going to tell you to kill anyone but if you want the high profits you're probably going to do it don't get away there's a reward exactly yeah and there's always the classic you know one mission to one group of people that says you know go here and do the thing and then a mission to another group of people that says maybe go to the same place and do something else like what yeah exactly if it was a delivery Mission we sent you after the same box both of you one of years is gonna win yeah there was this kid in elementary school named Billy Escobar that used to dig a hole in the playground he would go when he would gather red ants from one amount and move the redheads and then go and gather
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black ants and put them in there and watch them just fight psychopath yeah yeah Billy Escobar I don't know where you are his cousin was Pablo no no uh Virgil see we go off on tangents Virgil says with the new ship components being physicalized for 319 uh some of them uh with the tractor beam gameplay uh is there any plan for rare ship components to be loot rewards for ground missions well we wouldn't do it that way per se like um your missions coming up the Salvage ones is it selfish or is it I mean Salvage ones you take them off yeah yeah Salvage ones you could take them off yeah yeah so in which case I guess the
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way that we probably would would do this is uh we treat the wrecks as effectively like like a like a loot box like yeah like like so so its Loadout is potentially good it's potentially got cool and interesting components on it so if you happen to be salvaging this ship that we've spawned for you and it's good well your reward is in the cool stuff you find isn't it so I think we do it that way rather than let's say here's your reward for completing this Mission and it's a here's a component I mean yeah so that's how the we that's how I think we think about it good point there's it it's you know a lot of games you'll get the mission and then in the rewards that you know like there's an item attached you know and and that that's the that's
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the mission reward loot nothing we don't necessarily do that we like to set up we like to use our missions to set up situations and then if you are proactive in that situation and you and and you do the little extra due diligence and you search something yeah we provide opportunities for you to discover everything but yeah but I can't think of a single and you could correct me if I'm wrong I can't think of a single mission in our game that's specifically go and do this and I'm going to give you this item as a rewards we don't do we don't do item awards at the moment so no but again it's not to say that we won't ever you know it's no we've learned never to say never here but just at the moment that's not really the direction I think a good point on what Ed was saying is that like I've said this in Mobile twitch chats and on a few different things so I guess
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good to say here and put it all in one place is that when it comes to salvage uh your main your main thing you'll do is whole scraping however now with the item Port detaching you can take the guns off and the components and sell them not only that we populate the cargo hold with random assortments of cargo so there's extra value random or a bit more chosen yeah bit more it's interesting too we play with it so you could you could go go do a ship you could scrape all of it take all its guns in and then go into the hold and it's full of like something worth something that's incredibly expensive so what goes from being oh I've just full scraped this entire ship and got like you know 500 000 UEC becomes you know a 2.2 million payout because of the items on the ship and the cargo hold yeah this is this this is this is where I want to do my
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little disclaimer here that the 500 000 oh yeah these numbers are just those are numbers like I don't know where I know which train those came from but they did not represent uh specific economics and stuff before you go you won't know make your comments on should I do me thing that's it no no no no no don't do the Reddit thing Tom's working on Tom's working on something I haven't seen it yet but Tom's working on something that he's told me is called the reclaimer disclaimer yeah I haven't seen it and I don't know what's going on but eventually it'll show up it would have been a good time for it and see he's he's going he's back there going oh if I had only had it set up right now that would have been a good time for it I was gonna do that no Reddit that's just an example and then let it pass um Adeline uh says will missions eventually move away from the Moby glass app and be more focused on other means
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of accepting them such as the mission givers themselves or Interactive Terminals and stuff like that yeah yeah we we we would like in the future um the way that you obtain missions to be a slightly more personable experience um but at the end of the day you're Nev you're not really ever going to get away from a scenario where you are using your Mobil glass to read uh Mission descriptions or see the objectives or even accept them but accepting I mean when you go to like Eckhart when you sit down with him you do a little chit chat you still bring up your mobile class to accept it so this this aspect isn't gonna go however so that's that's always going to be there but there may be other ways that we want to do it um one way that the narrative team um and some other designers want to go
