Star Citizen: Introducing Pillar Talk - Alpha 3.6

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:04

   we're doing it let's do it we're doing right now this is literally the show very Seinfeld nothing yes so gentlemen welcome to the first pillar talk so this is a quarterly show we've been talking about about doing different types of video content we have inside star citizen and so that show we kind of defined as like the what if you will you know inside cercis and where this is gonna be where we talk about the why it's meant to be with our pillow directors or folks leading the pillars with Chris it's not the why like a pillow directions I know we try we throw a lot of turns out pillow directors and really incorporate other actors these are the people that have made games don't worked in the business for a long time I intimately trust to make really good decisions for high quality level star citizen and squadron so big and had

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   so many aspects because you know it's an FPS game it's a flight sim it's a space I mean basically in every game throw it together and put it in a safe way well it's very easy to get lost in man you sure and just sheer scale of what we're trying to do here so that's what and so I guess to open this out win three point six since we're gonna talk a lot about the upcoming release one in three six kind of it's exciting to you is there anything that stands out and those a lot but what what is some that say that's you tell you what about you I think on the gameplay system side obviously the law system would be a huge win to get that out the door with three point six it gives a pretty large foundation on which to build for the future and a means to serve as a counterweight for all of these undesirable player actions that in the past have been largely left

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   unattended it's been up to other players to deal with definite now with three point six we're delivering the first iteration of something that we're gonna continue to do extensive evolution and development on this feature for the next several quarters so the question would be then and three six what are the first things or the law system that people are gonna get to experience yeah one of the first things that I see is a greater breadth of laws we've got nineteen different laws on the books everything from murder possession of stolen goods transportation of illicit products previous to this you bought something and the only reason it was technic yours was because we stowed it on your ship but if another player blew your ship up and took the goods or snuck on your ship took him did whatever yeah there was no repercussions they could go sell it get full price now with 3.6 when you buy something unless you actually grant it to someone else if someone else has possession of

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   that they're very limited in what they can do with it you can't go to a normal law-abiding shop and unload all of this stolen cargo you have to go to salvage yards you have to go to fences and I'm a 36-mile without big brim hats yeah we're still playing with the exact location right now we're debating whether it's one or two in each planetary system I like the idea of making them a little bit more rare and part of that's because I want there to be fewer places where you can unload illicit merchandise the prices will be a fraction of what you get for legitimate goods and of course you also have to deal with the risk of any security agents that come across you during your travels every player is gonna have to do the mental calculus just have the choice so they basically can lose that goods pay the fine Oh stops a fight and then this whole you know security actress comes in to where more security reinforcements

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   interceptors etc pulls you you've been dampened so that you can't basically jump out of the area etc etc prisons which is where we want to go somewhere within the next couple of quarters once we've arrested a player then we put you on you know we don't respawn any a night we want to have consequences when people make judgment calls that's always a recurring theme with this game it's such a big extensive open-ended sandbox we're doing everything possible to give players the freedom to play the game however they want but with all this stuff whether it's your equipment or your action towards other players and NPCs and stuff like that there are always very definable consequences repercussions to the actions you're gonna take within the game does this mean murdering someone doesn't carry the same penalties parking my spaceship slightly incorrectly violations is just like well this is like it's a pocket

6. 00:04:09

   right you're gonna pay it and then certain violations like yeah people are coming after you well we've introduced the concept of a jurisdiction which is really just an area of space that specifies what laws apply within that area and the associated penalty is they have a parking violation Hurston you know how bounty hunters chasing you all enforcement would only care about you in proximity to her statistical vehicles content-wise we've got the Merlin not a full rework it's just throwing it up to modern standards it's quite an old ship we've got the Archimedes which is a variant of it so that's sort of the racing brush it's got a really nice white clear coat finish to it we've got the vanguard reworked that went front we'll just tidy up a little bit - before we looks like constantly I think about 10% of the interiors left

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   from the original and it's about 20 percent of the exterior it's how do we get to that rework like what made us make that much change - you know Vanguard there was in-game didn't really match up to the concept which was much more beefy this sort of like heavy long-range fighter she went back to the concept to try to really we've got all the cool little bits like turret coming out or like even like headlights popping up it's one of those things where you start pulling away or bits more and more comes with it and before you know is that right Stewart right do it wholesale yes or no answer is acceptable here John there are things not on the roadmap for vehicle chips absolutely yeah as we hear as many details as you want to give us that's a safety any Senate here as we did last year with the Valkyrie enero first two ships that went from concept straight through the pipeline the

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   Valkyrie people didn't know about until they walk through the doors it says in common saw it plastered yeah and there was that yeah I saw it in the demo what am i selling would be more things like that beautiful that's great our long-term goal is to sort of move towards more straight to playable yeah aren't the stuff that we came when obviously we don't have you know our vehicle team is decent-sized but it's not enough to get everything done so we still going to have a balance of some stuff that's sort of bit more longer-term and then some stuff that would be playable but as we move forward and as we get the vehicle team staffed up a bit more plan is to shift to basically dump is that here's a new ship go you can play it in the game right now so so there'll be a few surprises this year yeah good they go there's anything else you're excited by I'd say the other

