Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Thanksgiving Burndown

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:15

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse our weekly look at star citizen's ongoing development I'm sandy Gardner and I'm Chris Robbins today is a holiday in the u.s. so our teams in Los Angeles and Austin are enjoying some much-deserved time off yes definitely because of this we don't have a feature for today's episode but we do have some exciting news yes we do that's right as I'm sure you've heard Alfa 3.0 has gone to a wider pto and gone beyond over today a vacatio evocati evo cutting anything so let's see when it went into getting the build ready for this expanded group of testers in this week's burn down welcome back to burn down our weekly show dedicated to reviewing the progress of the release of star citizen

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   alpha 3.0 in the past week we've made tremendous progress towards the release of PTU as we focused on the categories shopping missions ships and vehicles traversal moby glass and overall performance and stability so let's check in with the team to see how each progressed this week we did a review of the physical shops from my standpoint they were feature complete then we've been focusing on missions and getting the item 2.0 ships completely set up from tech design standpoint we feel we're feature complete on that except for a minor one minor bug and then from there we're still working on the item 2.0 HUD and combat indicators for those ships and in getting that to feel right and then we're doing a review of the

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   commodities today and ideally that is feature complete and that will get turned to green and from there we will continue to basically focus on stability and performance one of the things that we knocked out this week was a raycast issue that was causing memory crashes and overall performance issues so ideally the evocati see a gain in performance based off of that but that's been plaguing us for a little while so getting nothing knocked out was good and then from there it's just been general stability and performance issues that we've been focusing on and then everything that the team's been working on is really been going towards those

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   tier zeros that we've called out so this past week we had a review of the shop locations in 300 with chris and todd papy and all the other directors we went through each shop we experienced the shopping flow and experience I got to see view the shopkeepers in action you know what really really well there's a few bugs that were still working to working through and to get get to get fixed but overall the shop locations in a really good shape and ready to release in 3 and 3.0 so we're in bug fixing and polish mode now and there's there's plenty of stuff still to do lots of bugs to fix up but we're ready to release these things live to you guys so we're really really excited about that so I've been going through commodity by commodity and setting the profit margin range each commodity has

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   its own profit margin range that scales roughly with its base value but it's not a linear relationship so that's taken some time to go through and just make making sure that there's never any one commodity that is always the best thing to trade because that's what we don't want to see you we don't want these players to get to a point where there's just one trade of trade route that's the most lucrative and then that's it and so a lot of my work the last day or two has been just making sure that we're in a good spot there so this past week we got miles eckhart the one of the mission givers in three Oh into QAS hands so he's he's being run through his paces QA has kind of taken him through his flow identifying issues and and calling out blockers those tech

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   blockers are being looked at by our developers and getting is getting getting resolved and at a good pace and we're turning attention we have turned attention to route o as well in getting him all situated pretty soon we'll be able to get him into QA his hands as well and so the mission givers are coming along pretty nicely on the ship setup side we've finally gotten the ships to a point where we have gotten them out to the avocado and we're ready for them to really bang on them and test them in their in their full capacity this on the setup tasks this past week we were able to knock out the the headlights getting all the headlights set up so that they actually work when you're going onto the the dark side of a moon and you want to explore the headlights will actually turn on now

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   and you can have a pointing and tweaking with with distance and brightness but for the most part they're all set up now we're also got the the beds and all the ships set set up with the savegame logout functionality so that when you get into the bed you can actually log out of the beds now and persist in that location so we're really excited about that functionality and that will be online in the live environment here pretty soon as well we have a big spreadsheet full of full of the different ships and all the different setup features that we need to get implemented and at the start of this endeavor they were all red all their all red cells meaning they hadn't been done yet and for the most part we've got them all to green now so we're we've got a nice pretty green spreadsheet lots of things been accomplished this past week and we're ready for for lots of testing bit to be done on those ships so one of

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   the things that we're looking to implement we're 3.0 is persistent spawning so one of the things that tech designers doing at the moment is going through all of the beds in-game in the ship's and adding an interaction point to those so that the player when they get into the bed they can basically save their progress and that will log them out as sleeping in the bed basically so what we've been doing at the moment is adding interaction points to every single one setting them up in data and basically saying when the player interacts with this specific point we're telling them that this is where they're logging in and that's where they'll remain until they look back and again for the 3.0 ship burned down we've been making a lot of progress fixing bugs on ships in particular the caterpillar these glaive inside three kind of series the Mustangs

