Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - NPC Nature and Seat Stature

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   you hey everybody welcome to another edition of calling all devs are weasely Q&A series right two questions from you the star citizen backer and posed them directly to the developers joining us on the show this week we go back to calling all devs all-star mr. dant Ruffin with a question about NPCs dan how you doing man hey Jarrett oh good yeah I was I almost had something other than my normal phrasing I lost it let's just get right to it I'm gonna tape little post-it notes with with canned responses when people ask me how I'm doing because I like Spock in Star Trek 4 how do you feel like I don't know how to answer the

2. 00:00:48

   question it's alright turning on joining on doing geez let's try this again will my NPCs walk around on board or does a turret gunner always sit in this tower a doctor always stay in his medical practice Chris once said that NPCs must eat and drink is this still the plan it's definitely still the plan each NPC will have a schedule they will have a schedule that says when they're on duty when they're not on duty when they will practice at their at their turret so let's take that the turret example for a second I am expecting the turret gunner to not spend all this time in a turret he needs to eat he needs to shower he

3. 00:01:38

   needs to sleep he will go through his entire life cycle he will have some exercise time where he's at the station there will be for example if you have let's say you have six turret guns there will be a few of them will always be at the station and they'll have a rotation so one of them will sleep between these hours while the other is at the turret while the next one is eating and doing Garen our stuff once the ship goes into combat you will have all their guys over guys switch schedule and they'll switch to their combat schedule rather than they're out of basket scheduled and there as soon as they switch to combat schedule whether they were eating being on the toilet or whatever they will leave that they will run all the way to to their turret and man the station

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   are you are you talking about like like a like a ship in squadron 42 you're talking about like a player player ship you said six turrets will say have a handle that here we're talking a ship in PU where where you actually will hire a crew to man your station because let's say today your friends are not online and you just want to have some fun you will be you will have your NPC crew that you hire and praised and trained and all that lovely stuff and they will have a schedule what you can do as the owner of the ship and the captain you can say yeah you're always on red alert then everyone will be at the station's what that will do it will cause their morale to drop if you keep them always at the station that will go hungry which again drops more out they'll not be happy

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   their performance will decrease so it's up to you how you want to do if you want to want to always keep them on red alert because you know stuff is about to happen fair enough but at some point you have to let them do their stuff and if they don't get enough sleep they get cranking on the slowest all right what does that happen sooner keep an eye on the public road wrap for when AI sub subs and interactions like AI crew and stuff you know are coming making their way towards star citizen that's a good time I asked the I asked the question but it's a good time to remind folks that we've built an entire public roadmap to answer all when related questions to the best of our abilities for a year out so when you have a one unrelated question always

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   check that roadmap to get the best idea that we have about when something will make its way into star system alright Dan I'll let you go thanks so much man oh thanks bye all right thanks so much Dan now we're moving on to Chad McKinney in our Los Angeles studio for a question about ship settings persistence Chad how you doing man hey doing well nice to hear from you yeah well you know we're in the same office it's you see each other at lunch occasionally ya know I get cheesesteak drafted a question from the backers vote oh my the backers says what are the plans for ship configuration persistence I'd like to keep my settings like selected MFDs weapons groups selected countermeasures countermeasures Wow module power settings stealth configuration state of headlines basically all the ship settings they

7. 00:04:48

   want to be they want those to persist between the times where they log out and log back in what do we got that's a you know a good question I think that it it gets that kind of this desire from the player base to have a more continuous kind of player experience the fundamental systems to get this on are exists there's basically two ways that you can do this you can either one locally per system so that means we're effectively writing these and some way to some file on disk and then if you go into the game and out in and out whatever they're gonna be there but if you change machines then at that point you would lose all of your settings an alternative is actually that we persist them into your player account and the persistence database and in that way actually if you change from machines

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   then it would actually travel with you which would be maybe useful for some people but both of those systems and or both saving things to disk and persisting them in the database exist we have ways for game code have access to them to be able to come up with a set of what we call persistent variables and and persist those across sessions and so really at this point that the fundamental systems are there it's up to each individual team each individual feature owner to take a look at what they have and try to figure out what they think is worth persisting and what they have time to do what the priority for all of it is so all of this could be done there is you shouldn't underestimate the amount of work that UI is so you know we may need

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   to maybe expose some custom interface for setting or updating these things or maybe it's somehow in-game you know we like to do that a lot but the fundamental like I said the fundamental systems are there and now it's just kind of up to the individual teams to kind of decide for themselves the priority and and whether or not they want to persist in an individual thing in the game right and right and to answer the question of whether we're going to be able to do it or whether we're going to do it and so like that would require a call to each of those individual teams yes I went to you because you can talk about the tech in general it's there it's just something it's just something that our innovative teams have to prioritize and who knows maybe the it keep an eye on the roadmap I'm gonna say that a lot throughout the course I have said that a lot throughout the person so when you want to see