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   thing which we don't call out as big of a feature but wipe and vo video II stuff for this release finally should get to the point where can hail other ships also when you're out in space and you see someone you can talk to it and you will have a separate channel to talk to your squad mates or teammates and stuff so I think it was one patch where we had the pipe and for you everyone had a great time but then we turned it off because we were getting crashes that were kind of hard to track down but this release we should have most of that sort out taken care of let's go yeah so I'm hoping to see a lot more use because the feature is great as long as people are using it right and this functionality there's loads of areas where we want to start expanding use the service beacons are one where it's an implied you know contract between two players and so it makes perfect sense that if you're requesting fuel or requesting combat assistance or whatever

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    it may be from another player that you want to dedicate a communication channel so that you tell him to specifics of what you're after a lot of focus is how can we make players work together better how can they communicate better because you know an online game playing with other people is like that's the fun not necessarily just doing it by yourself or else you just be playing single-player game right so the flip and VoIP is a example but there's a lot of stuff like the multi crew you and your crew will have to operate a ship efficiently so you're in combat and fires are breaking out or you've got to replace fuses are broken or fuel runs that have gone out your crewmates can run around and keep the ship going in a way that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise and that's like the advantage of a multi cruise ship versus a single seater ship we're working as hard as we can to get all the bits in place so all that sort of starts to work it's not really quite there with three six berths that we saw

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    more stuff happening with that mia tolling do we have any one of the things we talked about that recorders is the polish or quality of life we're trying to inject as much as we can in each quarter release really cool thing for me on the vehicle side is we've brought back the acceleration throttle so we talked about this Susan con it's essentially throttle that controls your acceleration and thrust directly drives how movable your ship is because the variable thrust was my suggestion previous design was cruise control like you set the speed you want to be and the ship tries to achieve it in the real world but I'll get my car and set cruise control to 20 and 30 or 50 or 100 he was accelerator and I'm just in the power that my engines putting out which is the equivalent of that's the force that my Frost is putting out and also if you're flying an aircraft you're generally you know always at 100% yeah you know I said so I

12. 00:09:00

    wanted to have something with more first order so like you'd be like be more affecting the thrust which was the original designer set up which is what we have it citizen combi then in the playback in combat which tends to happen everyone just basically as a hundred percent yeah we had a debate and I was like okay well I'll I'll let you guys go with this but then there's other reasons to be able to have the adjustment and then I was like okay I have both you know it's appropriate meme right now because there's no reason why you can't have that you can't set okay here's where it is do some really nice little things with it you can do soft landings yeah yeah just reduce that thrust and you just gently slice them rather than slamming that making of soft landings the veto I'm just gonna yeah we all want to make a game that reminds us of what we see in movies which is there's a little bit of a wobble and it moves

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    around so a certain speed ship has veto it suspiciously yeah you have this sort of hover mode that's is presented this weird-lookin motion we have at the moment where you're strafing around up down you're more accurately tilting rolling that's good if you pitch forward you'll you'll move forwards that's great yeah slightly changed the way shields working three six I won't get into the deep details of it essentially it allows the behaviors of the shields to come through so at the moment most ships come with two of the same shield yeah but if you want to change them to have two ones with radically different behaviour before 36 they just sort of summed their behaviors together he just ends up with this weird hybrid that didn't have any character whereas now if you put one has really fast regeneration but low health

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    term and the complete opposite you will notice those behaviors from those two shield generators that's really cool unfortunate a few things I'm gonna make three six so defenders movement two three seven it's our first panel ship and we try to apply our current pipeline tech needs to it and it really didn't work we don't feel like it's getting there yeah we're not pushing it out there because I think that's one of the defining you know that's its quality that's what we want to do so it's okay when we're putting stuff out they were iterating on there's definitely stuff that we're not happy with but we need people to play and give us feedback and we're also like some things like we've talked about making the URI good but you know we still have to have UI in the game so it's better to have some older surgically or slightly broken UI than no UI at all which we but in the case of something like a new ship no we

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    don't want to put out chip unless we're happy with it going forward we don't really want to rush features or content all of us want to make it perfect before we release it but at the same time we want to keep giving the community a reason to come back and play the game on a regular basis so you're trying to find these intermittent points where this is a complete game experience we can ship that and we iterate and we iterate except right yeah so on the Ben defender so you know if we look at when we set the time line I think we were gonna release in the last patch I think we base that'll on our normal so - boy you're quite a ship pipelines like look like with all planning right you're like here's all my ships and here's our big there we have our assessments and we know our pipeline really well we've done enough ships now we know it's a sport from this manufacturer it's gonna take this many many months kit to do do all get better we didn't have any of that for the defenders just so many challenges with it that almost every

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    single step of the way we were hit Rose boils on the on the outside for the first Benny yes the first bioship the guys working on have been very mindful that it's not the only batter ship so they can't just build it when our missive one off so the extra time we've had to spend here it's gonna benefit much as well been all penny skeptical yeah on that's also not been Henry six on release day it just needs more time there's a lot of stuff there's like one hundred and ninety nine meters lot of party places and places for doing all sorts of other business talking about past that goes beyond structure which is Kanaan is now how do you have more rich and luxurious materials what kind of props can you put in the paintings on

