Star Citizen Live: Mission Features

3 February 202300:59:441,599 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:05
Hello everybody welcome to another episode of Star Citizen live the mission feature team I'm your host Jared Huckabee and if you've never seen Star Citizen live before it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we hang out with some of our developers we chat we we shoot the oh I don't want to use my one that that early in the show we shoot the stuff uh we talk about the stuff that's uh been worked on being worked on and will be worked on uh and stuff like that uh on today's show we are a proud and honored I think about the conversation we had before uh I'm very honored to have members of the mission feature team on the show let's meet Ed and Elliot and Lars and James and I remembered all four hi guys hi hello hey so I we were just
00:00:55
talking about the about how you know all those when you're doing like the Nintendo directs not just Nintendo but E3 anything like this I was like I'm very honored to be here and blah blah blah blah so it got in my head sorry sorry I ruined your take if I were professional I could have avoided it uh so yeah members of the mission future team uh you guys make the features that are used in the missions way to butcher us [Music] completely true this has been how many years has this team been here for how many years have I been here exactly it's even worse all right so let's just start off let's introduce you some some of you folks have been on like like we all know we all know Elliot we're gonna leave Elliot for for last we've seen Ellie he was on
00:01:43
citizen Khan and stuff like that uh let's go to the go to the people we haven't seen in a while some of you haven't seen in a long while some of you we've never seen before let's start with uh let's start with you who are you what do you do for Star Citizen right so I'm Lars and obviously part of the mission feature team um quite a new higher relatively um we're approaching one year at this point and uh started yeah just working on new features that we'll be talking about later and did a bit of that on the background Correia worked a bit on that cool uh which what's your title Lars I think I think it's official like systems designer two yeah congratulations thank you the sequels are always better than the original uh
00:02:31
first time at Ghostbusters 2 earlier I was supposed to choose a good movie uh James who are you what do you do hello um so I'm James Tyler I'm a systems designer too as well light Lars um luckily enough to work on the mft team um I remember when I got offered the thing and I felt very honored to join the team that was already there um but yeah recently worked on time trials which we'll go over later I believe and I also spent a bit of time earlier last year working on Siege of Verizon with Elliot oh Ed who are you what do you do and most especially what is your title okay fine well my name is Edward Fuller and I am the senior principal principal system designer didn't you mean assistant no I
00:03:20
am not that I'm thinking men assistant no it's senior principal system designer on the mission feature team and I've been here for over about six and a half years on that team and so I've worked on all kinds of missions over that time um and we are also work on the law system and the hostility system and also Dynamic events so the one that I maintain look after is Xeno threat um for v18 as well um and yeah and there's some other future stuff that maybe we'll touch on and last and least Elliot who are you hello the more familiar we get the worse I get I apologize all right so Ellie who are
00:04:10
you and what do you do for Star Citizen hi I'm Ellie Moby I'm the actual senior principal no you're not I'm the principal designer on the mft team and I make missions features and a bunch of other stuff that you kindly went over all of it um most recently Siege in the future you all know I'm building investigation missions and I also uh help Lars and everyone else uh maintain I mean I help everyone else as well yeah well I help you yeah well consistent um so yeah we all work together and build a lot of stuff but I'm known for Siege gonna be one of those shows uh so uh we don't get to talk we don't actually talk to a lot of principals I want to talk about that real quick uh folks who watch
00:04:58
the shows uh regularity I mean I've been doing this for going on eight years now and stuff it's kind of easy to work out the the associate or Junior to you know just what it is one two three and then you get the seniors and stuff like this and then leads and so just but principals are are usually kind of off to the side we don't get to talk a lot about principles so what is a principle what what does that modifier do a title mean at cig anyway well I mean for me I think principles are they're people who specialize in in the subject matters that they they focus on um and they are you know they really know that they also are very dependable yeah hear that little
00:05:48
no but they can also like uh see complex features through um and also guide more Junior uh designers and even senior designers and you know show their Juniors the ropes and uh show them the systems and talk them through the whole process of developing Star Citizen and stuff like that I mean maybe Elliot has something he'd like that I will yeah we're kind of like an information well so we need to know a lot about all of the systems we own in case anyone come needs to know something about say like oh how do I set up jurisdictions and then they then they know to come to mft and they can talk to the principals even though we might not work every day with them we were like a sponge we have to remember that information and not let any of it go so we can go oh right okay this is how that worked but uh for a lot
00:06:36
of the time we've been writing a lot of documentation oh yeah so we don't have documentation it's like you have so many designers and they they come to you asking questions and at some point here it's like I can't answer the same question like 20 times I need to start writing this down and you and then a lot of it's just like pouring all of that information onto pages so that more and more people can just digest it in their own time and the worst thing that comes from that is that obviously we're still building the game is you're right it takes you like a full day to write this huge system up and I've done it and then the next day one of the engineers ago I changed how this worked and you're like oh it's even worse than that because the whole day that you're spending writing on it you're not actually developing something new so you so your work pauses for a day you spend a day writing it all up so other people go like I'm done while you were writing that I changed that I changed this and you're like
00:07:25
that's why there's a there's a lot in in any video game development I've worked a few places but there's a thing called tribal knowledge yeah there's so much there's so much that is never written down because it just it changes so frequently and rapidly that to spend time writing it down would be a waste of everybody's stuff so it's it's the the tribal knowledge can sometimes get a bit overwhelming and I think that's a big part of where principles you know come from it's it's it's the role that I often fulfill and on my half of the things like this it's this it's just people like all right in 2016 we had this thing where we did this and like nobody's touch everyone what is that I'm like oh that's that's this and you can go here and find that and then you bring out a mothballs and find out it still works and it'll solve