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for is a sort of like um sort of simple Mission Giver a sort of mission Giver light which isn't quite as like elaborate as something like Eckhart um but it would be like something where you have a sort of generic NPC like someone you just meet on the street who wants to do an parent and they they would say hey I want you and then I mean I'm not don't know what the lines are going to be and they're probably quite simple lines but you would then go over to them you'd have a simpler interact with them but then they'd offer you a mission you take the air and do their mission or their Quest or whatever it is and you go and do it and and so there would be a more organic rather than going to the mission Giver in the bar it would be like walking down the street and catching up and and hearing something and getting involved with someone's business in a nice way definitely more you know in situation more diegetic although we're never going
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to get away from them the Moby glass no big glasses it's like our mobile phones today yeah try to try to live life without one right now I mean it's possible but I mean the kind of world I'd like to live in yeah uh Driftwood Badger that's the one I love that name the Driftwood Driftwood Roger I have no clue so that's just like it's like a wooden bed like a badger that's already made like a carved out of Driftwood yeah or is it a living Badger that just feeds on Driftwood it's an amazing name are you in the chat let us know Driftwood Badger uh has a question that's actually near and dear to my heart I've given Dave I've given Dave a haddock some crap for this in the past uh it was discussed a couple years ago on video about how all the mission givers this was me he's talking about me
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because I called them out on it uh all the mission givers in the universe are mostly all criminals and scumbags or at least very morally gray that still seems to be the case what are the plans for giving non-criminals submission givers that don't make them want to take a long hot shower after uh what can I see Dave Haddock is Shady AF that's all I can just now it's just it's just how it ended up it's just we talked about it's really the same answer we talked about on the video a couple a couple years ago it's just um it was we had all the legal things you know Tessa was still in the universe at the time you know like it's so it's like well we wanted to start you know putting in some of that morally Grace those became the focus those became the first things and then as you already answered earlier in the day the the you know the mission Giver team kind of got her rearranged and stuff and that lost
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some priority and now that it's back with narrative uh you know the that's sort of picking up steam again it's also really dependent on the character team and really depending on the animation team because the mission Giver requires way more animation work than any other information because they have a unique location exactly exactly so so it's just a lot of things that you have to come together to do them um and stuff like this but there's a list the best I can offer is that there's a list internally I've seen it there are more Mission givers that aren't scumbags and that aren't you know just aren't Clovis darlie and and stuff like that no there's this this um I mean they're not in the game yet exactly but there is there's some from Crusader who I think like I I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be like security yep uh like you've got them there right they're
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naming yeah unless you don't want to read it uh but but he's saying Gibbs and Gibbs there we go I remember the Batista but I forgot the Gibbs so they're they're like a uh they're um two people they're like a mission Giver of two people which is a new thing which is partly probably why they're not in the game yet um so there's another challenge for us um so that yeah they they had a like a crusader security and they would be offering uh security missions and of course there's Tessa Bannister who isn't in the game at the moment but she will be coming back and [Music] she's not jaded enough to to be that sort of person provocative not really no but but no there it's just it's just
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let's wrap this question I'm saying there are a number of mission givers yes they've already had their pcap record they've already had their voiceovers done years ago it's just waiting for that Confluence of AI of character Art of Animation of location all that stuff that comes together that actually that has to pull one and they're all just on there is also another aspect which is we I mean we don't want to put out more Mission givers where they don't have missions yes yeah content so it's kind of like we've already done that we don't want to do more of that uh uh dirty Merc says uh uh do we have a path when a mission fails due to circumstances that are out of our control like a server or no spawns or item delivery to spawn to redo
