Sandi & Chris: Checking In

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:03

   that's the only reason i have a beard this should be the this should be the video hi i'm chris roberts do you need to move us at all or no are we good i think you could still slide a little to the right i i normally would have to cut by now but i was leaving at the last minute before i go oh much better well on a zoom call you don't need to really do your hair at least you're wearing pants but that's true that's helpful you ready hi i'm sandy gardner and i'm chris roberts and it's good to be back in front of the camera after quite a long hiatus yes it has been quite the hiatus and we've had a whole bunch of people working from home so it's actually about 720 now 720. uh yeah we had to move everybody we did

2. 00:00:53

   it in the space of a week really of march of last year and luckily we were set up in a way that makes it easier to do because we do so much collaboration between our different studios and here in la and in austin and in [Music] wimslow and in frankfurt but you know still it's a it's a very different way of working when you're not all getting together in a room together for um you know collaboration sessions or being able to look over someone's shoulder and look what's on their monitor um so it's been a challenge it requires a lot more communication uh and a lot more you know zoom and teams calls so actually we're quite looking forward to getting uh back to the office which uh you know whatever fingers crossed touch word is starting to be around the world i

3. 00:01:40

   think maybe here in la will and austin will be two of the first places will start to get back to the office but hopefully they're shortly afterwards back in the uk and the german office because nothing beats working with people and seeing them face to face and especially on a creative project so like we can still get things done but one of the issues has been you know in terms of how well we close things out it just takes a little longer when you have to always reach out to someone on a video call to ask about this and you can't look over a tester's shoulder to see the bug on their screen and and uh if you're just riffing on ideas it's it's you know in person makes a big difference so i feel like we did a really great job all working remotely but we weren't as uh efficient as we could be in closing it down

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   whereas when we're in person we we're we're a little more on point on that so i'm looking forward to getting back in the office and also just seeing people i mean you know this you know it's nice to roll out of bed and not have to you know do much before you you know go to work basically but it's also nice to get out of the house and nice to be around other people so uh so yeah i think you know i'm definitely looking back forward and i know quite a few other people uh in the company are looking forward to getting back and seeing their friends and work mates and uh you know carry on with making star citizen in squadron 42. so inquiring minds wanna know we have a few questions uh where's 3.14 at okay well it's uh around the corner i think probably middle of uh july is when it will probably release where um you know evacati right now i

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   think we'll be going to ptu in the near future and you know it looks beautiful i mean i think we've just released a uh inside star citizen that shows off uh ryerson which is uh you know beautiful and it's got the first generation of the cloud tech in that we're still continuing uh to work on uh that i think is uh pretty stunning and it's going to get better as time goes on which you know is volumetric clouds and you know it's a bit more of a challenge for what we need it for compared to say what you would see in microsoft flight sim or some other games because we have to deal with scales that they don't have to deal with so you know we can pull all the way back and sort of see the whole planet and have to see the cloud layers in a way that you wouldn't do in say microsoft flight sim and have it work as you come all the way in and fly through it um there's still some uh

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   optimizations to happen and visual improvements and a lot of layering and detail and effects but already i think it looks beautiful it's it basically combines the the rendering and the lighting all together with the atmospheric model so we ray march through all the clouds and uh you know we're having a ryerson first and then as we go forward we'll start to roll it out on some of the other planets and then start to work on dynamic weather but that's down down the road but i think it's going to be um pretty brilliant and then the rice in itself it's a floating cloud city i mean you know i'm sure i'm not the only sci-fi fan out there that's wanting to step foot on a floating card city in person and uh i it's you know beautifully done by uh you know ian uh leyland and his in environment uh teams uh you know they've just done an outstanding job on it so it looks

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   beautiful so if you haven't seen it you can um you know check it out on the inside star citizen uh or obviously you you know be play checking out on the pto or in the game in you know a few weeks to three weeks sounds good so this is actually quite a large question but um you can keep it short if that's even possible uh what's happening with server mission uh okay well the server machine we're working really hard on um we have put together you know probably uh like biggest uh engineering uh strike team um so we have a whole bunch of the uh engine team that's working on it as well as the networking team uh you know led by clive so on the engineering team we have chris balti leading up server messaging work and steve humphries is also contributing a whole