00:08:11
a thing that you need over here yeah like that so yeah it's uh it's always a it's always a battle between you know you should write everything down but you know a lot of the time doing when you're writing and then if you know it's going to change next week you know it's going to change next week you don't want to waste that time writing it down now and he's going to change but you don't know how much it's going to change you about three years ago I think I remember trying to write a document about how how to uh put like multiplayer stuff logic into missions and I started writing it and then I was like uh this is going to take ages and then I just knew on the horizon it was all going to change so I just went ah Luke I'm not gonna ride that now I'm just not going to bother he'll be it'll be out of date by by like next week but page says that's good yeah I believe
00:09:00
written it now like we've written them now because if things are solidified a lot more but at the time they they were not super pretty bad I've seen both sides of the coin as well like when I first joined I found a couple of little systems where you know I'd go to earlier and be like please help me with this I don't understand it um and then he'd be like yeah that part is tribal knowledge and you know we're going to do better and we're going to write that um documentation down and then Ed and Elliot have gone away spent like Ed um Elliot said you know a day writing this and it saved us so much time further down the line when you know me and Lars or whoever's coming back to these things we can just read it we you know there's gifts there's all sorts you know to help us out so I try to put personally in mind I put like memes and pictures and then I have to go because Ed is my senior I have to send him the document uh and he goes through it and he's like
00:09:49
remove that yeah like I'm not that I'm not that killjoy and I'm very well of the memes are in there embedded the uh uh in our Halloween special we did back in 2019 when we did a Jeremiah and I did a sequence called the things we've seen and it was exclusively of memes that were pulled from the con from our Confluence pages and so it was it was all things that had been embedded in design documents and process documents usually in what not to do or it ends up like this uh if you've never seen uh that uh uh it's on our YouTube channel it's called the easy Hab of horror uh highly recommend it uh ignore the fact that I'm dressed like an old Jewish vampire beside the point there's a lot of you'll see a great example of the memes that these guys uh often embed in their complex pages
00:10:40
the mission feature team itself now the the there's some I don't want to the the there there's some I'm trying the other word I want uh there may be some misunderstandings or what about about what the team actually does because the name is like you know for Mission feature team it's not missions team it's Mission feature team now you guys do make missions we've all we've had we've done enough segments where it's like oh yeah I worked on this Mission just like this but you guys also make the uh the mission verbs the the the components the technology that then other people who are not on the mission of each team go and make more missions and stuff like that uh so talk to me about that balance like like like what determines whether you guys are the ones who make the mission and whether you
00:11:28
guys are the ones who make the technology like the time trials and stuff like that that then other people and other teams will go and make their own missions so we always we always try to make the first mission so when it comes to building the feature the best way to build the feature is to build it in a mission to be able to able to test you know it works so we know it works exactly so you know when we come up with uh the time trial system you know and uh James will design it and they'll also build the first mission with Korea uh Korea overall everyone looks at it as the new Creator update but internally we go well that's the location of the attack module that is essentially for telling if there are bad guys at allocation and sending our mission to retake it then there's the timed item dispenser which is what jump town runs on as well and career runs on it's just spit out boxes for us at every x amount of minutes so we build all those modules
00:12:17
and then build something to use them because then we can go to the content teams we've built this this is how we used it as an example and here's all the documentation knock yourselves out right and everybody from like uh the EU locations teams to the Montreal teams anybody else once they see the you've now given them a working example and uh once once once you guys get around to write in the documentation they don't have the documentation of how it breaks apart and what modules are being used for what and now they can go and make their own mission content we've seen that with the the Montreal team who are making the you know all those new um a crashed derelict locations and and The Shanty towns and stuff they're using the mission features that you guys have put together now in assembling all their own missions yes you know from and stuff it's kind of also like it's good for
00:13:06
them because they can focus on content expansion uh a lot more than bug fixing because I work with uh I think his name's I can't pronounce it I'm going to say yam it's a JT GT okay yeah I won't try the last name oh yeah I'm sorry if you're watching butchered it um so what he'll do is he'll sell the eliminate uh what we call eliminate all which is just kill a bunch of people at this location he'll set up and then if there's a bug with it because we own the base system there'd be a bug with every single one all over the system because they're all built modular so then he can just go right there's a bug here off you go Elliot and then carry on expanding and then we can investigate into if it's on our side or maybe it's something going wrong with setup or something like that so it it just gives them more time to do content expansion rather than focusing on these little bugs that we
00:13:54
can quickly do and that's how that that that's how this scales that's how you know people like it's it's you're You're Building prototypes and stuff that are often used in Stanton stuff but when you know people are you know when people are concerned that like pyro will be empty or won't have stuff to do it's like there are other all these other location teams now have all the are they called verbs is that what they're called the mission verbs verbs and modules modules yeah verbs of the gameplay type and then the module is what they plug in to achieve that verb yeah it could be multiple could be one yes you know gotcha so the idea the idea would then be that with all these well all these features all the modules and anything that you know they can now go and the power and just start adding missions all over the place it's just like Lego they're just putting the bricks on top of each other and figuring out what they want I've made