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the mission without incurring a negative reputation this is a good question good job dirty Market yeah so the thing is if we would be able to detect if one of these bad things had happened we would have modified the mission such that it would be a fixed and you would never see it happen of course it still happens because we know it happens and in the case specifically with reputation and the reputation here because of course reputation is progression to get new missions and whatnot um we do and have selectively in the past decided we're going to remove this negative hit on a fail but the problem is if you do it everywhere you bury bugs and we don't want to bury bugs we don't want to ruin
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your day either but at the same time we need to figure out some things are within or you know some things are within the Wheelhouse of of what missions can fix and some things are outside of what emissions can fix but we still can't just like oh we turn that off and then we never really improve it as a system we never even fix it as a system so it's it's not that we're vindictive or anything we just want to make it better and sometimes we need to find the bug and and sometimes it's really hard to find the bug yeah now you may you make a good point there's always the it's workarounds not only don't solve the problem but no they've been exasperate yeah prolonged yeah it could be further down the line when suddenly like a few missions are
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using it and it's like oh it's broken so we turn it off then suddenly the um the load of designers go and Implement something and they put it across loads of missions and they turn it all on and it all breaks and then you're like oh my oh no we didn't fix the thing that was underlying that you know that would be very bad so whilst we have less missions we want to fix them before um you get loads and then they've all got the bug in it you know uh yell Merc yellow Merc uh with salvaging and Mining in admissions are there any plans for refueling missions for players who maybe own a starfare oh right um yeah that was on mine um yeah so uh refueling um yeah was being with us for quite a
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while now but it is still a play of player on player mechanic yeah um when refueling was first being designed there was an effort from a I had priority to be looking at ways for AI to reciprocate and be the refueled right um and then and then you know shifting of priorities and people moving around and refueling changed a lot came out um and the Prototype work of what refueling is for an AI didn't maintained to be matched with right now priorities for AI don't put them in alignment with working on that particular feature to to bring up so
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basically AI designers and AI Engineers would need to come back and look at that particular Behavior to for them to cooperate with a player refueling them and then you know and then it would be it would be possible but once they make a behavior then it would be something that I think we'd probably put in like service beacons so it'd be a spoofed NPC Beacon where they ask for refueling and you refuel them and then after that it would actually be something that we could put in a mission because we could make a module around it but you see how we are Downstream of something of a downstream of it that sort of Downstream so it's it's you know it's not like no one's thought about it yeah it's just it's also layers in any problem where uh you you you generally want to prioritize work that affects the largest percentage of people and not everybody owns a
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refueling ship about probably most players don't so it be so that becomes kind of a niche but the chicken the egg thing is well if you made missions for it then maybe more people would get you know yeah so it's hard to it's hard to balance that close I think we got time for two more before we uh before we bring in our next guest here uh uh since we've kind of skipped an Intel's question before here's another one from maritos any plans for larger cargo hauling missions um I've spoke about this multiple times a big fan of delivery missions uh I spend a lot of my time on Euro Truck Simulator too um so yeah I love big cargo uh cargo missions but one of the fundamental pieces we need
00:36:17
um because I I don't want to give you cargo missions where you go up click a term and it spawns in your ship I'd prefer the flow to be nice well I agree right so cargo heads cargo elevators I want you to have to move the boxes or in the future patient wants to move the boxes for you and I want that to feel like you are a delivery man who's loading your truck full of goods going from A to B maybe getting pirated uh getting there you don't always have to be pirated no always maybe it's maybe that's just an example Reddit yeah um and then take your boxes how do you drop off if I want a full proper Mission flow that makes you feel like a delivery man yeah and for those who follow the the public roadmap uh not to release me the other progress view you'll see that you know freight elevators are in development whatever