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   bunch to it and we have a whole back-end set up that we're doing here internally but also some of the back-end services and connections are all being engineered partly up in montreal as well with turbo and there's about 20 people sort of mostly engineers working on uh server meshing so it's probably our biggest sort of overall technical initiative uh it's super critical i mean we've talked about it before it's sort of the it's the bitter tech that will allow us to sort of open up uh you know well a number of players but also just sort of help a lot with uh you know sort of our performance issues that we have because when we you know you play right now in the game you play in the live build and you're running around stanton if everybody's in one location it's a

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   lot better than if people are spread all over the system and typically what happens is as a server stays up for a longer amount of time people spread out you know you'll have people in you know area 18 and our corporate people and new babbage and microtech a lot of people in louisville you know people flying around in space you have people at space stations and so the longer the servers get out the more you got different actors and different entities that are all sort of come in around the star system and as we build out the the star system uh more and more entities and objects get created so like you know we're going to have orion coming out with through 14 and you know that's you know hundreds of thousands of new objects and entities that just come in with that so if someone goes there now all of a sudden that's hundreds of thousands or more entities and objects that the

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    server has to simulate so the key with server meshing is it this is allowing multiple servers to handle different areas inside a star system uh and even later stages of it multiple servers working together to handle even one area like you know an arasan or a new babbage or something like that uh and allowing players to seamlessly sort of travel around and have be passed under the control of different servers so the authority passes from one server to another servers so one goes and that allows us to have a lot much larger amount of players in the same space and instance it's also incredibly critical for transitioning to new star systems so if you go for a jump point and you go to pyro for instance we need to transfer you from the server that was handling you in in the stanton system to the server that will handle you as you enter

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    into pyro and so um yeah we've already got the you know a lot of the the core features of server meshing have been working for quite a long time so the you know authority transfer there's a whole bunch of stuff that's already been built and you know we're building out the the the back end database what we call the entity graph that is going to sort of persist and remember the state of every single entity and object in the world so if you stream out an area you completely remember the state where everything is you know whether you dropped a coke can in the middle of a forest on a planet and that that aspect of it you know opens up obviously the positions we talked about which is great but is also a fundamental building block for the server meshing so we've been really working hard on that we've um you know we're making really good progress to it i'm not going to

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    promise any dates because it's it's by far the the most technically uh challenging thing i will say probably by the end of this year we should hopefully have the proper persistence in there that we talked about the proper global persistence which is this sort of streaming entity graph thing that i've just discussed which is you know the new version of what was being called the icash before if people were getting confused about that uh but yeah now we're working really hard on it and we're gonna have uh you know this year we're not doing a physical citizencon because it just felt a bit too early coming back from uh the pandemic you know whether everyone could travel and not travel i mean you know even now it's you know we're gonna go to the uk uh next month and uh you know we're all vaccinated but still it's uh gonna be a pain and we gotta quarantine and do all this other stuff so

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    um you know we'll probably do a physical citizencon the following year but this year we're going to do a virtual one uh which we didn't do last year just because you know we just you know we're just sort of overwhelmed with everyone moving to work from home and everything but this year we will do one and we're gonna one of the panels is going to be on silver meshing so to which we'll you know drill down much more onto the sort of details the technical technical setup and details but uh you know i'm actually quite looking forward to virtual citizencon and uh i think you know you know everyone making the game loves to share what they're working on with everyone so uh it's actually quite a morale boost for the teams as uh you know and it's nice when you do it in person because you get to meet people in person and you know you can see you know how much people really you know love and enjoy the work that you know everyone's working on uh but the next best thing is to do a virtual one so that will be uh

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    you know later this year in in october um and uh you know i'm looking forward to that and um hopefully you guys will like it yeah what else are you looking forward to in star citizen uh well i mean you know out you know outside of the you know the you know sort of meshing and the positions um you know there's some really cool features that are coming online actually the next patch so 3 15. uh i believe uh it hasn't aired just yet i don't know when we have this thing edited so it may have come out and calling all devs or not by the time you see this or may not have but richard tyre is going to sort of go over the personal inventory and the medical game play which is a big thing for uh 315 i mean you know first of all uh you know the personal inventory sort of like a