00:14:42
some hideous Lego though I think I'm sure we all have I think one of the things that stands out as well from mft is the fact that we do make those modules for everyone else to use but we also think of the developer experience as well within you know how do they want to use this how you know how can we speed up the the mechanic for them to even just place it in the game and whatnot yeah and modules aren't done once they're they're made I mean Elliot's probably adapted some of those modules like added new features as content teams want to express missions in ways that they current modules just don't quite serve and then he goes back in and and they adds those inputs and adds that functionality and then even more possibilities are possible and back to documentation you make an interesting point James about it's not just
00:15:30
it's so often assumed that we just make things for the players but there are many teams I like I loved when I get to do things with the tools came or whatever and about the stuff that we make for the developers you also have to make this interfaceable usable by all the teams and then you will get requests from other team members like this this module is impossible to use I can't get it to do like can you just can you put a button over here to skip this step it's like that is there an interface is there like a specific interface for the mission features to use the modules like like like if I'm on the Montreal team and I'm going to make a mission and say okay what am I opening up to build it is it flow graph is it it's documentation pay over documentation it tells them in which tools they can do what to do what um when we talk about say having that
00:16:19
developer experience when you like if anyone else who opens up stuff like ue5 that is a highly polished engine for wide use if any of the games company it is not widely punished it is make it work and then the devs can usually figure it out and sometimes it is the most horrible or like very difficult to do uh sort of pipeline however we make big effort to try and go right well if we put this here and put this here and this here and that here that's going to make it more obvious and it will document it like this because they need to read the documentation because it's not always 100 clear so there are little bits and Bobs where we'll we'll change how something works purely so on the front end of it for another developer there you can go Ah that's what that does that makes more sense and we do a
00:17:07
lot of heavy lifting on the back end to save them having to do that pain on the front end some plain English inputs and stuff like that as in the background it's all like okay crazy thing Chances Are Over the longer course of development there will eventually be some kind of interface absolutely it does improve like like the the tools guys are working all the time or making it better yeah and we feed that back to them and and they make it better ways I got tagged on Twitter about in the monthly report there was a mention of the subsumption Apollo yes a tool and they're like hey will you do a segment and tell us about the subsection Apollo and I went to the air guys and I'm like I'm like hey what what the heck is Apollo like it's basically a GUI first assumption that's that's all it's it's it's it's it's just a little wrapper that sits on top of of subsumption and
00:17:56
lets them access it while inside the engine so they don't have to go to another problem but it is essentially just an interface yeah uh that that sits on top So eventually there'll be something like that and then and then this will just keep yeah yeah so let's talk about 318 uh uh we'll start with the time trials James because we've already mentioned it um the time trials was was a new tech that that that you guys developed that basically unlocked all of these location teams to suddenly start going oh we can now add races here and there and there and so like that um how did that come about well as you mentioned you know unlocking those areas for those teams was one of the major goals there and we thought uh when it comes to racing you know how how can we make an implementation that
00:18:45
can be used in so many different ways because obviously the Pu is like a Sandbox you know you want to be able to just plonk this down wherever you want um you know you want to make interesting locations and so when it came to racing in general and we'd looked what came before so we had scramble racing in the past um and we wanted something new um and we looked at what people enjoy doing and we looked at the community in general as well like there's so many amazing racing communities out there and what they'd done is they had these leaderboards on a website you know that people raced around now you had to you know trust the person had done that in that time or you know there was no way of them actually you know having their times or anything tracked in in officially um so it we ended up coming together me Ed Luke working on this design together
00:19:34
and thinking the best ways of basically giving them those capabilities of being able to do that in the game aim time trials akin to kind of rallying was kind of the first thing that came to my head I'm a big fan of rallying like Conor McRae and whatnot and it also kind of benefited as well in a way that you didn't need a million different other people in that one location to do the race you could if no one else came to that location still have a fun time on your own that led us to yeah the current implementation really um we do have some future goals and I think Ed will speak more on that um yeah well maybe in the future of this show but it's v18 yeah but it was it was super fun to make and um look at Ed
00:20:22
being such a good guest no we're on the topic of 318 keeping up yeah yeah keep the show on yeah I like Tom Holland and then you know stuff but it's another good example about Johan we were doing the this the feature segments on ISE uh because that story was about the the physical creation of the racetrack and stuff like that so you saw a lot of artists and things but it's a it's a it's a wonderful reminder that we can't put everybody who works on a thing in a single you know segment of the stuff they're they're these are the people who have been who have stepped forward to tell this story uh today but there are many folks underneath from from Mission feature folks to Tech artists to animators to everything that all make these things possible uh what else did you work on that's that players can look forward to in 318. Korea is coming out new Korea so uh yeah we're parked
00:21:11
outside yeah that's really cool depends on what side of the fence you're on with Korea too if you enjoy it or not PVP focused we tried for so yeah some people might not as much enjoy it but um the university meant to mesh everyone together so if you go if you don't like it you've got to try avoid it or be a good citizen right that's the other way be good yeah like I said that's the easiest way to avoid it is don't break the law exactly of course of course we need the hostility system and law system to like always work I mean you can't put you can't put the emphasis entirely on the place they are citizens that belong to us and we do constantly Monitor and look at those Luke is constantly on spec they're always on it you'll probably see his blue little Avatar pickled at random hey thanks I'll look into this yeah so so
