Inside CIG . Roundtable . Engineering

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] hi everybody I'm here with our programmers of cig uh Jason Spangler our CTO our lead Tom Sawyer Kyle Rockman Jeff yurii and bran Jackson hell so we are here to talk about the process to makes Star Citizen happen Jason you look very concerned and you shouldn't so what happens Jason how do you get everybody else to uh make this happen well we're starting with cry engine as you know and that's a very big code base so we are uh adapting it and adding things needed to it to work for a

2. 00:00:52

   space flight uh game and also as a large online game with a persistent universe so so we kind of from the top down we've looked at that created a big list of tasks and systems that need done created adapted and now we are working on the ones needed in the beginning for the hanger app and for other features and as we get to each one before we start it we break it down into much smaller more detailed tasks uh talk about the technical design and the limitations and budgets for the uh performance and then we Implement and create them by writing code and also reusing existing technology all right so

3. 00:01:41

   it doesn't look like you're in the Bahamas though you're in Montreal right yes what are you doing there I'm at Behavior Uh meeting a lot of programmers uh and other folks who could work on Star Citizen from uh this studio and what about the other guys here Tom what do you do in terms of programming uh currently I'm getting the initial backend server architecture in place so uh just uh you I think I wrote about seven or eight different servers you know that are providing different services and we have the staren uh client you know connect to the servers doing account authentication and get your pledge data and item data to fill the The Hanger app you know with the items that you've purchased on the website so just again that's uh you know

4. 00:02:30

   architecture and framework in place and once we get that working then it's you know back to kind of the MMO style of the gameplay you know creating worlds and having people join them and you know a large scale you know Universe wow this sounds like a lot of work Kyle what are what are you doing um so I'm a tools programmer and I basically write anything that we need to make the production schedule easier or better um one of the things that I'm focusing on right now is the actual installation launching and patching of Star Citizen the initial hanger module that we will release so we have this uh you know just basic Windows installer that installs the launcher and then it downloads all the game data that's necessary to play um that we uh patch so we can put out incremental portions of

5. 00:03:20

   it and just keep patching to your current existing content directory um and then from there you actually launch the game you log in we you know I uh interface with toml lot where we are going to hand over the login credentials and the game client is going to use it to connect to the server and stuff like that so this patching scenario so if I'm in Australia for example is that any different from if I'm here in Austin no I mean it'll just once you log in and you're a user that can download the game it will uh connect to our uh CDN it's a it's a network that hosts all the data for the game and just downloads the stuff that's relative for the client and then um launches the game game client which ends up talking to the server stuff that Tom is writing all right and then Jeff how do you come into the mix I'm a gameplay programmer so I uh develop the the game systems uh or I I

6. 00:04:11

   implement the the game systems that the designers design um currently um working with Brendan on uh doing the the gameplay portion of the of the shield uh to kind of you know get that hooked up and get get it working in the ship so excuse my ignorance what is The Shield uh The Shield's the um the shield on the ship and it's it's um it's kind of the first line of defense like when you get hit so you mean if like an enemy hits me then it would first hit the shield and you know the shield would eventually wear down and then it would start hitting the other components on the ship itself so how strong are you going to make my shield strong as you want it and Brandon what do you do um I work on visual effects for the game game um

7. 00:05:00

   so far I've been developing things like laser bolts uh The Shield as Jeff mentioned kind of just working through how a player understands he's attacking somebody else through the visuals and um you know sees the damage that hits him as it hits his shield we get the initial kind of estimates and we work with those and then once we've kind of got everything in the game working the designers come along and the artists come along and refine everything we've done because you know just because we we set it up with the original estimates doesn't mean that it's fun still so Jason does this sound right to you you're looking slightly concerned again um yes one thing I would add is that we look at all the different types of specs that the designers want and we

8. 00:05:48

   create systems that have those specs so then and then we give them some sample data uh with like a sample ship and when they create new things new ship ships new items that can then fill in the the data with the values they want but we still have to implement the systems that will use those specs and behave however the numbers uh state so how difficult is that between ships do you have to program entirely from scratch again or can you use functionality from what you had from say the Aurora LX do you have to do it all again for 300i we definitely make it so we make a ship system so that the system would work for all the ships um and then sometimes we need to add

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   specific things that might be specific for like a few ships or one ship for maybe how it's laid out or the or because it has some something special about it but we definitely try to make systems that will work for All Ships what are some of the good points that you see about using the cry engine are you asking to me oh yeah um well definitely very good graphically um very full featured um it has a lot of the networking uh and bandwidth and latency considerations we need so it's a good foundation for us just like any engine it's a large code base that has had many

10. 00:07:27

    programmers working on working on over many many years so you can find very uh degrees of difficulty and commenting and such in the uh engine code sometimes it's just some things are more difficult just because it's solving a more complex problem for one system but this all sounds beyond my reach it's C++ right that's about all I know I can't I can't read anything on Chris's computers he has four screens up and it all looks like nothing to me we should help him by just getting on his keyboard and typing random stuff in sometime wonderful to find that one tell you're optimizing his why is this not building Easter egg hunt all right Jason we're going to let you off the hook

11. 00:08:15

    now okay this is our programming team and now you have a sense of what they do on a daily basis