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    you know another part of that proper persistence and the world behaving like it's meant to where you don't have this infinite bag of holding where you have every single armor piece and weapon and clothe and you can access them all and equip all of them that's not realistic if you're running around out in uh you know the sahara desert you you know you don't have access to all the stuff you just have what you can carry on you so personal inventory is going to be about what you what you can carry and and how you can equip that whether you have something in a backpack whether you have something on your suit and it'll be just limited to to what you can use and carry it's also coming with a whole new way to equip your character because to be honest with you the you know the pma is horrendous uh it's the most counterintuitive pma yeah it's a personal management app it's sort of uh it's like how you

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    currently put clothes on but it's it's anyway it's just it's it was wasn't we never finished it wasn't done properly all the years ago and then we were always like we're going to fix it up and haven't got around to it but we have a whole new way of equipping and doing which is much more sort of paper doll drag and drop uh setup and it's going to be far far more intuitive far better and will allow you to properly behave like okay i'm going to wear my civilian clothes now okay i'm going to take that off and now i'm going to put on my armor but it will be limited to what you have around you whether it's in your hab or in your backpack or your you're right next to it and it will make your behavior be much more like it would be in real life so that's a big deal and the other big deal is the medical gameplay which is really the first stage of the death of a spaceman which i talked about many many years ago and that uh you know involves allowing players the ability to sort of fix up

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    and heal people at varying levels of damage more so than we can do right now with a med pen uh also revive people um you know uh depending on the severity of injuries and then it involves um you know also the sort of respawn mechanic so if you die um you know you you come you know you get brought back to life um uh you know in a hospital bed you know currently we you know there's been a slight tweak to a bit of the law because uh i i i saw some people get quite upset about the fact that we mentioned that the respawn uh in a you know a place away away is you know now being sort of covered by the fiction of you know you've recorded your dna and you're cloning but the bottom line is if you got atomized in an explosion on a planet somewhere how are you finding that body to

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    to recreate the person you'd that just doesn't actually make much logical sense the kind of uh you know concept we would have is that you can only have so many times you can come back to life which is basically uh you've sort of recorded off you've take a little bit of your dna and you can grow a clone but you can only do that three or four times it's like having three or four lives after that you're you know you you know you've degraded too much your your dna degraded too much and you have to you're basically permanently dead and your uh you know next to kin will sort of take over in the game which is a desperate space mechanic so it's exactly the same as the deafness basement mechanic that we had before which was you had only so many lives before you would go on to have to pass on to your next of kin but just scientifically working you know you know i mean it's all the handwave at this

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    point but it it just sort of logically sort of makes a bit more sense and also allows players a choice if they don't want to wait around to see if someone can rescue or find them because it may not be dead if you like die if you like die on a planet or you preach to death on a planet and no one's around to come get you you know what's you know why you just that's not that's not a fun game is our youngest daughter yeah it's not a fun grain experience you may want to just you know respawn back in the babbage but anyway so it's the first stage of that um you know we delayed it a little bit we we could have pushed it to get it into 314 we wanted to hold it to 315 mostly because uh it's to do with the hospitals that you respawn and if we had it in 314 we would only have two locations that would have hospitals which would have been orient and new barrage with 315 we also get all the space stations and grim hex

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    and the space stations are all you know they're in orbit around every one of the planets so even if we haven't got the area 18 one or the laureville one maria uh pure of heart done just yet they'll be in i believe the subsequent release uh maybe the 350 316 one i'm not sure i'd have to take a look at the release schedule but now we've got a place that no matter where you are you can you you would basically respawn where you where um uh you know your your home base is uh so that was one of the biggest and just to give a little bit more time to sort of polish things like the ui and and the experience and and and that's kind of one of the focuses that we'll be going forward is uh you know it's a bit of a it's a bit of a shift but to try to deliver more final or more polished features rather than a very basic version that then you sort of leave for a while before you come back to it um so