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   the Aurora and the constellations including fixing those bugs we've been implementing new features such as the new bed interaction feature which allows to do the save and exit interaction on them we've also implemented the new light feature which allows us to have controllable lights which gives us the ability to turn on headlights in the ship's so we can see into the dark areas of the planets and we're currently in the midst of doing a first pass on item 2.0 items balance so that we can do things like actually control the power plants and the sheer generators and the weapons and make meaningful choices when we're flying the

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    ships and sliding those dials on the MFDs that we've just fine-tuned and are getting the features that you can control on those MFT is working so I'll just tick it that says the ESP is broken ESP is what helps you stay on your target when you're flying across the space and you want to dogfights and it helps you to lock your pips so it's easier to land your shots the ticket says that it's broken after quantum drive caught him traveling and so we the ticket was first sent to Michael who works on quantum drive and basically we took took a look at it and figured that it doesn't really involve quantum drive at all so I I jumped in and tried to figure out if it was

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    involved targeting so because targeting is what shows on the Pips and ESP is broken if your target is inaccurate so me and Mike me and Michael were looking at it for a couple hours and we figured we've jumped all over around the universe we locked on two different targets both allies N and it means that we can't figure out what's going on and so we have a hard time even figuring out if it was working or not or if it was on or off and so we started looking at the code to see if hood turn the ESP on or off and turns out you can so he followed that tractor-trailer turns out that the UI for ESP is broken so it would always

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    show that it was on so we figured so if we do this quick fix at least he'll be accurate and show that it is on or if it's off and so I put the fix in and then we went back and flying around and walking on two different targets and tracking them and we still can't figure it out so we look back at to what the ticket supplied and it said that ESP is broken and had a five second video of youth of just swinging back and forth against the target and we spend a couple more hours and it turned and we started feeling like if none of us can figure it out and QA can't figure it out then probably it was a user error because the the different keyboards that you that

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    are involved in just playing this game it's pretty it might be possible that the that you hit and actually turned off ESP the UI didn't update and so you don't know that it's off and then when you try to lock on and it's broken so we put that fix in and everything looks fine we're sending it back let's see how it goes from we will see how the QA feels about it and many days that come in there's a fire to put out and today was no different there was six major issues blocking us from releasing to the evocati and eventually the PU one of those issues was all the ships were missing their LEDs and the LEDs are the level of detail meshes that as you get away from the ship it goes lower resolution what was happening was it was

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    showing a very low resolution model up close and then it would disappear as you went away from the camera so we had a lot of missing assets and you would usually think this was an art issue but we know that these were working in the game not too long ago so the fact that all 30 or 50 ships suddenly were missing these was very curious so we started looking into the issue and we thought well let's test this on our development build let's test it in the editor and it was fine in that order fine in the development build then we went over to QA and asked them to look at it and they noticed that it was only happening in the shipping build now shipping build and development build where we work it's a little different

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    there's a little different ways they build those processes different flags that get set not enough not as much information gets put in the shipping bill because it's a little more streamlined so we were looking at it since we isolated it only to the shipping build we started looking at the data inside the shipping build and we can tell that the build process had not put the correct files into our p4k pack files so once we realized that we contacted our DevOps engineer miles and he was able to clear the cache and solve the problem this week we had quite an interesting set of tasks given to us by a design which started from the Swanberg and which was related to a basically

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    headlights on a ship not working properly which evolved into creating a new system of light grouping for headlights for every ship on 3.0 and in future developments where players are actually able to control and toggle headlights or spotlights on their shapes whenever you know their carrier or you want to illuminate the surface of let's say an asteroid when you're looking for something which is quite an interesting and a very very strong visual and it's something that was missing from some ships before so because it had to be done on every 3.0 shape and every ship has its own separate task it also

