Inside Star Citizen: Persistence Existence | Summer 2022

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:04

   hey all space dad here coming to you from a secret facility that we'll be talking more about next quarter now alpha 318 has a whole lot of features that players have been anxious for updates on and while we'll get to all of them like we always do before this quarter is out we wanted to take this week's show and slow things down a bit for an uninterrupted unabridged chat about persistent entity streaming what it is how it's been going where it's at now and what's coming up next and we'll get back to our normal features next week but for now please join me in welcoming benoit beauceur cto of our partners at turbulent for what we're calling our very first pes report so benoit

2. 00:00:52

   welcome back to isc to start things off give us a nickel version of what persistent entity streaming is it's a personality streaming is a system that allows us to persist the entire game world and restore it from disk so that it's never lost and changes from players are meaningful and what's that look like to the player how will players know if pes is working or not uh it's again they're gonna know because every time they come back to the same server the state will be the same so if you leave a ship a can or any kind of items in the world will stay there you blow up a door it'll be blown on that server forever but part of this is something that cleans up the junk afterwards right yeah some items will be covered under life cycle management which will get recycled rights because obviously we

3. 00:01:39

   need some kind of janitorial system behind the scenes but there also are discussions about gameplay to do that to help players to get players to help us clean up the game world but yes those are that's a new avenue that persistent enemy streaming opens up all right so we brought everyone up to speed on what pes is let's get to the updates now last time we heard anything was from chris's letter from the chairman back in may where we'd just dropped something on the ground shut the servers down brought the servers back up and it was still there what's happened in the last three months uh well so the the team which is fairly large team at this point has been working really hard to get our first stage delivery to what we call game dev which is our main branch what that means is we've moved from a prototypical

4. 00:02:29

   work branch into what everybody in the company is using to develop the game and so that's the big achievement is now the the technology is in the game dev branch so everybody is using it in day to day day in day out testing uh and every you know so all the bugs appear they're right in our faces we fix them right away it's been a bit of a crazy crazy time but that's the big achievement in the last three three months is that we've stabilized the technology enough so that the entire company can now be working on it uh define crazy they find crazy everything being on fire like you know this technology touches on every subsystem in the game so transit was busted uh you know like stuff was persisting in the wrong locations

5. 00:03:18

   uh you can log into the game because obviously with pes comes the a new login flow to get players into the game because we need to bring your items into a new database so that entire system was also as rocky to get in because there's a lot of cases uh to deal with like timeouts if you have too many items what happens if you have too many items uh you know and dealing with the different all the different stages of the login from authentication to you being actually spawning in the game and so it's been a lot of debugging uh encountering issues on different types of machines because when we start you know all the developers have some pretty good machines on the on those feature branches but when we move to game dev now we're exposed to all kinds of different hardware and you know timing issues occur those are the weird

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   ones to find uh they're really difficult to trace in fact but uh so that's been the the craziness is getting exposed to way more machine types or users as well right like uh the game requires a lot of resources to run when we develop locally and so sometimes you know one service doesn't start on somebody's machine and that causes you know all these crashes to start being reported and now we have to investigate them and so that's been a bit of it's the real time effect that makes it crazy it's like you know it's not we're not making technology in a bubble anymore where everybody's using it and so that makes it really really difficult to follow but it's been it's been fun to finally get the technology in the hands of people that can uh really adjust it for the game and for the players and so that's been fantastic

7. 00:04:53

   so that's been the last couple months but where are we at right now so right now on the technology side we're in bug fixing mode right and identifying the elements that are left that we are still you know rough around the edges so let's i don't want to call it polish it's really bug fixing back testing stabilization uh stabilization is the right word that's what we're doing right now so it's feature parity and making sure everything works though it should uh on the other side there's a new team that's kicking in work which is deployment teams right so this is taking the technology that we have working on a game dev build and locally and basically breaking it up into a lot of small services that run in the cloud so the operationalization of the technology

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   that's what we're uh really focusing on now it's like a dependent project right so this allows us to basically uh bring the game to you guys that's where we can do ptu so ptu is for a lot larger than a developer running the game on his machine even though there's tons of services when we go to the cloud you know we've got operators that deploy that on multiple machines and scale this out this is made to scale so so now it's about testing that that's true so we've got the technology is working now we're trying to scale it out to the cloud c you know how many users were kicking in and there the weight of the entities how many entities we end up having in the databases can they reload fast enough you know testing all of the facets of the assumptions that we had but really getting the getting this

9. 00:06:28

   technology ready to be deployed for players to play on has the recent change in server player counts had any effect on pes testing or its development well at first we thought it was going to have an effect but the reality is the same amount of entities get stored whether 100 players are simulated or 50 so no for the moment there is no side effect to having more player player caps because the you know obviously there's more entities being changed but ultimately for the same amount of players online whether they're divided on 5100 players per server doesn't doesn't change anything for ps great awesome uh but what's next where do we go from here where do we go from here it's a straight line to uh deployment right that's the only thing that matters right now is is