00:22:01
when it's all like perfect and operating then we can blame exactly until then you know we should we share a little hey if you've got a problem at Luke directly yeah uh pickle the random one letters attention to Luke Presley I know he's watching right now I'm sorry Luke pick your target sorry uh what else is in 318 that you guys worked on uh The Horizon missions the um uh go to a go to an horizon Island and kill people I saw a couple of people playing a uh citizen Kate uh did a video on it that was very uh very fun to watch because uh there was this odd thing while she'd play in it and the the server performance was really good so the AI was acting how they was meant to and they were snapping and it got to the point where in the video I think she said I need to put a silencer on because I keep just getting annihilated from miles away which was
00:22:49
very nice um it's a first it's first step to sort of branching out some of those missions into new locations um and making more use out of it because you know we built those we built those platforms for the siege of a rise and dynamic event but when the dynamic event is right not running you have this location this beautifully gorgeous well-crafted yeah it wasn't doing anything so you know it's a you know double dipping where possible is a Hallmark of all video game development yeah it's it's it's if you can build something for one use good you can build it for three uses amazing yeah so uh so yeah so there's new platform missions uh and 318 prison designer Max um so he made the prison Mission he's made it so there's AI wandering about
00:23:36
you kill him you can loot him you can um then sell the loot to the Contraband kiosk we actually recently made a change where he was having a problem where uh people had to go to this one little area to sell the Contraband and sell all the minables and then you had some some of the bad players we talked about stood there waiting for something Mike there you go just just hammering bad people murdering the bad people just like killing people so what we did was we was like right let's move the mining kiosk to three different locations to give those of people a bit of a chance and sort of spread it out a bit more um so we implemented that and then the other thing Max did was uh the jump challenge changes we added two item dispensers into jump town so there is now more boxes that you can get and we also snazzed up the location with the help of the art team and the locations
00:24:24
team added a little bit more so it was less of a one inch tree sort of thing because that's a choke point we wanted to add a few more ways of getting in and out and you've seen some amazing videos on that as well we love watching all of them says and Kate again bed bananas did a good one books I had to do I had to do two entire quarters of content on 318 I've seen it all yeah uh what else is in 318 oh my God no I mean I mean I've been working on Xeno fret trying to get that uh up to speed with 318. it's a lot in 318 I mean persistence is is the big one the big fundamental change so you know making a dynamic event work in those situations it's a lot it's a lot
00:25:11
to do yeah and I imagine just little things like now it tracks Mission progress and you and that that part that problem actually says you've actually done the missions I saw I've seen people on PG it's like oh I logged out I did a mission like a week ago and I came back and it was still listed there yeah well uh Mission persistence isn't something that we we have right now properly in 318 we will need to I mean I'm just stepping you back here well I'm just I'm it's more it's more that persistence is uh it's just that so much has changed since xenother last run right touches every system every system has persistence in it or not in it or whatever amounts of in it wasn't there a bug like previously because of persistence where if the
00:25:58
javelin was destroyed its records stay there and then the other Javelin was trying to come in right I don't know I think that's something we have that with uh we had that with the AI reinforcements that land they land if you blow that ship up the other one just like well I I'm still gonna try land there even though you still exist and yeah it's a fun thing to battle we will be seeing the changes mandated by persistence for the for the next year for the next two years it's it's all these things everything everything up to this point was made for the game in a certain State and now with persistence there's all there's changes to the AI like hey if there's already a crash ship there you know because it didn't have to worry about that before it's like oh maybe we don't land that I think there's a bad thing it's also it's also quite
00:26:46
challenging to work on a game that has persistence turned on by default because what we do is we uh we run servers locally and test our stuff but if you shut that server down it persists so when you run your server from nowhere it's it's still there and all the stuff is exactly as you left it sometimes that's annoying because you're like you're looking for a fresh stay but it isn't that's persistence and so you're like this is like making games again I've never made a game where I have to worry about persisting things from my previous run it you really do have to think in a new way to work on that situation that's a great point I hadn't considered that there's a lot of a lot of folks um have like a second computer under their desk and whatever where they run local servers you know because they're working on a thing and then for every time up until now you could just count every time you load and then everything
00:27:34
was reset to zero you could just start refresh but now it's like oh where did I leave this with this last test through when you're fixing bugs you have to be really mindful of that because you're thinking okay is is this is this bug still here because it's persisted because I had an issue with that with I was setting up some elevators and um it was there and the bug was there I fixed it I fixed it and then I I ran the server again and the entity had changed I fixed it except it persisted in the broken state so I was like okay fine okay so this is only a bug in this moment so if I you know purged the lock go again it really is fixed but you know it's it's challenging but it's it's kind of fun you're also messes with our debug tools like um games
00:28:29
so yeah in the debug thing when we're playing like so I'm testing a ugf mission or I'm uh waiting for the shuttle uh because I'm testing something and I'm still there and then like lies like hey you got second on James like you got a second I go over to them and then I come back and I haven't turned god mode on which will stop me from dying and all of a sudden yeah exactly I'm tired my food and my hydration levels have gone to zero so my guy is having the worst time of his life he can't see anything I can't hear anything and then I'm like upon god mode and then I do my bug but then every time afterwards when I log in my guy is still dying of hydration permanently until I actually Purge the server and restart so I'm stuck in that hellscape of uh so basically your guy is 44 years old yeah