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    those are those are big things um the persistence at the you know i wish i mentioned at the end of the year the proper full persistence of being able to remember where all these items are which opens up um you know having your own hab that you can store things your own hanger so we're going to have persistent hangers and persistent habs too uh and you know we i don't think we put those on the schedule just yet um they will be there shortly after persistence but that's a big deal because then storage space and where you keep things away store things will be huge and i think that will radically change uh the game experience that people will have so those those are all you know very cool stuff we're also working on um you know the the proper iteration of the cargo stuff so a whole revised cargo system um that will be just much more physical and

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    practical and ties into the the object and item persistence uh that i've been talking about so for the traders out there it will be a lot a lot better and i swear to god the ai guys are working on some really good cool stuff and i'm gonna determine to make sure that in the in the uh game live server you actually see it because really there's a lot of problems that come because of the low server tick right it's really quite frustrating because in reviews i see you know um you know fun behaviors a lot more behaviors and they're actually in the pu right now and uh it's it's a lot smarter but you know you get into the live game like i did with uh my ten-year-old daughter last night and there's just a lot of people standing on tables doing nothing um and you got range last year yeah i got told off for uh you know i was told i should be embarrassed to have all my ai standing

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    on tables um but yeah no we because i mean the ai is actually very powerful there's a lot of really um you know interesting stuff that can be done it's more a matter of the you know the server um being able to sort of run fast enough to handle that and then there's some synchronization things that we have to fix the ai system like the streaming in and out of stuff um you know the object container streaming which is on both on the server now and on the local but the server wants the the problematic one because that has to remember state when it comes in and out and that's one of the reasons why the persistence that i talked about the entity graphs really important because you really need to remember all the state properly and right now we don't remember the state as well as we need to and we do need it for server meshing but that also in that is one of the reasons why you see ai problems out there is because they were streamed out in a state like

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    sitting on a bench or doing something and then when it gets streamed in it hasn't remembered that state properly and that's how they stand on a table or a team post and it's and because we're always streaming in and out stuff as you're moving around the world and and and the ai if we were not streaming stuff in will be um you know you wouldn't see a lot of the problems you see but unfortunately we have to stream things in there because we can't keep everything in memory at the all the time so the global persistence will also help a lot with that so there is that's a very short answer awesome very short um and you code a lot at night what are you coding at the moment uh well i i'm i'm finishing off something that i uh uh started i don't know last year or something i mean i don't have that much time to really um do all the coding but i'm i'm

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    trying to finish up the uh what we call uh physical skins so all our characters in the game the the physics that that you you determine whether you collide is defined they're on the skeleton so skeleton has you know physical joint for like the arm and the hand and the head and the legs but it's the same skeleton and the same sort of physics geometry for every actor in the game whether you've got heavy bulky armor on or you're just wearing thin clothes and you know and actually most games are like this in fact a lot of games just have a symbol capsule that defines uh a character but you know we all our characters you know when you see a helmet come on or you they put the armor on and they put a jacket or shirt on that's what's called the skin which is just geometry

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    that gets mapped to the joints of the skeleton and then as the joints move around the geometry deforms with it and the change is to enable the skins to have physics information embedded with them so when you bring in the you know the armored torso piece of a heavy armor it actually brings in physics geometry that will define uh that basically represents its shape so as you put different things on your physics shape and profile can change and that's really important because that means for first of all you know better collision and hit detection so like you know you could have a case right now where you have a big bulky helmet on but the physics geometry is just the head size and so a bullet could go look like it's hitting the helmet but it

27. 00:20:45

    doesn't actually hit the physics geometry well we can change that now so the geometry is the same size as the helmet and also it makes a big difference for things like uh physical interactions like with cloth so if i've got a if i walk through like uh you know a you know sort of hanging dangly plastic um if i've got my proper shape then it'll move out of the way where the the visual um render meshes and the same for like i have a cloak on it it will now drape over me properly because right now if we put a cloak on the back of a character with a normal skeleton and they had a say a heavy armor on the cloak would look like it's going through part of the heavy armor because the actual base skeleton physics geometry is smaller than the heavy skeleton so you're saying you're making it more specific yes it's it's essentially just making it more accurate it's allowing