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    actually resolves quite a big chunk 20 I would say tasks on our to-do list before we are ready to push for a pity you and it was quite a quite a quick task it literally took me about one hour to do all you had to do is separate their headlights or the spotlights from the existing lightening rig into its own layer assign a new light group just for them and just stick a box which allowed players to use a shortcut to turn them on and off I had to do it for every single shape and just like that about 20 tasks were done in a very very short amount of time this week we've been focused on getting

18. 00:14:03

    things ready for when we go to PT you part of the big piece of this is updating our traversal experience how ships fly and travel through our expanded universe a big piece of this has been updating our navigation points for quantum travel as well as doing a lot of fine-tuning on the atmospheric flight systems as well as some of the more interesting flight systems that we have for vehicles like the NOx the dragonfly those will be really exceeding exciting to see in game so look forward to that but this has come with another challenge and that is making sure that we have the performance that our fans expect so we've had our lead engineers Chad McKinney and mark even working on performance related issues in order to bring that experience up to the high fidelity and high speed that we hope to see in the finished product for the

19. 00:14:51

    quantum drive we've been working on a lot of visual effects work recently so we've took the old system which was using a different set of triggers and such it was basically state driven every time we entered a new state of the drive the spool the ramp the travel we would just say okay far off these effects that took a lot of a lot of the control away from design on how they wanted it to behave so we've instead change it to a velocity based system so now instead of it being this effect plays when we enter this effect or this stage of the drive so spool up play this effect it's now when the ship reaches this velocity play this effect it gives designers a lot more control over how the visuals are going to look and gives our artists more control over how things develop through the flow as well as controlling our short and long range travel we also

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    implemented our dynamic nav points so the internet network around a planet is no longer has to be placed by our designers it can be generated dynamically and controlled based on what you're actively targeting so it doesn't flood the players screen with all kinds of useless data if they don't want it they can drop their quantum target they'll go away have combat and then bring it back up whenever you need to those have been the big things we've been pushing for this past week or so 43.0 so in the last week I have closed that a lot of issues with the help of John to do with gravity being quite unstable so things like for example the gravel of bikes flipping up sigh down and getting stuck in the geometry and just nothing able to write themselves so now they can fix that problem without much issue we've also had things like strange forces that just come out of nowhere and kick gravlax up

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    into space I guess so those have been resolved as well and general sort of issues where gravel up bikes lose control we had one issue where you would turn left specifically left and the grappler bike would tumble and then carry on if you tried to go right it wouldn't happen which is the exchange we fixed that issue as well we still haven't quite got it yet we're also looking into issues where there are these huge forces that occur whenever you drive a gravel a bike up to a big rock and gravel adjust panics and goes oh no you're gonna hit the rock and it just flings you up into space so that's been sort of limited and I think with that issue and with the atmospheric stuff the John's been working on where you get this turbulence that I mentioned earlier just making sure that they all

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    work together and there's no other issues on top of that and pretty much at that point where Pete are you ready with this this is ready to go and it feels a lot nicer than it used to okay so I was investigating in PTU burg where as players are flying around the PU new objects were not rendering in and it was just basically missing from all the locations that you visited the issue was that the streaming system was essentially stuck so as new objects were requested to stream in they were not getting updated and therefore they were not getting loaded and not getting rendered to resolve the issue we first had to gather the information some information from the evocati and QA where we basically exposed some debug streaming information into the release builds so that we could essentially see if what kind of issue was happening with the streaming system was it stuck was

23. 00:18:04

    running out of memory was over budget that sort of thing once we got that information we realized that essentially the stream system was stuck and then as new objects came in they were not getting updated not it wasn't going over budget it was just not getting updated and to resolve this issue we essentially found the cause was that the streaming system relied on a checked update every naught point 1 milliseconds and as you are connected to the server it was storing that value in a float which after a while a lost position and so it couldn't represent nor point 1 milliseconds anymore and therefore it never got into the block to update the importance value of the objects and it never got streamed in and basically to resolve it we changed that time a check to be to work on a frame Delta time

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    rather than so absolute time it was just looking at the difference how much time has passed since the last frame and that resolved a streaming system bug I am primarily working on hooking up the radar gameplay in a scanning gameplay to the UI and the MF DS and the visor interface that will let you know that you are radar and scanning game playing like that when that it happens at all because the the underlying mechanic is that is a is a location versus another location versus the ambient signal between versus what you're doing and what they're doing all of which is basically invisible until we put it on a