00:29:17
I think I think the funniest thing that happened to me was um during time trials prototyping because of persistence coming in and I didn't you know realize what it was going to do um I'd logged out prior here like mid-race you know went away from my lunch I came back to record a video for an internal review kind of thing I thought I was doing really good in this race I was beat you know getting on time for the platinum and then all of a sudden my wreckage was just at the end of the race and I just smashed straight into myself which you know ended my race prematurely yeah on Korea we actually were debugging it and all of a sudden we fly in and there's three of the the chief of security they're super bosses they're super tanky so I'll come in there with a pistol just to test something and there's three of them's like there he is and I just got lit up instantly it's like that's a problem yeah uh zizer and Chad is like I wonder
00:30:05
who Jared was referring to I was referring to me I'm the one that's constantly dehydrated and exhausted all right so we've only got a few minutes left let's talk about plans for the future uh I will I want specific dates what what what's what's next for the mission feature we we know investigations are in the mix somewhere developing investigations let's just follow up on that real quick how how's that going uh yeah it's going well um working we're at still the stage we're working very closely with narrative um because they might be making a story and it might have a certain scenario in it that I've not considered on the system side that I have to like go reconsider for example one of the stories that the Adam one of the narrative people had made up um he just added a little a little note
00:30:53
is like set dressing there are two like cocktail glasses on the side of the pool and I'm like I didn't think about spawning set dressing I should probably spawn set dressing so that I have to update the thing but that's all part of the iteration is why it's good to get the stories first because then I know right my system will achieve everything here so yeah investigation's going well cool what else are you guys working on uh Salvage Missions at the moment Salvage Mission so yeah we wanted a way to kind of show the the new Salvage mechanic so uh yeah I'm currently working on some different like different legalities and versions over the three of them sure uh so there's a legal version where we have a new company that's being made I'm not sure if I can call it it's called Adagio and they're literally just Salvage contracts so they have just they have a bunch of Salvage and they sell you the rights to a piece of salaries like you pay us like x amount of credits
00:31:42
or uh UEC and then like that's like here's your Lot number you can go get it there and then you fly over and then it's yours to keep and it's kind of in the safe area of this point like a LaGrange point where they kind of towed it there then there's the um illegal version where basically uh another an legal Corporation new one called the Tar Pits um they're like well they hear about Salvage and they're like well you can go there but we know that um security forces are going there to investigate what happened you have an hour good luck and then you basically have to race there and once you're there like you have an hour you have timer on screen and if you're staying there too long well then all of a sudden like you know Fighters come in or like other investigative forces and if you know if you're in a vulture for example well that's is not really good at combat and
00:32:30
we're actually trying to get a mission Giver which I won't spoil who it is so have fun trying to discover that but a new Mission Giver we're gonna give him uh him or her some love and they're gonna actually do a kind of a mini rush where it's like well there's been a massive battle somewhere in the middle of space um there's a lot of money to be made but it's an open contract so here you go but you might find people and then it's we're really trying to have emergent gameplay Community Focus so it could be three votes that are like all happily salvaging away and then an org is like yeah this is our Salvage now they come in with like a reclaimer and like a whole combat Suite it's like okay kids move aside and this is ours now uh just to every time there's a question about a mystery Mission Giver chat goes Tessa Tessa's coming back who's Tessa yeah
00:33:18
it's not Tesla these guys don't know who Tessa is yeah it predates these guys that wasn't evil testers but it's not tested they've got a thing for her her time will come eventually it's actually three Picos in a trench coat um I think at the moment mind this top secret um until it gets a bit of a director sign off but um I'm still keeping an eye on time trials as well um the big thing for us at the moment is there's a lot of data coming in for our analytic and analytics um so keep everyone keep playing them because we need that data we really need that data um so we can make the platinums harder we can see if people are crashing we can you know we get all kinds of data from
00:34:04
that and which is the most popular ships um that will lead us into you know helping us with our design decisions down the line but that's what I'm maintaining at the minute yep yeah uh well I'm allowed to talk about that we have we have uh we have a planned uh a new Dynamic event which will be like classic racing so it'll be like uh laptop based racing and it'll be multiplayer so time trials is a single you against the clock whereas this would be like people together racing together a racing Dynamic event yes exactly yeah exactly and the plan is to have uh we'd have maybe two new ship tracks and maybe a ground race um in there as a mix and then we'd we'd also uh limit it so that you'd have only
00:34:54
your specific ships or ship would be allowed to race on the race day yeah and uh you guys are also working on yeah there's mining missions to go along with the salvaged missions the uh the mining missions are what we're calling resource Rush uh essentially once again we give you uh you're buying the rights to a location that's uh far out and there's going to be like a an asteroid cluster gas cloud thingy and um we spawn a bunch of minables in there and essentially what it is is that each player can buy the rights to go there and then they have a finite amount of spawned resources that they have to mine now we make the contract open so it could be salty Mike but I don't think it'll last long it could be Birch going
00:35:41
in it's not everyone fighting um it's just really bad isn't he he's terrible I don't know why he still plays the game but I've got no clue there's absolutely no reason for us to pick on salty Mike today I mean after all he's a cig chill and we secretly pay him under the table yeah I'm so sorry salty Mike um and in the mic so the mining missions are you know also we talked about you know making multiple uses of things obviously a lot of the same Salvage kind of underlying tech for that stuff and then um in the monthly report this will be the last thing we'll talk about before we let you go uh there was some talk about uh researching uh defend your ship oh yeah yeah it's not really missions it's system it's like it's it's probably what everyone's sort of been