00:37:04
I've seen I've seen some internal reviews and stuff you know the other opens up and there's a whole bunch of a whole bunch of crap and it's like I got to get this into my ship and you know and they're all prototyping different ways of moving the things either by the hand tractor beam or by you know carts and stuff like this so so it's all being worked out when it's you know farther along and and we kind of we're more uh we're more confident in the exact approach you know we're going to take that's when we'll show it to you they're still kind of blue skying a couple things how best to move things from the elevator into the ship it goes into the whole thing if we could fudge it and make it all right but we want to let our key focus is fun in the verse so we want to make things that are polish that we think are going to be fun and that players are enjoy yeah and another team is working on making it to some degree fun so we would be stepping on their toes yeah very soon
00:37:52
uh let's see last question before we uh bring on our next guest uh salty Mike oh God and you managed you managed to squeeze one in here for salty Mike again I want to I want to state that I did not pick these questions these guys picked these questions this week uh there would not have been a salty my question which one is it I don't know but which one oh I don't know of course I just default into giving him so much trash it's the one that's marked I took him to Germany once it was the thing I wish I were better at this um in a recent monthly report it states the team has now taken over reputation what are the plans for the near future with expanding reputation for players in the game okay um yes reputation yeah we we've taken it
00:38:40
over from uspu and there's a few things that we're focusing on and one of the most important parts we we think we need to get out is reputation-based hostility so we want it so that you can do missions for like the nine tails in the verse and the the when you do these missions you gain reputation and you can gain reputation to a point where you're allowed at their outposts because you're friends with them you could be doing Siege Verizon and they won't shoot you because they think you're friends but then what needs to come pretty much at the same time or directly after that is a like sandbox reputation hooks so these are things like if I shoot Ed my reputation you're right next to me be Jared if okay if I shoot Jared my reputation with the entire Community
00:39:28
goes down you know right yeah anyway sorry but your reputation goes down if you shoot nine tails your reputation would decrease with them and if you keep shooting them they're gonna start hating you so even though you could start just shooting if it could be this destroying any [ __ ] or anything yeah we just want like ways of going like the players done this it's against this faction this reputation so this reputation has allies of these people so it's also going to little bit affect them but they're hated by these so these people are going to get a positive outcome from your one action yeah so we we want to have we're focusing on getting those because we think that's going to make the universe feel more alive and more influenced by your actions as a player um especially like being able to do missions for nine
00:40:17
tails will allow criminal players to live that life yeah because I think that's why we chose not to do reputation for nine tails yes up till now because we it creates this problem where we go yeah but wait a minute you do these missions for nine tails and they're supposed to like you yet you still get missions to murder them and they and you can murder them all and yet they still give you missions and because there's no connection between those two things is where it all comes apart so we don't want to expose the obvious fault but we want to after this particular Feature work reputation is a very important system to us yeah we know they're supposed to underpin everything so well many things so there you go Mike now stop asking and uh it is entirely possible to want to murder somebody that you like
00:41:03
yeah uh I've been here before of course they might not like you anymore I suppose all right so Ed uh Elliot thank you so much for hanging out for taking the time uh for agreeing to be on the show uh this week and for going through pulling your own questions stuff like this it's like this was one of the easiest shows I've ever had to do I just kind of left it with you guys and went on and I got uh I forgot what I was gonna say it's all it's like when you end the show yeah no I don't know where I was going with that I just went yeah it's gone uh anyway uh we're gonna take a short break and when we return uh we'll be back with uh Tech senior technical director of UI technical technology technically UI technology uh
00:41:56
Mr Gill uh so stay tuned we'll be right back foreign somebody in the chat was like they
00:44:22
should do a cig dunk tank at citizen Kong and I don't hate the idea maybe it's just because I'm really hot in here right now like a dunk tank sounds like a good idea uh that uh was a look at the new Louisville scheduled to make its arrival into the persistent Universe in Alpha 319 and you'll be learning even more and seeing a lot more of it uh in next week's ISC so uh stay tuned for that um for the second I'm going to show before we get to our next test I want to do a little show and tell like to highlight some of the things that make up uh our only constant here uh this week I would like to highlight one of my absolute favorites uh uh uh this is this is a scale replica of the parasite helmet