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    the walls make you feel like a super yacht which is what it is that's cool is there anything we want to add ship customization wise like we've kind of talked about it about the future and about what we planned for it and anybody that's long this is a discussion gentlemen a big one in three five one we snuck it into three five one rather than holding it for three six where it was originally planned yeah was basically the persistence of your slow down yeah that came about specifically because one of our designers rob reiner was making a point that there was just tons of chatter from the community that that was one of the most often requested features and so we basically slutted that to the top of the list and then the next step of this just didn't roll out with the initial feature the initial thing was just whatever your configuration is it will persist that so when your ship gets destroyed lost you go and claim another one you get a carbon copy of it in the future or it'll

18. 00:13:49

    look at the base value of your ship yeah octavo will be different based on exactly yeah the accounting serve as part of that is done we were already calculating the appropriate prices what we're really missing is all the UI the player facing feedback once we've got those elements we'll roll them in and then players will start to see oh well I've got you know LTI you know insurance on this ship up to this amount of value and so if I add additional value beyond that then I pay some percentage of that on a recurring basis in order to guarantee that all of that extra stuff will be outfitted on my ship when I go yeah and I think what we'll do is because we were originally thinking while you'd buy additional insurance for the extra weapons but it's better to do it this way which is your insurance covers whatever your ships on but there'll be some adjustment in the doctor ball or the expediting fees based

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    on the value of all the equipment and then on the cargo insurance what we really should do is you would have the opportunity just like I buy something online right now where I want to have travel insurance so if I'm at the commodities kiosk or whatever and I'm going give me you know 100s you use of gold or something it says do you want a for an extra you know 10% 20% you want to insure your load yeah don't it's not 10 or 20% I just thought of giving you a sample then you just have this trade on your own yeah I'm only I'm gonna get attacked or I'll be fine so I don't really want to spend the money or well I'd like to insure myself it's the same as you want to we're gonna take insurance you want to basically live on the edge take the chance go out there if you lose your cargo you literally lost all of us people are you speaking of rentals it's not gonna be right there with v6 will also have ship rental kind of cool because you know ships just inherently

20. 00:15:27

    are expensive and have to be for the economics to work but that means there's a fair amount of burning money in the game which always a problematic one we say we reset very difficult to be clear I will be fixed server side OCS when that is working then you'll have true persistence to have server OCS we have to have true persistence in the game because this server has to know exactly the state when it throws it out of memory and then it restores from that state so once we're assisting the state of the universe to a database when things are going on a server that means we have true persistent probably around about that point of time is where we'll start resetting a ones database so people can burn money towards accumulating chips and everything else that until then ship rentals pretty cool because it's a way to get into a expensive ship much sooner and even in the final game it will be

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    useful because if you're playing a game and you want to try something you could rent it or you could get into a bigger or better ship have a higher earning potential before you have the money to necessarily buy it outright ok quite a few before we before we wrap this up maybe some progress reports underneath else we're talking long term here is anybody have any updates on this stuff that we're we're a suicide match the persistence go together yeah that's a big project suicide OCS is fundamental for the meshing the static meshing and fully dynamic meshing which is where we want to end up it's a big development effort because the core team is implementing it they do their stuff but there's a lot of game code that has to adjust to make sure it works with the new paradigm because the client OCS has the ability to always know the server

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    has a full authoritative state of the entire universe for the entire star system at any one time at the moment that we move to server OCS it won't because that server may only have a portion of the star system for instance in its memory and that means that different variables have to be classified differently to persist because you can't always count on the server having a definite record of it so as some of the game code has to be adjusted to make sure that it's safe for that kind of set up once the assistants and the server meshing is in play that's the last piece of the attack and once the assistance is in there we're going to stop wiping accounts and so people can actually be playing turning towards something accumulating wealth for chelating items and ships so wrap this up why is this worth the wait I know this will it's completely change everything because all of a sudden

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    you're playing with thousands of people in other words you're no longer confined to a little island universe like right now ironically the more points of interest we add the more separated the player community becomes in other words we double the number of areas but we didn't change the server cap and so all of a sudden the players you just spread out more and so now for the foreseeable future and may not be able to put Gordon number in the exact same area but that doesn't really matter with three point six what really matters I think is I go to the asteroid field and there's a lot of players over there then I go to Portola store and there's a lot of guys there and then I go over to our court there's a lot of guys over there and so wherever you go you run into new people you form relationships or you trade things or you go off on it interest together and all of a sudden you've got people that had a trimmer already having a criminal rating when there's a relatively small number of people all on your server is not purely threatening in

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    the future having a big price in your head when there's thousands of other people that can basically accept the contract to bring you in and basically get paid for it now also you're really at risk and this series through to everything the entire game becomes infinitely more interesting so thank you guys for joining us thank the subscribers and backers obviously as always so let us do this content let's get back to work yeah there you go all right ready you