00:36:29
clamoring for it's it's not Mission it's um it's the right it's the right to sort of defend your ship which is probably what everyone really wants right yeah they want to be able to stand their ground in their ship that's what that is and not get a crime stand and not to get a crime story that's what the mission goes into it was building other stuff you know we we don't just make missions absolutely me Ed and Luke are also making it looking at a system and trying to improve the law aspect of that someone you know might not have the right to then send the ship from an intruder or somebody board it's like well I can't legally kill him because he's not got a crime stat but it's like you've not given permission to be there so it's it's systems like that and we work on a lot of those as well we're always reading um like Spectrum I'm on it like every night which is terrible really bad but I read all the threads on there and anything yeah on Spectrum yeah so it's
00:37:17
terrible no no read it and then the other ones and we're just I'm always like zeroing on the ones that Matt uh the things we own like hostility and law and and then we're always just picking them up and sending in the next day uh embedded QA are just going through everything we found and and we're just always trying to improve those systems and make them better I'm actually really glad you said you said there there's all there's always this there's always this persistent kind of narrative out there that oh they only listen to the streamers or you know we've thrown a lot of shade of salt We only listen to the streamers or the YouTubers or whatnot so it's it's heartening you know I made a joke but it's heartening to know that there are you know dabs individual Debs who are still going to the internal forums and you know reading the things
00:38:05
that people are posting it's really interesting I love reading the forums I mean there's a lot there's there's everyone's got a voice there and um I can't respond to everything in fact I do respond very occasionally but I don't because it's not in my wheelhouse I'm not the authority on it that sort of reason is that why I can't respond even if I am sort of the authority I'm not really sure what we're going to do so I can't really answer it and so and I can still read it you don't always have the time to write your documentation the time spent writing replies that's outside of my work hours that's stuff I do in my own sometimes um a work desk eating my lunch um probably shouldn't be at the you know my desk eating my lunch on on lunch but I'm scouring through Reddit myself and
00:38:52
I'm just typing in race and then if you if you said something that has the word race in your comment I have probably read it in the last month is it good and the bad you know I mean you've got proper boundaries I just stop reading talk about Luke I'd like to see this mentioned in his uh quarterly review it's just too interesting though you get very personal about it I remember I was watching uh a couple of streamers over Christmas Christmas Eve uh playing Korea and some are broke so I just remote it into work on Christmas Eve and was like I'm gonna fix this this is super hypocritical because when I tried to do it I was like I was looking like it's your holiday get the hell out of here oh my hypocrite them to do it so I'm like you know what let's have a rest I'll do it I'm still spying on all the siege stuff and I'm not even working on that anymore I just want to see what people's feedback are so if you learned
00:39:40
anything this week it's that game devs have poor work-life balance and build a drawbacks or we build them or we watch them no it's it's heartening to hear that you're so dedicated um that sounds like one of those E3 things uh guys thank you so much uh for taking the time I'm honored to have you on the show um I just gotta ask who's on your water bottle real quick oh that's one of our QA um JV so uh give me the water bottle to the camera Tom do we have my close-up yeah our embedded QA have this kind of thing where they kind of keeps screenshotting people during Microsoft teams meetings and want to work here I started editing that and and the emote is from a from a stream Library here but he's on you're you're he's there now all
00:40:29
right that's Elliot Lars Ed and uh James and uh I'm Jared we're going to take a short break and when we come back uh the mystery of the elms's what does that mean you have to stay tuned to find out see in a minute thank you are you traveling the Stars exploring the Galaxy that's lonely lonely hungry work always remember though Big Ben he's with you big Benny always has you back big Benny eat his food Kelso
00:41:53
atmo Esports and the bad token race club are proud to bring you a championship event like no other the Stanton seven this exciting rally circuit pays homage to Earth's classic rally and formula one Traditions pushing drivers and their teams to their absolute limit across some of the toughest terrains Stanton has to offer qualifying teams will push through seven individual races located across the system from the isolated moons of Crusader to the bustling City centers of Hurston and Microtech each race Pilots will control a featured vehicle from the rugged Drake dragonfly to the Lightning Fast tumble Cyclone navigate perilous terrain and conditions
00:42:43
as well as one another Racers will face off on Magda crashing through mountain passes and Dusty valleys Walla where jutting Cliffs and deep craters Force pilots to thread the perfect line and Clio where one wrong move means plummeting into a lunar sea Racers will pick up individual winds across the races but only the team with the highest overall standings can claim the title of Stanton 7's champion sign ups begin soon get your crew together and join us for the Stanton 7. you won't want to miss it and we're back uh that was a little
00:43:36
commercial for the upcoming Stanton seven race uh it's thrown by our our friends over at atmo Esports uh that's an old trailer from like two years ago I went looking to find one and the last one was two years ago I have no no idea if bad token is still their sponsor or not if they're not sorry I just I wanted to promote the event so I took the only trailer I could find online so there you go before we get to our next house I want to start I want to do a thing uh I get messages on spectrum and Twitter people are always asking about the the random stuff that are around us that make up our set I want to take a minute to Showcase something that you may not otherwise have noticed or whatnot each week uh this week I want to talk to you about this do we have my close-up this is uh Hunter the Star Citizen comic by Adrian attisor this is actually a fully
00:44:25