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    what's coming next to what that's what the public roadmap is for but hopefully it's it's a it's a it's a gameplay feature I want that's a gameplay feature I think many people want I don't think there's anybody I don't think the the other side of that argument oh no we shouldn't have settings per sentence I don't think they have much of a leg to stand on so I well I can't sit here and absolutely commit that it will happen as III think I think the chances are in our favor so yeah hey Chad wanna let you go man thanks so much to hear from you all right take care all right thanks so much now finally for our last call the week we are going to Kirk Tomei with a question that I know it's close to the heart of little Terrapin out there Kirk how you doing man hey good job we got a question comes up with a lot of ships but most recently and perhaps most

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    comically it's come up with a series of little Terrapin cartoons as to do was that our wonderfully though okay you know they've made it they've made their way to a couple desktops here in the studio seat height but let's just talk about adjusting the seat height you know what we'll point will ask about the Terrapins specifically in a bit but let's talk about the process of adjusting sea Heights and and why this becomes an issue to begin with what's the challenge here sure well I guess I can talk about the history of why the secret the positions are where they are and specifically why the geometry around that the seat and your your viewing like your basic view area from your CV the cockpit are so the there's a big

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    emphasis on being able to see 4mf things on the screen that emphasis has been has been you know reduced slightly but we still need at least two MFDs that show you pretty vital information at all times I think we maybe push the limit there quite a bit in ships like the Cutlass where you see almost the entire dashboard does take quite a bit of room on your you know as far as like your viewing screen space and so that's that's when you know why the the viewing angles are where they are at the moment now I know there is a request to push those seat angles up and ultimately we'd love to do that and the best way to do this would be to actually

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    incorporate some actual like height adjustment that is that is you know optional for the player let the player choose whatever height they want for to this there quite a few challenges in doing that it's not as simple as simply I just think the the height of the itself so I was gonna try to lower my chair just to show you how simple it was and I can't find the lever to do it so I failed it continued anyway so there there are some challenges with that so one of them is you I so the the HUD and the ship's is actually a physical place in the cockpit seat so we need some way to actually transfer it so that the HUD especially you're in your flight club that's directly in front of you corresponds to your your actual height is so that it's in the same position on

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    the screen when you do change lights and that's just tech that we need to implement in order to get that to happen because right now it's little plastered in the ship so we need to some way to make it dynamic and adjust to your junior lens another issue that we have is that the lot of times the things that would need to be also adjusted with this the seat height which is namely like your controls right so the eye case it's it's attached to the dashboard that's in a cockpit and so we need to make some physical you know some geo changes to accommodate for not only the I K because you know even the ridiculous if your hands were so far down that if you just look terrible like driving the ship

15. 00:11:20

    right and so that would be necessary for any of the ships we change in that way another that probably the most major one is that animations would have to be changed and that's a challenge because while a lot of our ships do share a template set of animations for getting in and out of the seats and this is especially useful for the singles the single-seat fighters that we have because typically the the animation for getting in and out of the scene actually is tied to getting in and out of the ship itself but we need to adjust those across the board and that that's kind of a tremendous undertaking um and because they're shared it causes an issue that what can the weak part is

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    so if we have ships that you share that temple of animation it means we can't kind of piecemeal this change across across individual ships if we break the animation so and then fix the Geo so it works in one ship than any other ship that we have that that shares that template also has to be done and has to be done you know before we ship a build so that we just don't have one nice ship and a complete build one of the ways that we make a game at this size and scope possible is through the use of common elements but this common elements at the same time make sweeping make small changes into sweeping changes because they have to now affect so much more than just an individual ship right yeah so um I think we're these are these

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    are issues that are all solvable just takes time and I think the personally I think that the issue that is going to be the most challenging is getting the UI to settle correctly because we can probably fudge like the you know the heights of the seats in the ika and the animations pretty pretty well without any new tech but the transferring the ship pod to be dynamic is is going to be something that is going to be a a pretty big tech debt yeah yeah UI is usually I don't want to say it's the it's the it's the thing that holds us back but UI is the one department that touches every single aspect of star

18. 00:13:54

    citizen so it's they're obviously very taxed so we out we are often having to wait for UI for for this feature of that feature and why doesn't I can't just fix everything Kirk I thought I K was the Silver Bullet that just made everything possible well I mean it does but it it won't so you know I Kate will allow you to move things like the final positions of hands of feet but it won't allow you to make them not look ridiculous right so if it's if it's a small nudge sure that'll totally work but you know if you want to move the character say like a half a meter or something there's just absolutely no way we can do that without completely reworking the cockpits I mean all right Kirk well I think that prep answers it actually the last question any specific information about the

19. 00:14:42

    Terrapin c4 little Terrapin anything we can say at this point I tried guys it doesn't always happen all right think those comics coming though they're there all right thanks so much Kirk I'll let you go okay I take it special thanks to Dan Ruffin chad mckinney and of course kirk Tomei for taking their time to be here on the show that's this week remember you I would normally this is actually normally where I would say you could submit your questions but we're done for the year we've got we've got only one more show next week before we're done with the year we've already got the questions taken and then I am on vacation in January so we're not going to see another calling all Deb's for a little bit but it will return in 2019 we'll throw up a new thread when we're

20. 00:15:29

    ready to start bringing these things together so yeah you don't have to do anything this week just watch next week's show easy huh for calling I'll dab some Content Manager for global video production Jared Huckaby and I'll see you next week everybody thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library