00:45:11
uh with this one there we go of the parasite helmet made by Star Citizen backer Mighty Heidi uh uh this was I commissioned this from her and and this this just arrived here uh uh if you've never seen this before uh this is a uh subscriber item uh that goes back to my time I I ran the subscriber program for like a year in 2018 or 2019 or something like that uh this is one of the items that I commissioned and had added uh to the game and the helmets in the game uh uh the the eye uh it moves with the face tracking and stuff this one doesn't uh but but yeah so check that out that's available in the uh in the subscriber store the the in-game one not this one this is this is a special one-of-kind uh made from me by again Star Citizen Mighty Heidi uh I'm just gonna put that right here for the rest of the show
00:46:00
right there look at that look how gorgeous that is uh yeah our next guest is uh uh technical director of UI technology is that what we decided yeah yeah okay newly promoted just did I don't get it right uh uh uh uh David Gill Dave how you doing how you doing I've never called you Dave in my life it sounded wrong when I said it uh most people you have a nickname occasionally there's a person in Game Dev who who has a nickname that's completely separate from their names you have a nickname you want to do you want to share that or should we not share that with people no no you can share that yeah even my parents called me so really yeah your nickname is bone it is yeah which isn't the coolest nickname in the world but you know you don't get to choose your nickname that's the rule right yeah
00:46:48
now uh before we started the first half Elliot and I were talking about how he had heard a story about how you eat her two different stories about how you got that name and I said I'd never heard a story I'd never even asked I preferred the mystery but since we brought it up where did this nickname come from um it's something as straightforward as I'm quite thin I'm sorry no I'm not gonna that's not broadcastable it's a good thing Elliot's not miked back there anymore uh so uh bone this is your this is your your first time on the live show in quite a few years at least the first time in the spaceship here uh tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what you do for Star Citizen um well as you point out newly promote it but uh I'm the guy that makes I'm I'm a game coder essentially at
00:47:37
heart but I'm a coder that writes the stuff that allows people to make UI so I don't actually make the uis I make the things that make the uis from a bit like a tools program but or an engine programmer that kind of Direction you have one uh thing that you've made uh that the payments within the Star Citizen Community everybody should everybody should know this but now though we haven't talked about it in a while we for a while they were talking about it almost every single week building blocks yes you're one of the key people responsible for building yes that's my baby and so yeah I'm responsible for responsible for making it but also responsible for uh keeping it working as well it's back there not it's like yeah it's one thing to make something but in a game that's still in active development keeping it working is almost as much
00:48:27
work if not more than making it the first time well it's actually developing it as well so it's um getting better each each uh quarter and like providing better tools and more interesting stuff for designers and for engineers so they can make better uis so the whole thing is is never really standing still it's always in development so like fundamentally it works now and now we're like trying to improve it and to prove the tools because the faster people can prototype and make stuff the better uis you end up having better uis about the features you have so now your title before you got promoted it was senior principal engineer senior principal engineer and the engineer and programmer sometimes interchangeable uh code or even yeah yeah I I know I notice
00:49:16
in in the UK here that they use engineer a lot more than program in the states the 10 News Pro programmer once we once uh we once intent I had when I was first starting here and I was like Hey I want to do it I'm going to do a thing about how the difference between engineers and programmers and whatnot I'm the nervous just like it's just cultural it's the same thing I'm like well that's a really short segment uh so we didn't we never did that um but in your new role as technical director do you have a sense of of what of what those responsibilities are going to be um yes uh well these these I was gonna say uh before we get into this I want to say when I say new I mean the email went out this week like it's really no when I booked them he was still the UI engineer so so congratulations by the way but that's what I want to say do you have a
00:50:04