Illustrated comic set in the Star Citizen Universe uh it was create it's written and drawn by one of the OG Star Citizen backers a guy named Aiden teaser uh this was a produced uh in conjunction with crash core uh a lovely org out of Germany shout out to crash core and it was originally printed up and given away at our Gamescom 2015 event you can see uh the cone Cathedral here depicted in the futuristic year of 2945 so these very limited you can't get them anymore I'm amazed mine still survives but uh it's very close to my heart and one of the first things I got to really put in motion here when I got hired into Star Citizen so shout out to 80. uh if you're watching I haven't talked to you in a while uh all right joining us on the
00:45:13
show now in the back half of the show we like to you know we we do all the information in the business in the front and then we have the party in the back it's we're essentially the mullet of Star Citizen uh joining us for the mullet is Robbie Rob me Elms say hi Robbie hey everyone and Nick Elms no relation no relationship no association so uh uh Robbie and Nick uh who are you and what do you do first for for cig well I'm the kelms um I'm a creative actor now responsible for the flight side of Squadron 42. and uh yeah I'm Robbie Elms I'm the lead designer of Squadron 42 specifically the flight sections now this is where I do the biggest disclaimer I'm gonna do we
00:46:02
are not talking about Squadron 42 today there's no conversation about Squadron 42 that's not what we're here about uh if you're upset send your letters to Salty Mike and somewhere in Florida uh you were on the show you were on the show this week because your folks that we don't get to to see a lot of to talk a lot of but uh you have something unique amongst most people in in in cig you were actually father and son yes yeah we are indeed yeah in fact we've started to work together uh probably was it 2011 or something like that yeah 2010 oh yeah I've been working together for about 12 13 years now long time I'm going to ask Robbie this person how is that are you okay the worst critic the worst no no it's good it's
00:46:52
frustrating at times of course you managed to turn me back into a teenager with a lot of the feedback but uh strong little strops every now and then yeah but I see it's from a good place and and Nick how did you uh was it you who brought Robbie in did Robbie bring you in who who got here first I got I got here first uh I was working with Robbie sort of going back to TT when we were doing the Lego games and things and uh I thought right you know whatever dog and bark yourself uh I'll uh I'll bring him across here well I remember there was like no hope for me as like when I think it was four you got me a second Mega Drive it's like here here's X-Men here Street Fighter get good and just no Hope from there onwards I got hooked on games and it's that was my excuse for research though when you're okay I used to come in you know the uh the Nintendo
00:47:40
64. played golden eye well that's it birthday present and I woke up to him playing GoldenEye he's like a Bill Murray I'm like no one will believe you okay it's research it's a meme We're Not Gonna this is a GoldenEye promotion thing but it just had its uh remastered released on on handles but it's a meme online about that pause music but that really was that pause music was it went harder than it had any right yeah exactly I have many strong Memories the watch and it says dropping yeah uh set to that pause music had it so so that's how you that's where you got your kind of start and inspiration gaming Nick how did you everything that you could do with your life I I well started off working with Chris you know we were kind of sort of
00:48:29
just finishing school and just playing around with graphics on the BBC micro and uh you know he was doing uh his games Strikers run and match day and kind of said to Phil and I uh because we were all we all like doing art we all did Art in school so come and you know draw some pixels let's let's let's do some stuff on here so we did that all of a sudden he's driving around in a really flashy car I'm feeling that look at each other going what what has happened here and he's like you know sold this game and he's like yes what did this and you know he's minted um so then we sort of conned on to this and uh you know sort of Chris hung around for a bit and then he went to origin and uh you know obviously the rest is history so you've been with Chris for a long time then yeah well I um I went to training I I was sort of on the tech side and I was training um companies I was one of sort of only authorized Autodesk is a 3D Studio so I
00:49:18
was going around to games companies um in the area training their staff how to use 3D Studio one of them was like a company called Rowan software which did a lot of flight simulator games so I was teaching them how to build planes and I kind of got well I can I can do this I can do this for a living so um Aaron came back to the UK set up a studio three a and pulled a load of us in and that was me and the games industry from there on so that's you in the games industry uh but you mentioned Chris and you in school I mean your association with Chris goes goes far back now this is okay we have to tread a little lightly because we forgot to tell Chris that Nick was going to be on the show today so so so so so I'm gonna I'm gonna try to thread a needle here because I want to know about your I want to know
00:50:06
about your early associations here uh how far does your relationship with Chris we went to um primary school together it goes back a long way um but yeah I mean I'm glad you gave me a heads up on that earlier because you know being put on the spot with uh you know tell me a story about Chris I think uh could have ended with career suicide for me I would I would never do such a thing tell me a story about Chris one that hopefully won't get me fired and I think you know anyone I was obviously seeing Chris will probably uh you know attest to uh it's it's fairly accurate it's uh go back to when we were like 15 16 and we just played DND and Chris kind of got bored with the wooden delivery from the DMS you know you'd be in a room and somebody was driving on his like you know this needs more immersion he's spicing up so we got this idea to bring his friends in to do voices for the creatures you know
00:50:55
wearing a script um he's getting sounds like rain sounds and stuff or wind sounds in the background and he's having us all doing these crazy like you know voices or Dragon voices and things like that to play as a tape recorder well he's dming right this is long before the internet yeah right now but yeah this this is like a day I don't know how far back it's probably about yeah about 40 years back really so uh so uh uh I'm gonna keep pushing what what kind of what kind of DM it was it was fantastic at the end but the thing is I think it only went for about three sessions because it was so work intensive like I said before we were all quite good artists at school so we're even drawing uh you know concept art for for environments in fact just to sort of like have the maximum amount of immersion um for this game but yeah I think we got
00:51:43