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    for better simulation it's necessary for like uh cloth and hair stimulation so you can make sure that the hair is you know you know not going through what looks like the head because the actual geometry for the the physics geometry of the head is smaller than the actual render right because so i've i said i've been working on that for quite a while it's been sort of something we do in the background um and uh yeah it's almost uh it's almost ready um uh to go in and uh you know probably and not miss release or the next one but the one after that they don't they don't put my code in right away we need to make sure it gets tested so it doesn't blow everything up um and uh we've been playing a lot of games in the in the quarantine that we've had in la what have you been what well we've been playing

29. 00:22:21

    they've actually been playing a lot of valheim yeah well i think we started off uh you know i don't have a uh nine and a ten-year-old daughter what we do together um sky and rain uh who i think have sort of guest starred on an isc once uh yes or twice or something not an isc atv maybe um but uh yeah so i you know started out we were playing uh minecraft uh because uh our youngest likes minecraft a lot and then we were playing some full guys and fortnite uh so um among us yeah like skye is actually very good at fortnite we yeah we like won four or five straight games together uh i was just following her and she was doing all that she had it totally down it's pretty but pretty intimidating uh feisty valheim player wow but anyway so then we yeah more recently we started to play uh valheim

30. 00:23:11

    uh you know the beginning of this year uh which was you know really great and it's it actually has some uh fun sort of balance and survival light um style gameplay which is you know similar to some of the the longer term survival light stuff and crafting stuff that we would want to do in uh in star citizen and some of the stuff we've talked about actually for years we've also played star citizen yeah we played stuff we played last night well chris and rayne played last night again that's sort of well as i was mentioning usability and and uh you know initial user experience it needs to be far more obvious and we do have again plans for that uh but yes it is quite frustrating to uh sometimes uh you know you don't realize you have all the knowledge of how the game works and not if someone hasn't

31. 00:23:57

    got all the knowledge it um you know isn't immediately obvious to them rather rei didn't stand on table so that would be good and maybe maybe the medical tech will fix uh our daughter froze to death well no she was she responded anyway but yeah yeah so he froze her yeah um what else what else what else what else and we have some plans for next year don't we uh yes so um when we uh get back to the office uh which is probably gonna be a little later on this year um you know the i'm you know we as a family are going to move over to the uk for uh some time to be with the squadron team to get it finished yeah so instead of being here in sunny la we're going to be in

32. 00:24:44

    sunny manchester sunny manchester yeah i mean with global warming everywhere everyone's turning into california anyway um but uh yeah so yeah so the so uh whether we're we're doing it at the end of this year or the beginning next year we're definitely over there we got some you know the uk office we're actually uh we're gonna be moving to new offices in the uk um uh next year uh which will be good because we're totally over yeah our current officers are you know they're not big enough for how many people we got in manchester now everybody knows that that's not some spoiler alert no no yeah i mean we we we've we've grown up but we we are um yeah you know we we've got some new offices that will be moving into next year in germany um because our lease was up there and we we've um you know how we've got a you know great new spaces

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    very close to where the old one uh was and now we're uh gonna be in a uh you know we're gonna it's gonna be a very cool place in in in manchester and we're gonna you know the new offices will be um hopefully the hopefully there will be the new flagship for the cihe offices and we'll have about 400 people there and um anyway that'll be fun and i'll be there with everybody because uh that's where the core of the squadron team is and so i'm going over there i'm gonna be there on a day-to-day basis with them uh getting squadron finished out for you guys so yeah this was supposed to be a short five-minute video yes you made a new i i tend not to answer um questions short questions yeah or i know i don't give short answers to questions let me put it that way that's true thank you very much uh for you know everybody all your support

34. 00:26:19

    um over the past 15 months and the past you know i thought you're going to say 15 years for a second no 15 years past nine years kids are in college i'm getting a wheelchair uh but no no it's it's you know it's you know i think it's there's a it's yeah it's the developers and and the community it's like a family yes and um you know it's you know it's it's great to build and it's great to watch people play and have people excited by what is and what will be and uh yeah it's still fun for me all these years on so yeah i'm not saying it's not a lot of work but it's a lot of fun and we are really building a universe with unbridled ambition which is uh you know i think uh a privilege to be able to do for all you guys so thank you very much it is thank you

35. 00:27:06

    we will see you in the verse i think it's clear that you missed this a little bit