sense yet of what the new responsibilities are going to be so it's really about tooling at the moment it's um we do have tools for making the UI but um they're not very user-friendly um the two guys won previously would definitely attest to this um so we want something that's definitely more designer friendly definitely more artistically friendly as well so and it's a complicated business because Chris is really into very 3D uis and we've all seen the stuff that Zane produces which is awesome but he's he's extremely Technical and what we want to do is kind of lower the bar so we don't need extremely technical people like anyone can pick it up and make cool looking stuff you know you still need artistic ability and understand your works but at the same time we want to make this really achievable for
00:50:53
the broad range of designers and artists I want to follow up on that so that it's not misconstrued and whatnot it's when we say we want to make it more broadly available we want to that is because we are a we are as a company as a team uh fast approaching if we have if not before the past over a thousand people uh you know more than half of them you know game developers and stuff you know the Thousand includes everybody our our office staff these Studio Management's like this but there's a lot of developers here all with varying levels of of technical abilities so like this if everybody could program UI everybody would the answer one so making these things accessible is is super important it's not about well let's not hire people who aren't technically proficient it's you hire people who have their proficiency here and have their
00:51:42
proficiency here but we we want you want to build a thing that doesn't require them to also have a UI programming proficiency so that you can spread this out that's how we hit this at scale but also um just do stuff quicker like if you can make uh try stuff out and go not quite so sure let me try some other things out and you're not struggling with the tools are you not struggling to all the stuff and you just go blah blah blah here's some things right yeah that that really uh suits my future and you can move on really quickly and I can produce more you can produce more work if you've got better tools it's like trying to you know trying to build a house with a tiny trowel or something like no you want some heavy machinery that can build this stuff together so the better the tools the the better people can work
00:52:32
and it frees them up to do more creative stuff rather than just screaming at their computers going these damn building blocks now for this the the the second half of the show here the second part of the show I like to dab a little more into the personal stuff we've we've talked more about work stuff than we traditionally do with everything is uh one of the areas uh we're not going to have time to like go through your whole life story or when unfortunately but we'll have your back uh one of the areas that we first connected is you obviously have a deep and Abiding Love of video games oh yeah and it's history I think the first time we ever talked was because we were in one of those big meetings where there's you know 100 people we're all and in the background of of your of your camera uh there were stand-up arcade machines there was one
00:53:22
in particular that you do you remember the the first arcade machine I I I sent you the message I'd never talked to you before and I'm like dude you have an actual freestanding uh arcade game in the in the back and I can't remember what it was right now I have a Miss Pac-Man and Gallagher um machine okay Galligan machine yeah um and then a like two-player Street Fighter six button Street Fighter machine as well but yeah I'm a I'm a big big fan of especially the mid 90s stuff and it was really cool and you've worked in Game Dev for a while now yeah and by this June it'll be 30 years 30 years in the game industry uh so one of the things I wanted to make sure that we I don't get to I don't get to talk to a whole lot of people who've been around as long as I have
00:54:09
most of the people I talk to are Young like Elliot so so so so uh one of the one of the common game development things that we don't ever get to talk about is canceled game the the game the games that disappear the every game developer has a resume with gaps where it's it's where it just looks like they didn't they didn't do anything for a year or two years because they were working on a project that didn't survive but it's NDA it wasn't it was never announced or what like this one of the ones that I know you working like I I really really want to talk about it uh you were working on an ET game yes not the ET game that everyone
00:54:59
yeah not the infamous Atari one I'm not that old there was a 20 20th anniversary of the film so the film came out in 1882 1982 so we were due for release in uh 2002 and we were doing a GameCube PS2 what mounted to do a gardening game so like ET would fly to a planet and you would pick up some seeds and then you'd bring them to your spaceship and you would cultivate these seeds and then you could cross pollinate them with other it's sort of a bit like Pokemon but with plants it's it was it was odd he's an odd character anyway like I think most people are not really aware of et's
00:55:49