10. 00:07:16

    to make sure that the technology can run in the cloud properly that it scales out uh that if we have more players coming in either in a short period of time or in a long period of time that we can you know add more provisioning add more machines to run it um making sure it operates well at scale uh so when you know all of you guys are online to make sure that everything's functioning properly that we cover for we recover from hairs this tech comes with a lot more observability than the previous systems that we had so we have tons of graphs and like data that's coming in from the system operating uh and we're you know the teams need to get used to this to be able to identify problems to be able to help support we have a bunch of new tools that we're

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    also working in the last stretch here to uh allow game support to uh help players that have issues for so uh character repair is something that we're starting to work on uh mine the word here is not character reset but character repair which is something that we can now do that we could not do before so that will allow us to not you know just destroy people's inventories and items but really go and fix one issue on their on so that they can keep playing so we're trying to get that in before we launch it because we think that would be a very beneficial uh for if there are corruption uh events again we're trying to this the technology is made to not have those but like better say that story right so so yeah so that's the that's really the

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    work now is login flow and pes is just stabilization and deployment so that we can launch it so it's bee line for for 318 is is all it's like we're banging on it until it gets it properly now i know we don't like to do dates but we got a whole lot of player testers waiting to help bang on the pipes you wanna you wanna forecast anything oh no i'm not even gonna try to gamble on that one uh i mean we have it running in in the cloud it's running right but you know before we're comfortable not sending the etf team into a you know just fire drill that's gonna be you know there's a big difference between testers internal testers developers using the system and when we get real users on it it's completely completely different right

13. 00:09:40

    and uh so it's hard to say for me like i can't i don't want to forecast it that's fair that's fair now before we let you go i want to reiterate that pes isn't a traditional feature like players are used to when it works star citizen isn't going to look any different it'll just be another step closer to functioning like we've always intended to it's it's a major step forward in stability when all is said and done yeah you know i'm not saying we're not going to have wipes anymore because there's always data changes that will require us to do that but we're really hoping that the technology will allow us to have consistent data which we don't always have right uh you know all the every players had horror stories of so you know how they're you know losing their movie glass or their eyes which is incidentally one thing i

14. 00:10:28

    discovered in this project is that if you don't have eyes you don't see markers in your visor that's an interesting one uh but uh so trying to make sure that the data's you know the technology will make sure that the data is safe and sound so obviously less corruption so that's the first thing we expect second one stuff will persist and to be honest at this time we don't totally know what that's gonna mean when we put real players in it right so we do have life cycle systems and cleanups and all that stuff yes we've planned for that but we don't yet know what you guys will do with it and that will greatly affect how the technology functions right in the end uh so that's going to be interesting to see so as as a player stuff you put on one server will stay there right it's there until the server gets you know wiped

15. 00:11:17

    manually but by default every server will just persist you know like you said it's a stepping stone technology really what this means is behind the scenes the simulation and the replication of the game so simulation is the stuff that runs the physics and the rendering and the ai right is one thing and the replication which is sending updates and the state of all these entities as they're being simulated this used to be like this right and now with pes and the game server this is split into two and that's the big achievement that ps allows us to do yes we get persistent state that's awesome that's great but the real thing is that we separate simulation from replication and that allows us to do server meshing after that and that's the whole that's the reason why we're

16. 00:12:05

    doing this all right last question then how do you feel good i feel good tired but you know we're in the home stretch so i'm i'm happy i'm happy about where we are i'm happy that the the company now can use the technology and see what it what it's like to persist everything i mean my our dev servers are not littered with you know stuff playing around which uh which is cool uh but uh i i know i feel good i feel encouraged uh also stressed out because like we need to scale it right so that's the it's that it's that ten percent that takes ninety percent of the time right so that's the effect i'm a bit stressed out for but it's okay i feel good about it all right well thank you for your time man thank you man so what did we learn this week well

17. 00:12:53

    hopefully it's that persistent entity streaming may not be the most uh visual of features but it is the next big step in realizing a universe where players can truly leave their mark the the last major milestone that'll make server meshing possible and that it's still heading your way in the upcoming alpha 318. now thank you for taking this iscd tour with us this week but don't worry we've still got four more episodes left this quarter where we'll be covering things like hull stripping cargo refactor the new 600i and msr crash lights and more as well as meeting the performance capture team and exploring their new facility next door and then maybe we'll stop by his people are talking to my people we'll see what we can make happen

18. 00:13:44

    for inside star citizen i'm jared huckaby we'll see you all next week you