about three sessions in everyone's like Jesus this is too much work it's like a job really a 15. but uh yeah it was an experience I think everyone who played those campaigns uh you know even for three sessions would remember it certainly Aaron and my younger brother Simon who's uh you know Financial yeah you you you brought Simon into this let's yeah let's go ahead and mention this uh it's not just Robbie and and and and Nick who who work here at cig Simon is also a member yes yep he's yep throw a stone you might hit Financial director yeah well I find I only run into Simon when I've done something bad you know my my only interaction with Simon has to come with like you're building a spaceship yeah Simon yes we're building a spaceship
00:52:31
really I'm like yeah I feel I'm partly responsible for that as well because I used to sort of steal his pocket when he when he was a kid so I think that drove me into accountancy it's the only career he could uh he could go are there any other Elms this year I don't know about well Jamie was here for a while yeah my younger brother was QA for a summer wasn't it before we exiled him to Australia and New Zealand whatever he's been to New he's been in New Zealand for the last five he didn't cut it so um uh you're here yeah you're here we talked a little bit about your history of Chris let's talk about uh uh you you've now been here since the UK Studio open 10 years nearly 29 months or nine years this month yeah you just had your nine year anniversary yeah yeah
00:53:19
what's what are your uh um again we're I've got this you can't see it but I've got the Angel and the devil on the shoulders here and there are things I want to ask and things I want to push forward just yelling in my ear and I'm like like no you you need this place you just moved to the other side of the world stay employed when I when I ask what's your favorite story from your time here you've been here 10 you've been here nine uh what's the first thing that comes to mind it doesn't necessarily have to be your favorite but when I asked that question what was that first story that just popped into your your head think for me is because we have essentially here from the ground up near enough is when we first got unless it's not just him Squadron related when we first got Quantum travel working and it's like oh my God we can achieve this kind of moment of like oh
00:54:07
the scale of what we're going at that was like when the penny dropped for me is like we can do this it's gonna be great that's probably my story yeah I might as well going back to uh you know when we first started to get some of the rushes in from the uh you know the actors and the T the the sort of the the team that Chris assembled was just mind-blowing and seeing that coming in and then seeing the amount of it that was coming in and going oh my God this is going to be huge it's like hours and hours of it yeah it's so impressive those two moments I actually have stories about both those two movies when the when when Quantum was first uh was first introduced and then we uh we in the testing uh somebody had had a a a ship inside the other ship I can't remember what the ship it was at this point and somebody just got the
00:54:54
idea what happens if we try to leave in the middle of quantum and like everybody everyone was like we have no idea we don't know what's going to happen and we and got in while and got and disembarked from the ship in the first Quantum and that ship stayed in Quantum and was flying with it it's like holy cow it's just that you build these systemic you know things and there's what they're intended to do and then there's what you discover they can do along the way it's a huge part of the accident that was a that was a huge moment yeah uh uh for me and then you talk about the performances in Squadron 42 uh a moment I will never forget is in the LA Studio when we watched the first Rush the First Assembly of the of the bishop Senate speech yeah before citizen con 2015. it was all still black and white and white box and barely animated
00:55:44
all you really had to go on was Jeff zinelli's music and Gary oldman's performance the Vandal and I'm like I just remember saying like the air start start going and start going up on the uh on on and there's a I remember there's like there's there's a Code there's a Code of that story I definitely can't tell but but yeah but yeah I will always remember that like I've got it right now actually just going back to that moment uh Stephanie when Hannah does his team get hold of it as well you know they really did it justice yeah yeah and before anybody cost me a letter there's not a squadron 42 story that is a watching a video story uh so yeah so I mean that's that's pretty much it we're actually pretty much out of time and Nick Robbie thank you for hanging out with us is there anything you don't get a whole lot of opportunities to to to talk to the
00:56:33
community and interact with the community because you're you're on the you you you're hidden in the Squadron 42 dungeon on the eighth floor uh um is there anything uh just about your experience in CID you've been to Citizens cons before you've been to Bar citizens is there anything you want to tell the community why you have a well you have a moment here we're just so grateful for the support uh you know what you guys do for us is it's amazing I think salty Max had a bit of a rough time before yeah you can compliment once so I've not forgotten that soul to Mike I've got a head of lettuce however whatever that means but I'm going to take it as a compliment it's I I want to point out that my job is to make the shows I I I I host these things for like one and a half hours every week the other 60 plus hours is done with all the things that
00:57:21
go into me I'm not a professional TV show host um and and so the moments where I just get stuck on something hyper focus on something I'll just drive them into the ground I apologize uh to Salty Mike and any any trauma or or dismay uh that may be caused by you being bad foreign all right so for Star Citizen live uh Nick Robbie thank you so much uh for taking your time uh to hang out with us uh folks watching if you haven't already uh be sure to check out yesterday's uh uh Insight Star Citizen with a look at the arena Commander feature Team all kinds of stuff coming uh to Arena Commander some are in 318 the dying star fixes uh uh the the majority of what you
00:58:09
saw is coming in a in a patch uh later this year we we can't quite predict where because we're still trying to get 318 out and then that's going to affect all kinds of branching things and stuff so so we know it's coming we just can't quite pinpoint where it is but as soon as you know we know you will know uh and then uh tune in uh next week uh next week uh is our next journey to 4.0 special uh which we which was initiative we started back at citizencon last year uh we have a lovely lovely Ian the art director for stars and live uh presenting to you the very first look inside building Interiors these are the new modular uh Creations that are going to help us populate the commercial buildings of artcorp Area 18 of of Louisville of Oregon uh you name it so
00:58:59
uh stay tuned to watch that even Microtech actually I have a side which one am I forgetting the cold one so yeah so tune in for that next week on Insight Star Citizen uh I'm Jared Huckabee uh this is Norman and uh we'll see you next week everybody take care

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