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    screen and says it happened or it didn't and so part of it is getting readouts from the things you're scanning and reporting that information on screen in a way that makes sense and is generic enough that we can use it for debris or a vehicle or a planet or a jump point or whatever else to the point where we'll want to be able to extend this to being able for like police scanners to scan the ship and its cargo and its crew and have the the feedback on that go over time and let everybody know that it's even happening so that's the once you have that information I the part of a part of it is displaying it the other

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    part is the gameplay of getting it of manipulating your scanner to focus in on one part of space or to expand out to get a more broad sweep of the area and so all the the controls to manipulate that and to demonstrate to you what it is you're doing when you push buttons and gameplay happens is that's what we're doing we find multiple challenges with displaying information to the player right now all of the ships have their own kind of display systems and we're adding a new one basically for scanning and trying to locate other players this is a challenge because we don't want to clutter the

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    play with too much information we want to make it basically the essential for the player to if they want to scan something they can easily do it and they can get all of the information in a simple and clear way to make them make better decisions react faster just basically make gameplay more fun for them so last week we had a few more polish tasks left for the starmap these have been done so the star map is basically a bit you ready there is one more task we need to I need to submit we are not submitting right now to prevent any instability for the first BT release but all will probably be submitted for the next patch after

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    that on the radar to disarm it to radar conversion I'm I've been able to get some more work done we have now a nice transition between the star map and the radar so if you zoom in and too much will all go smoothly I'm going to get like a video together today and I show it to the team to get some feedback and see where we go from there in regards to the raycast issue that's the programming team took care of it took roughly a day and a half of all the senior engineering programmers here in Frankfort to track that sucker down and kill it so the mission manager that's been Peter you ready for about two or three weeks this

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    last week Todd again reviewed it with some of the other designers later I've identified the last few fixes that they'd like so right now waiting the process of estimating those out get them into schedule and then we'll see where that force for again to the last few fixes before we go to before no life then we've gotta have one let me start the live sing so you wanna take it away firstly we pushed to on Friday and again on Saturday which is pretty good we've got a feedback report from from will leverets the QA responded to in the last sort of our also highlighting some bug highlight in the bugs that chris that we'll call that in

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    there for the ships the service stability I'm just trying to take a look at it now for the most part seemed not too bad I couldn't see anything in there that highlighted anything particularly dreadful but of course I can ask after the guys in the meeting in a little bit other than that the main things to sort of highlight where there's a couple of bugs that we already know that we've got that are being take a look at where if ships go into a green zone they sort of around a little bit in the catalyst we find a fixed position before we do that

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    and then whatever happens we need to go because we need to get this into the server some health information so if we do fix your issues tomorrow we know whether performance wise we've been doing lots of intestine increasing player count so externally we got up to 60 players in an instance so that was really really cool to see we've got a lots of cool images of port olisar and all the ships flying around it's really really interesting to see the different how even just a increasing player cap like that can can make it feel a lot more lived-in a lot more a lot more exciting and internally we actually even got up to 128 players so we're doing lots of tests to try to increase player player cap and it's going really well so far so we're winding down with the 3.0 release right now and that means that some of the things that we're looking at

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    our stability and performance and this is something that we're always concerned with but when we're really approaching a release that become in priority and these are two kind of broad topics stability is something that like I said we're always addressing but we've been fixing the obvious crashes we've been fixing the obvious bugs and disconnections and now we're getting to a point where we've gotten through most of the major issues and we're left with either very difficult to solve crashes or very difficult to reproduce and so oftentimes I'll get some report from the epic Adi and it will be that one time during an avocado run there was a crash on the server for some reason or

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    disconnection and I get a call stack I get a core dump and there's no repro we've only seen it once and we need to fix it somehow and this has come up many times I have to look at these kinds of issues and just try to figure out how it is even possible that say the server can get in particular states and how to fix it without ever seeing the crash and so this requires a lot of collaboration for instance with QA to get certain kinds of information working with avocadoes so that we can try a fix that may not hold and and kind of go back and forth until we get something that looks like it's it's working and this is it's an ongoing process and this is the kind of thing we're having the Ewa Cod is incredibly