abilities and well maybe I'm very aware of disabilities but he's you know he's a he's a Interstellar Gardener which is he's not the first thing you'd pick as a character for a video game but uh we had some really creative uh game designers come what was like yeah cool idea uh and it was it was a really interesting game um then our publisher was like why can we add a bit more than this just gardening bits so we when we got to these planets we would like have like puzzle puzzly sort of platform section I found the artwork you you can resume in on that can we zoom in on that it it had artwork it had artwork and everything so it obviously got kind of close um it was finished it was finished yeah
00:56:39
we finished it and it never really never released um and unfortunately the it it came around that like uh it ended the company that I was working for as well so because of the uh where the contracts worked out so it was really unfortunate because we did it at the time I did lots and lots of crunch got it got it to completion and then they go yep it's not not worth releasing now it's I'm excited to tell you some of the folks who are watching this either live on Twitch or on the YouTube Replay I might wonder why we're talking about this um it's often perceived like ISC and scl or our our marketing tools and whatnot sure they certainly have that role but I always try to uh uh attack both of them as education on the process of game
00:57:29
development itself and I've been excited to have you on this because there's this aspect of game of the story of game development not not ours but in general where you can work on a thing all the way to completion and it can still like Ed is back there you're not he's like yeah this this happens like like all of us have been to a Game Dev mixer and met somebody knows something if it's not happened to us we know somebody who spent years in the morning something that never you know that never saw the light of day and you just it's it's it's it's it's one of the really awesome aspects of Star Citizen because we're we're out so it's like you you can play our stuff while we're building it's like this so you know we don't have to you know we we chose a model where we don't have to worry about that but uh but that story that aspect of game
00:58:16
development is is an educational one that that I've wanted to to share and to discuss with folks did we're almost out of time but did did you oh yeah it's been 20 years the company's out of business and I'm sure the NDA probably doesn't you know apply did you did you did you bring it I may have I may have sneaked I do have a the copy this like literally look at this look at give me my zoom in can I zoom in look at this is just a burn CDR that this this is this is the ET game you see the copy I think that's the only copy in the world this might be the only copy in the world that's that's also the PS2 one which is kind of strange but yeah that is the PSD the only copy in the world
00:59:06
don't drop it so [ __ ] happy right now that's my one sorry you're not miked we can't hear you we can't no no you know he's not Mike you can't hear his question serious question that's what we talked about you can't introduce something to get in trouble when you make PS2 games not everyone's got a PlayStation 2 dev kit so if you've got QA you would burn actually burn uh earn a copy of the game don't burn a copy of the game you might be the game that week but uh QA will be using or it might go up to the publisher for them to evaluate and things like that so
00:59:53
um yeah it's it's a bit of a more of a manual process and is this one that would play in a PS2 or will it be a place uh probably a Dev kick but I'm going to have a look David yeah can we look on eBay for a PS2 dev kit okay it's work related I promise um they're quite pricey uh uh bone that that's it so we have time you survived thank you so much surviving me for taking the time uh for hanging out with us folks watching at home or or at work or if you're like Captain Richard back in the day in the in your car on your lunch uh 3 18 2 uh has just gone out to a live servers uh with a lot of you know with
01:00:40
more bug fixes and more optimizations uh uh for the gameplay experience uh it's also I can see from my from my internal chats here it also helped us reveal a couple of malicious queries on the back end stuff and the folks are working to fix that stuff up so like I said half these things fix things and have these things reveal things that need to be fixed uh so that's that's currently underway uh I understand there might be a Xeno threat sometime soon I don't have any specific data maybe we should leave the mic that next time we'll talk about leaving the mic up but there's a Xeno threat event happening sometime soon keep an eye out on the robinspace industries.com website and socials uh for details on that and then remember of course uh ISE returns from its quarterly Hiatus uh next week with an episode dedicated entirely to
01:01:29
the new Louisville that's coming online uh with the upcoming Alpha 319 uh it this you see a little you saw a little bit of it out the window today and during our intermission it looks amazing the the the the the the Montreal folks are just killing it as are the folks in uh Frankfurt who worked on the lighting and the atmosphere the light in the atmosphere really set this thing off now uh the whole sky is like burned it's so cool it's so cool check that out next week on ISD uh for this show Star Citizen live uh that was Ed that was Elliot this was uh bone I'm Jared take care everybody we'll see you all here next week

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.