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    useful because it means that we can test at a scale that we're just not able to achieve internally so that's one big kind of set of things that we're looking at right now it's one of the few things that we've been trying to do hard on 3.0 is optimization optimization optimization you know we have bigger Maps gigantic Maps a lot more players and unfortunately a lot of our older systems ran these updates all the time which means if we throw in 60 ships that's 60 big gigantic if' CFS updates works our heavy physical beasts that eat up all that yummy yummy cpu power and obviously if you have a ship way down there you don't care about him you only care about the ships that are nearby that you're combating or with your buddy so we only want to update just the things and I put in something it was

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    actually during bug smashers to only show those ships that are nearby unfortunately that had a knock-on side effect where on the server if you had an AI guy over here he wouldn't update and he couldn't handle the mission so if you go fly over he would eventually take on and then teleport away no it caused havoc so I had to build upon that optimization so that it wasn't just in range but if he detected him on the sensor or for you know on the dedicated server if he was a mission-critical thing he should do an update so now we only update things we should update unless the server needs to do those special little things and performance and we get our fun CPU cycles one of the other things we were doing on optimization is we're trying to get rid of a lot of our old systems there was this thing called net serialized this is

36. 00:28:44

    basically the old way of the CryEngine to serialize a bunch of data you basically had this function it had a block of information and you feel the devil out but it doesn't work well what their new system called serialize variables the new way is multi-threaded working in a batch all the great new stuff of the day and that serialize main thread a horrible flow set up so we're trying to rip out that last thing we only have three things left I used it we ripped out two and we actually have a third one getting worked on right now so hopefully we could just toss away that old system and use that awesome new serialize variable flow and I think Clyde will be very very happy once we finish that off so performance has gotten much better dies of late we've managed to increase the average frame

37. 00:29:32

    rate in many places even really busy places like grim X and Levski and but we've we've managed to get more people in more clients and at the same time we went to evac RC with over 40 people not long ago and we've even run local tests using what we call headless clients which is kind of what it sounds it's basically just an automated way of connecting clients and will usually we actually had I think it was ten or ten or twelve pcs that we had each one were running about seven to ten headless clients and we managed to connect over a hundred players not sure of the exact number but managed to get over a hundred people and at the same time with stability there's an actual stable server with that many

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    people in so that was really exciting for us it's a Hitler and general performance is better even localized as I say we've we've gone through periods of time with a frame rate has been sub 40 which is when qh tends to get worried that's when we will start throwing bugs and if like we're seeing an average kind of FPS below 30 in any area and yet almost all of those areas are now pushing well over 30 into the mid forties high 50s it's it's it's much much better performance throughout our priorities at the moment it to get build that is stable but also has good player time features so we're focusing on flight and traversal planet Plumtree stuff landing missions there shopping just to make sure all these are

39. 00:31:07

    functioning and to get out to a PT you push in the hopes that no it's a good experience when we do go to PT you as you may recall last week our production schedule showed we were at 179 remaining must fix issues towards the release of PT you across all categories I'm thrilled to say that the result of all the hard work by the team is that we burned down enough issues to push 3.0 to PT you to start a larger round of testing now from here we'll be releasing updates to more and more PT you testers until we feel thorough improvements have been completed then 3.0 will be released live now don't forget to check out our production schedule on Friday to see the progress we're continuing to make and see you next week here on burned down while there's no feature today we do

40. 00:31:56

    have some very special video content coming your way our anniversary special starts tomorrow and to celebrate the sale we've recorded eight episodes over around the verse to profile all the ship and vehicle manufacturers in-game include a few surprises yes a few surprises so be sure to check out our website each and every day over the next week so you don't miss an installment of the series or your chance to pick up a ship that's not normally available yes that is right and thanks to all of our subscribers and backers for your support we couldn't do any of this without you yes we definitely come so thank you very much and for those of you in the United States happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating and thanks to our dedicated testers out there playing the latest build and getting it closer to everyone's hands in 3.0 live yes thank you and until tomorrow we will see you

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    [Music] thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest in star citizen a squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon you