Star Citizen Live: Cargo & Hangars

13 September 202401:05:091,813 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:13
Yeah, take it in. Hi everybody. It's enough of that. Welcome to Star Citizen Live Cargo and Hangers. I'm your I'm I'm your I'm your host. Almost forgot the word host, Jared Huckaby. If you've never seen the Star Citizen Live before, it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week, uh invite one of our developers on the show, and uh chat about all kinds of stuff Star Citizen. Today's show is focused entirely on cargo and hangers. And any conversation related to cargo and hangers must involve Cargo Chat himself, Mr. Chad McKinney. Chad, how you doing? Doing good. Thanks for having me. Now, I I thought we had agreed to both shave our beards for this. Uh we both agreed that you would shave your beard. Is that what we agreed to? That's what I remember.
00:01:01
I should I should read my messages more closely. Uh no, as as I can already see in the chat, no, I did not lose a bet or anything like this. Uh the answer is I'm getting a fight with a razor. That's it. Lost a fight with a razor. Uh uh uh against my my better wishes and against my protestations on this very show for years and years and years, uh I am getting scanned uh for inclusion in one of the games next week. So, that's what this is for. I've seen people wondering if it was for CitizenCon or for some big marketing thing. Nope. It's just because they're like, "Hey, we're going to put you in the game. Probably going to make you a janitor or something on the on on on the Bengal or something." I'm like, "Cool. I'll be a janitor on the Bengal." So, that's what this is for. So,
00:01:49
sorry, women and children, for the fright. This is what I actually look like. All right. So, getting on with the show, uh this is a Q&A show where we collect questions from you, the Star Citizen viewer, and uh pose them directly to Chad. Uh we put up a thread up on Spectrum, which is our bespoke communication platform available on robertsspaceindustries.com. If you haven't checked that out, check that out. Uh it's your chance to submit questions and vote on which ones you want to see answered most. Uh we selected the questions that were appropriate for Chad. Uh remember that no Star Citizen developer works on every single aspect of the game. So, while there were many questions that I know folks were fervently wanting answered, uh we do have to find questions that are appropriate for our guests. That said, we did pick four or five that were still outside his mandate and went to uh Ian
00:02:38
Leyland and Rick Porter to get some answers to those. So, we did try to include some some of those questions that we normally skip over for that. So, we're trying to best of both worlds here. So, Chad, are you ready? No, but let's go. All right. So, the first question is a real real easy one. Uh uh just just a softball over the home plate. Um in the Hangers and Cargo SCL 4 months ago, it was said that it just missed the release and that you were really close. Uh what the hell happened? Uh time is relative. No. so, a few things on that. Uh first is when I said that, first off, I I do regret using that exact terminology. But, you know, to to be more serious, um
00:03:29
when I said that, that doesn't mean we're really close to going live, right? So, I think that's one first one thing to consider is that there's still the whole evocati PTU live flow that we have to go through, and there's going to be a a lead time to getting that out to players like no matter what. So, it wasn't like um we were so close to just like pushing the button and and being live. Um I probably could have been clearer on that point. But, on top of all that, there's a lot of things that happen even still like, you know, in between like what we would normally go, you know, to live and doing uh further development. And in particular, some things that like ended up being especially problematic uh like going long was things in particular like ATC and transit.
00:04:17
ATC and transit were two really critical parts of the whole hanger loop, of course. Uh and the ship loading changes that we did with the ship loading platform. And unfortunately, like if you could ask me to pick two systems to not touch at all, it would be ATC and transit. Because they're two older systems in the game. They're very complicated, and they have lots of bugs historically. They're they're problem children for us as as uh systems. So, we knew coming into this that it was going to be um a risk making changes to those systems. And what turned out to be, I think, you know, more of a problem than we anticipated is that like once we started getting like
00:05:04
wider testing, those systems really buckled underneath load in a way that we weren't really seeing internally. So, it we would, you know, if anybody was on the PTU, for example, um whenever we first started going out, it would it would be rocky. We'd put out some fixes, bring in more players, and then the just the thing would fall over. And as a developer, to make it more frustrating, fall over in a way where not only could we not reproduce it, but our own QA often times couldn't easily reproduce it. Or if they could, there wasn't like a coherent uh understanding about like what the fundamental cause was. So, for those kinds of issues, we had to get creative as far as like understanding what was uh happening and like what to do to address it because again, like we couldn't really
00:05:52
consistently or or fully understand it. So, we put in a lot of diagnostics, a lot of telemetry, try things, and then eventually work towards a conclusion of what the actual fundamental problems were. on top of that, like I think there was kind of um consideration with those systems about, "Right, we're going to go in here. We're going to make some big changes. We know we have to in order to make all of this hanger stuff work. But, these are kind of older systems. Do we rewrite them? Do we, you know, largely refactor them? Or do we try to keep them largely intact with the smaller changes that we need, hopefully smaller changes that we need to get us out? We wanted to hit the release date sooner. So, we made the call that we were not
00:06:40
going to largely refactor or rewrite them for this release. In retrospect, I'm not sure like if if I could do it again, I would be interested to know would it be longer actually if we just decided to just rewrite them or refactor them first. The good news is that we already are planning on doing just that. And in fact, um transit is already in progress with the new version, which needed to happen anyways for server matching and all that stuff. So, that's good. And then ATC as well, we already have um plans on how to rework it and to make it just fundamentally some of the the problems at play here because ATC as a system is so like centralized, and it keeps a lot of state internally in a in in a very centralized place. But, these systems are extremely complicated about
00:07:28
how they deal with persistence and logging and streaming. And in particular, tracking uh ship uh allocations in the hangers. So, there was we would get bugs, for example, with like ships doubling up in hangers, etc. Like those things were really challenging the system, as well as like the doors not opening. So, like a lot of that stuff, I think we have a lot better idea about what to do about it as a as a system in the future. But, this release, we made the call to try to, you know, take the system that we had, just kind of like, you know, get it working with the new direction, and then hopefully give us some more time without so much time pressure to to make the right adjustments like more fundamentally. You know, it's a risk we took. Uh didn't turn out, I think, as we hoped, but sometimes that's how it goes. But, there
00:08:15
was a lot more things than that. Um another thing was the mission system. It's a new mission system uh with a new delivery hookup for the delivery missions. First outing, right? There's a lot of new shaky things that we found with in particular the hookup from the freight elevators to the missions. There's just like a lot of loose ends, a lot of things threads would get lost. We have this whole warehouse system that has to interact with the uh mission system. And there's just, again, a lot of these like rare low repros um issues that in these very fundamental places, actually this is another point for ATC and transit. Like when you have a moderate inconsistent bug in a system that's not as critical, it doesn't seem as bad. Not to say that, you know, bugs aren't bad. Of course, we
00:09:03
want the game to be stable. But, whenever you have something that's like, let's say it happens 1% of the time or zero 0.1% of the time, unfortunately, if that is in a part of the game flow that's critical, it's critical. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's awful. It's unplayable, right? So, we have to like take even more care with those systems to get them into a better place so the game is more player playable because those bugs have an outsized effect. Um but beyond that, there's also uh in particular a lot of issues that we had with uh networking and and serialization and the replication layer changes that were coming in in preparation for server meshing. And uh I can just speak for my own
00:09:51
personal experience debugging some of these things. There were some very complicated, hard to understand bugs that we had to work back to eventually being actually corruption in serialized data that was coming from some bugs in the replication layer which we could not reproduce that again internally and that was a wild one to figure out. It was very very confusing as you can imagine because it's rare and it's random and like the data you get doesn't make sense. You're trying to make sense of like how these things come together. Uh but we we got there. there were design and iteration changes. You know, some of them, you know, we were pretty public about like the item bank uh but also tweaks to the freight elevator kiosk, changes to how the economy tuning works for example auto loading times and
00:10:38
and stuff. So like and to be fair, we were wanting the patch to be a complete package as much as we could. So given that we were already going late, we we didn't entirely shy away from taking some of the time to like also like clean things up on the design side while we're also grappling with some of these harder engineering problems. And then like the final thing I'll say on it is we didn't want the whole schedule to shift. So we still have a lot of other goals. Uh one of them obviously was the Atlas but there's, you know, things coming up 4.0. We're obviously still trying to get, you know, squadron finished and out the door. And we didn't want to just
00:11:25
take everything and just like take everyone, you know, focus entirely on this release, get this release out the door and have our whole schedule change for for the whole company. So we had to like, you know, keep there was a lot of people who needed to move on to 4.0 goals or or whatever. And so it meant that we needed to keep like the core people that were working on the main line features on the release but we didn't have the full force of the company to just close out one specific patch out. We could have but like I said it would have you know, caused problems for our other goals otherwise. So So you kind of in total there's a lot of a lot of things that uh I I feel like I've learned from and I hope in the future uh it gives us a better like framework for how to deal with something this complex.
00:12:13
And then um you know, one last thing I'll say is I think there's also just a fundamental problem with the the whole conceit of having this many fundamental things in one patch where I think if I would do it again, I would slice it differently and try to do the persistent and instance hangers in their own patch first and then layer on top all this other stuff. We wanted them to come together as an experience and I understand, you know, that might have been actually kind of a weird thing for the players to go through to have like this one particular aspect of that feature set come in without the things that make that make sense. But from a development perspective, it would have allowed us to harden on the
00:13:02
the aspects of it that were in particular thorny and and and more of an engineering challenge and then get that hardened and stable so that we give that to the players and then layer on top of that all this other stuff around it. But doing it all together, I think really challenged us when some of the you know, like I said some of the risks didn't uh break in our favor. Yeah, you you you you bring up several good points and for those of you in the chat are like, wow, this was an easy question. I hate to see a hard one. I was being facetious. This was the hard one. there lots of times when we talk about a tier zero feature or whatever, it it it's it's we do that thing that Chad was talking about. You you can basically for anything you can basically do one of two courses of action. One, you can split them up into several smaller things or two, you can try to push out a suite of
00:13:52
stuff. And we attempted to do the suite of stuff for uh for all of this. It was originally attached to an even bigger suite of stuff and everything that was 323. when we've done the separation in the past, it's a little more stable in certain stuff certainly but you that's when you tend to see things like, well, I don't understand why this is like this and I don't understand like this is like this and we just have to go, well, that's because we didn't give you the second part and the third part and the fourth part. And when you get the second part and the third part and fourth part, that first part will make more sense. And we try to explain that but it when you play the game and you see 1/4 of an experience, there's just there there's you're right when you say this doesn't make any sense. It doesn't because it's 1/4 of this overall thing. And when you see things like
00:14:40
the persistent hangers now and where we're going with with with item placement and the item banks and all that stuff like that, this is still just sections of the same thing that we'll continue to build out later and later. And you can expect to hear more about at a big event that's coming up in a few weeks. How many weeks? Don't tell me. but yeah, so we we tried to do this nice package thing and yeah, some you never know when you start these things. You never know whether the package approach is going to be the right one or the slicing it up into a bunch of different sections going to be the right one. And hindsight's always 20/20. But uh yeah, it's it was a it was another learning experience and I really appreciate and I want to hammer home the part that you you and your team basically there on an island by yourself and then you know, it's
00:15:29
yeah, you had help from here and there but for the most part, the full resources of the company were not there to to help you. They all had to stay on other things. They all just to keep the progress on 4.0 going and the stuff that's, you know, beyond, you know, going. So it's uh I appreciate the work you you put in and I think if I can speak for the community, they all appreciate that you guys we started talking about this. We were we first talked about this in ISC in October of last year. That's how long And I've been thinking about it a lot longer than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, your your small team out there in LA and Montreal has been on this for more than a year and stuff like this and I just I hope we all appreciate the the folks watching at home and myself that that your dedication of staying with this and sticking with this and and getting it resolved or getting as as
00:16:17
resolved as you can before the 4.0 uh the 324 release and subsequent hotfixes after that. Um all right. What happened with the item draw change? Let's just get the two big ones out of the way, man. It'll be easier after this. What what happened with the item draw or what To me, it's you know, it's uh this one it's not like a challenging question. Um it's kind of on a bit of an arc and I don't think that arc is completely finished. Um what's what's funny about that arc is I we've kind of ended up where we started actually cuz like in my in the original proposal for the item bank, it works like it does now actually which is like it's the um personal inventory UI and really like the item bank is more
00:17:06
like an interaction point to trigger that UI. And the reason to understand why that makes sense is because uh to think about like what you're doing at the item bank. What what you're doing really is we're trying to make it easier to get things that make sense from like a FPS player perspective, right? So if you want to get meta pins, you want to get armor or a weapon, these kinds of smaller items uh which are often equipment, uh we want to make that intuitive and easy um and quick, frictionless. Uh the personal inventory UI makes sense for that because it has the paper doll view where you can pull things over and like kind of very more uh tangibly interact with the player, more quickly equip and unequip, swap things out, etc. However, the personal inventory UI, I
00:17:57
think, you know, everyone that's played the game knows it's not perfect and there's there's things that we have long wanted to do about it. And um in fact, for this release, it was one of the things that we hoped that we could uh get to but we didn't have the time to. That's that's still we're still going to um come back to making improvements to So for that reason, we had some internal discussion on iterating on it and looking at it. And after we had gotten the freight elevator kiosk UI to a pretty good place, um I think people saw before that we originally had this more 3D based UI on the left hand side of the freight elevator kiosk, um which we may come back to at some point with some rethinking but when we went to the more like kind of straightforward like grid view um and then added, you know, certain things like search and uh better
00:18:46
filtering, that experience started to develop in a way that had some functionality advantages over the personal inventory UI. So we had some discussions internally and decided that we would try, you know, moving it over to use just the freight elevator kiosk UI rather than the And then there was trade-offs, of course. So like some of the like faster, tangible, easier um kind of changes are gone but you have other things like search and filtering that are better. And after giving it to y'all and collecting a lot of feedback and stuff internally, we had to make a call. There there was it was one of these things where there was very strong voices actually on like kind of both ends of it. So I think no matter what, some people, you know, it actually I
00:19:33
just went to a Bar Citizen in Seattle. It was funny like I talked to people and it was like some someone would say, man, I'm so happy you made that change. And then somebody else would be like, why don't you bring back the the freight elevator kiosk UI and item bank. But I think the answer is going to be we're we're going to probably keep it like it is now but bring over some of the things from the freight elevator kiosk UI like the search functionality to make that a better experience itself. So both of them are you know they they are better user interfaces and UX's in general. and and and yes folks who are in the chat watching who done the math it is 8:00 in the morning for for for cargo Chad. He he he he woke up extra early on a Friday morning in order to do this so
00:20:22
be kind. you can talk about how messed up my face is all you want. But let let Chad make up for a little bit. He's doing great. Um All right. So we got a couple questions here about the hangar itself. So these are the ones that we ended up going to Ian and Rick these are the design of the physical hangar and the layout and stuff is not typically questions that would be that would work for Chad you know as as a as a programmer and engineer and stuff but we these were important they were highly voted up we had access to Rick Porter and Ian so we went and got the answers for them. So the first question here is are we going to have more room to park ships and vehicles on the sides of our hangars. The pads are big enough but
00:21:11
the pavement is tiny compared to the rest. There was that question. There was are there any plans to add side rooms to players persistent hangars for things such as hubs firing range repair modification facilities or even just a large room with a cargo grid where players can customize as they see fit. And uh can you get rid of the garage in our hangars so we can just set up our furniture better too many random cables and boxes lying around. Uh can you clear up all that garbage? That's a long the sides. I'm merging all these together because the answers answer to all of these are sort of the same thing. These these are the very first Okay I I need to rephrase that. From a player perspective which is you and
00:22:02
then these are probably we're trying to we're trying to figure out before the show whether these are the fourth version or the fifth versions of hangars that you've seen. There were two versions made by our partners of behavior way back in the early days and then we and then we attempted a first version which is what you have before and then there's this. So this is I think this is the this is the second the CIG has made this is the fourth version of hangars and stuff that you guys have seen. and not all of the features not all of the intention that we wanted to get in there is in there. I'm going to read these notes from directly from Ian and Rick here so you these are just their words. Um we plan to add garage modules. Uh so we don't intend to expand the pavement but there should be more room for vehicles when you could basically
00:22:49
add on modules and expand the hangars to the left and right and to the front and back and to this different sections. Um The plan is for personal hangars to be able to be customized and expanded in the future with with the addition of these hangar modules. The exact list of modules are still being defined at this point which so I'm not going to be able to give you a list of whether it's a firing range or something like that. Um but you will be able to modify your hangars to certain extent and expand them out in other directions and stuff so that you can bring vehicles out and kind of store them off the side you don't have to use the ship elevator for bringing all your ground vehicles and stuff or just your smaller fighters and stuff off to the side. Uh and as far as cleaning up the garbage around the end we've already done multiple passes for the base hangar OCs so we're listening to the community and moving in the right
00:23:37
direction that's Ian speaking there. We want to split the data for instance hangars and personal hangars separately so that we can completely remove everything in the personal hangars while still leaving some form of dressing and world building in the instance hangars. So what this means is that as we've talked about before you have your home location and then you have the instance hangars that you'll get at every other location when you go there. For those right now those are using the same OC. So when you remove the dressing from one you remove the dressing from all of them. We want to split those into two different object containers so that the instance hangars that you get at every other space station or whatever those can stay dressed and look good and everything but your personal hangars the one the ones that get assigned to you at your home location when you log in those will be completely empty and you'll be able to decorate those to your heart's
00:24:24
intent. That is our intention there. No timeline on when that's going to come. and then yeah as far as the that was it. Oh and then I'm sorry one more question on that. You're just going to listen to me for a little bit these are answers from Ian and Rick so I'm going to give the chat a little break since Chad did really good in these first two questions. Uh the freight elevators are positioned a bit awkwardly in the hangars for loading and unloading in relation to the ship pad we land. A lot of the hangar ramps are in the back in the hangar in the freight elevator is off to the side. Um has the team considered moving the elevator to accommodate these? This goes back to the same hangar modules. So all the hangar modules will also be where you place the freight elevator and stuff. So basically when the customization comes in we anticipate you being able to move the freight
00:25:11
elevator to wherever you need it for your particular ship. Uh and then the last one in this lounge of questions here that were not necessarily for Chad but were were really important that we wanted to get answers for to. Um Are there plans for the station cargo decks to play a role in cargo hauling and logistics gameplay? Folks might remember we added cargo decks to to space stations two years ago? Three years ago? No it's about um These need a significant rework. They were built with an intention and a design philosophy that existed back then. We've since evolved our thinking on how these things should work so they will need to basically a rework to incorporate them into the current version of cargo
00:25:58
gameplay that Chad and his team have have created and gone out in 3.24 and will continue to iterate in subsequent patches. So yes there are plans we can't tell you what they are just yet because they're still at a point where it's they're too likely to change between now and the time where they're implemented but when we get closer to a better understanding of how those are going to be implemented we will share that information with you. And that's me speaking for Ian and and Rick Porter portion of our SCL. Chad did you enjoy your break? I enjoyed it thank you. Yeah. Back to Chad. Uh the Atlas which is the new hotness that was that's been revealed over the last week in PTU um has a magnificent tractor beam that is is
00:26:48
making out every other tractor beam look like turd sandwich from a can. Uh will you implement a mode switch for tractor beams to give functionality like the Atlas has to the multi-tool or dedicated tractor beams so that there's more parity between the three or is this something that's exclusively to the Atlas? Uh for the moment it's exclusive to the Atlas. There is some discussion internally about like maybe doing that. Uh nothing confirmed. I I feel like the there is some benefit to having it you know having there be some diversity in the cinematic universe of tractor beaming as far as like functionality to differentiate the advantages and disadvantages of certain things. For the moment
00:27:36
we're leaving it as it is but that could change. Uh I think as we've as we've illustrated that can change with feedback and as we get more experience we do more analytics we see how people are using. We do always there will always be some distinction that we you know you want the handheld for boxes this size and the larger weapons for the medium boxes and the Atlas for the larger box that is in the ship tractor beams for the larger boxes and stuff. Um but yeah when he says no plans right now that's what just what that means no plans right now. But if you follow Star Citizen week right? If you followed Star Citizen for any period of time Like at the item bank right? Like we we we take feedback seriously so you know we'll we'll figure out what makes sense for the game and and but like my understanding as far as like what we're
00:28:24
doing right now with all this is it's just going to be the way that it is. Yeah so that's cargo Chad and me saying make your points about uh share your point of view make your solid considered arguments not just the pitchfork stuff. There are our history is replete with dozens and dozens of examples where we've heard what you said and adjusted these things so if you feel strongly about it continue to feel strongly about it continue to share that and we'll see what the plan is later. Will we be so in the SitCon goody pack by the way there's a SitCon goody pack I think it might be available now. I don't know I'm not in that part of marketing so I don't know. But I think in the SitCon goody pack
00:29:11
there were beds. We sold beds? In the goody pack? Uh this question is asking if we'll be able to log in or out of our hangars moving forward with these beds that are in the SitCon pack. When you get it I don't think so but I'll say this. We plan on and as I've said before about bed logging we're we're definitely going to work more on bed logging and we're going to work more on logging in and out and one of the things in particular that we're going to work on is logging in and out of hangars specifically. We want to support that. That's something that uh we've already been working on to some extent on the technical side, but
00:29:58
there's still more work to to go there. I don't want to say that when you get this particular thing, a certain feature is going to be supported in the next release though. So, like as far as that goes, like I I don't plan on that being a supported thing by then, but logging in and out of hangars and bad logging is going to um be developed further, is what I'll say. I I I You said a lot of words. I want to I want to I want to get this very concise. You're You're telling us that at some point not not I'm not saying the next release, but at some point you will be able to log in and out from your hangars. Yes, 100%. That's the That's definitely a uh a thing that we're going to support. Cuz my least favorite thing in the world is having to wake up in the hab and go to the hangar. So, that would be lovely. Thank you, Chad.
00:30:47
That's not my least favorite thing in the world. David's my least favorite thing in the world. He just did a yelp. It It It was like a 1950s like like a scream queen. Like, What work is being done to stop our hangar deco from bouncing around so that we can make our hangars the way they are shown in ISC. Uh we actually answered this last week uh with Benoit. That's here because I want to refer people back to Benoit. Uh basically it is not a feature issue. It is a matter of physics. Um it is the it it is physics is one of the largest performance hits to uh the server. Uh so, that is basically it trying to negotiate uh the physics of all those items placed on other items. As server performance improves, as server meshing uh provides us the benefits to server performance
00:31:37
that we all hope it will and stuff like this, uh that problem will become less and less uh severe as it is. And then we'll be able to find then we'll be able to go in and find the individual edge cases that cause it uh here and there and there. But, basically it's one of those things It's literally one of those things where it works on my computer, and then you put it up on a server with 100 people, and it starts flopping around, which is why it looks one way on ISC, and it looks another way in live. We show the intention of the feature and how it's supposed to work, and it is basically a performance-related uh error uh that's causing it in the in the servers right now. So, as we continue to optimize, we continue to improve performance, uh that will result that will resolve most of those issues, and then we can go in and do the edge cases. In the In the 3.24 PTU, you were
00:32:27
originally able to add one SEU cargo mission boxes into larger eight SEU boxes for transport. That was really nice, by the way. This has since been removed since launch. I hate you, Chad. Uh any plans to bring this back? That's a good question. Um it's more that there were some issues on the delivery side. We needed more sophisticated logic to handle the freight elevator delivering nested contents for delivery. So, we didn't We rolled that back because we were having some issues having that work like consistently, but it is a thing that like we've talked about with the the mission team, and I think at some point we'll probably bring it back, but for the moment um it's it's more of just it's one of the things we had to like give up on in order to get the release
00:33:15
out the door. Okay. Uh currently in live 3.24, when we call our ships while we are in a party member's hangar, our ships spawn in our personal hangar instead of the party member's hangar. Will that change in the future? For sure. Um this is another one of those things where um we had to, you know, make some calls as far as like what we were going to try to deliver on this release, and uh if people saw like the very early um actually, I'm not sure if this part of it got to Evocati or not, but at one point we we actually had a a drop-down where you could pick on the freight elevator kiosk a party member in in actually choose their inventory there. So, we were trying to like really integrate party members into that hangar
00:34:04
experience. Um but, on on both of these, where we ended up is uh needing to remove it just again, you know, to get the release done. But, also I think we realized that there's like some some more design considerations around the experience of security and permissions, and party membership isn't always the right fit to answer some of those questions anyways. So, there's definitely um some design work to do there as far as like the experience and how you you attribute or or revoke certain kind of rights in your hangar or to other players. But, we do want to allow that that general kind of flow where you can have your friends there that you're playing with be in a party or or in a group or an org or whatever, and then, you know,
00:34:52
have a way to spawn your ship in there. Uh additionally, the ATC did not really support this pattern very well, and it's because the ATC is an old system that was originally written with Port Olisar in mind, and and, you know, just a some landing pads at Port Olisar. That was the original implementation of ATC. So, this whole idea of like even hangars is is kind of alien to that system, let alone that multiple people could be in a hangar. And we've kind of had to, you know, build that into it, but it has some fundamental concepts like this thing called a permission token that don't really make sense in that world, which is why we're reworking some of the um implementations to essentially Actually, this is kind of
00:35:40
getting at like one of the core things that we're going to do is is separate out from ATC hangar management as a concept. And ATC is going to become a simpler system that all it deals with is requests to land and exit. And so, it's really just governing the the entry ways to the hangars, and that's it. And then have a separate system for hangar management for ships and all that. And included in that can be the idea of like how do you handle different situations and corner cases around multiple ships, including multiple ships from multiple How much How much do you hate ATC now? Uh uh uh uh Can be real. It knows what it did. I I I I'm pretty sure that I you know,
00:36:30
ATC has been a part of the PU since it was first introduced in late November, early December 2015. I mean, it is it is one it is When you say, "Oh, it's an old system," it is literally the oldest system of the PU. Um I'm not entirely certain even the folks who you made it originally are are even still with the the project at this point. They're not. Yeah, they're not. So, it is it is it is a Yeah, it's it was it was It's what we It's like what we say with the old MFDs and and you know, stuff. It was It was It was good for its time, and it served its thing for its time, but I think everybody is in agreement, both player and developer alike at this point, that we need a new, more robust uh a service to replace it. Yeah. And to be fair to that system, like it wasn't really designed with this in mind, right? So, we've been pushing it, but we just have to break it at this
00:37:20
Better. We need to break What do you mean? More ambitious for the breaking of it. Yeah. It's a I'm realizing this is probably not the kind of conversation you'd see it in the in the uh promotional material for any other game development there. Like, are they like like like talking about how much they hate a game feature? I'm like, yeah. It's It just It just It We We recognize the same thing you do. It's the We're all on the same boat. It needs It needs an update. Uh right now. So, that is being specked out, and that is being that work is being assigned out as we speak. There's no ETA on it cuz like I said, it's still early days and that stuff, but uh it's I'm not going to sit I I I can't sit here and pretend like it's the greatest thing ever. It's a I hate it. No, I mean, every time I see a report of players saying or or QA finding like a
00:38:09
door not opening, I I feel it in my bones. Yeah. Yeah, what was it? Rhino Seperath 1972 says, "ATC has stolen millions from me." Yes. Yeah. Yeah. should push I honestly we we should we should just I hope there's like a permanent prisoner in Klaischner once we replace it, and we just name him ATC, and he's just like, "I used to do that." we were talking about uh vehicle spawning in different hangars. Uh is spawning vehicles from the cargo elevator still planned? I think we mentioned it in one of those early ISEs and whatever, and and nobody We haven't heard much about it since it was removed. Absolutely. Um still a thing that we want to do. Um we Now that we've had a bit more time, I
00:38:57
think we're also considering that experience a little bit more as far as like how that works, and also potentially supporting things like the Atlas. Uh but, definitely it's it's a thing that's that's going to come. Yeah, it's definitely coming. Can we have an option to remove or disable the alarm in the hangar every time a ship is called? I I I don't know about that. Uh it's not a thing that we've talked about or um I I've heard even feedback on. But, one thing I'll say is we are looking at ways to make it faster, that whole that whole loop, because we want to make getting ships like a a quicker experience. Like I think at this point
00:39:46
people have enjoyed the the pomp and circumstance of getting these ships. It's it's a really cool thing when you do it, but of course with anything, you know, you do it enough times and Yes. you kind of just want to get your ship, right? So, we're looking at potentially some ways where, you know, you're getting let's say like a a Titan or something like out of an XL hanger. You know, it feels kind of absurd that the giant experience that unfolds for you over the period of time it takes. Right. So, we're we're looking at, for example, maybe we can like preset the loading platform height or but maybe adjust some timings to make it faster. So, you don't have to wait quite as long, but without changing some of the fundamental elements of that
00:40:35
experience. We will we still want it to feel um big and important and you know, have that pomp and circumstance, have it feel somewhat epic. Uh but where it makes sense have the ability to like have that time not as long for the smaller requests. I don't know that we'll outright disable the the sound there. Okay. Well, Again, if there's lots of feedback on that point, maybe we can change it. I'm going to make a suggestion. Some of the best things in Star Citizen came from my ideas. That's not true. Um eventually we get you have to make some kind of you mentioned it before, some kind of hanger manager a thing, you know, especially when they start adding the customizable rooms and stuff like this. In the hanger manager, there should be like a couple of default ringtones
00:41:23
listed in there just like when you get with a a new Motorola phone or whatever and you can just set it so that you can change the alarm sound. It can give the alarm sound can sound like a like like like like a French police car or whatever. You just just just different sounds so that people can change it up every once in a while. Uh okay. I'll we'll take that into consideration. Thank you. I don't think he's really going to take that into consideration, Chad. I think Chad's shining me on. Um all right. So, a lot of this is focused on the hangers and stuff like this. Uh there is a series of vehicles that are kind of out there on the left there, the Hull series. Uh talk to us about what they what the end goal for this what what is the experience loading and unloading a a
00:42:12
Hull series ship supposed to be like? Well, I mean, it's obviously what we have now is a I would say a you know, tier zero implementation. We wanted to get something in for the Hulls that was unique because it's a unique ship in the game. It, you know, can't land with those spindles extended and it's it's big. It's it's it's epic. And we wanted the cargo loading for for this ship and and the series beyond that to feel like it made sense for the cargo trading at that scale and in particular have that visual be like um something that was like
00:42:59
compelling. And so, we wanted to make that cargo loading in and out like feel like something that was like physically like building up and and reducing on the ship. However, obviously it's, you know, just doing this like popping in thing and then also it doesn't support any manual loading. So, in the nearer term, we are looking at adding support for manual loading for the the Hull series and any other um ship that might need to dock uh for cargo support. And um now I'm not going to say like any particular release or anything, but like absolutely we're looking at bolstering support for those ships as or not just bolstering but creating the support for those for for manual loading at those loading areas on the exterior of the
00:43:47
stations and actually adding to them and having potentially multiple we're we're considering different ways to make the throughput on that system make sense both to allow for multiplayer and and ships using tractor beams to help optimize that loading time. And I think that will be a really big like meaningful change. Beyond that, obviously we still plan on doing a better implementation of the automatic loading for the Hull series, be it NPCs or drones. Um I think that probably is going to be later because it's more of like a visual experience and less of like a gameplay experience where it's like the manual loading would be a really big meaningful change from like the actual in-game experience for the players. So, Uh but that's what we
00:44:36
have now. Uh Bluesman, you're asking a question about the missions. That's question for the mission team and not for not for Chad. Uh Where was that? H Lander 1337 says, "Is this the SCL Live that announces Pyro is coming out?" Yes, Pyro is coming out. Eventually. When it's ready. You heard it here and everywhere else. what's the current status of hover trolleys? Are there still plans to give players this or another method to move multiple cargo boxes around locations at once? Yes. So, hover trolleys, another thing that was sacrificed to the release gods. Uh in particular, the hover trolleys have some new physics around their their behavior and they were being pretty wonky. I'll put it like that as far as
00:45:25
the actual like attachment onto the um onto the hover trolley not with the attachment but how the hovering dealt with it. So, like you would suddenly have this attachment and like the thing would kind of like sway around and sometimes like violently like flip over or something. So, there's some physics issues with it that need to get sorted and also there's some questions about quite how to integrate it into the game loop as far as, you know, how you get them or um you know, is that something that you buy or can you find them in the world, etc. etc. So, we took a step back from that to focus on getting the release out the door, but it's not forgotten. They are going to come back um once we've kind of smoothed out the the implementation and the like the physics
00:46:12
problems and then also pinned down exactly like how we want players to to use them and and where they are in the game. so, yeah, still still coming. I will say you know, to kind of I will say there there beyond the hover trolleys, there are other things in addition that we're always looking at as far as like figuring out how to make the game loop for moving cargo better and certainly I think in masses is certainly like a thing that now that we have manual loading in the game, we have more experience with it. It's clearly like there's like this interesting point where if you're not dealing with the largest boxes in the game, some like combinations of medium to small boxes can be cumbersome. So, it's definitely like a thing that we're
00:46:59
aware of and there's I think going to be continued design consideration on the new things like the upcoming Alice that's it's coming in 3 3.24.1 which is in in testing on the PTU. Uh a bunch of people asking me how much the pledge will cost. I don't know. I'm not in those meetings. we've been talking a lot about uh manual loading. Uh this is how will paying a fee to auto load our cargo work? Um Isn't that I'm I'm not sure I understand because like you pay a fee to auto load now. Yeah, I was going to say that's a weird question. I thought that was a that's pretty much a thing. We'll skip ahead. Hey, we'll get to we get auto load it. I mean, I can give a maybe
00:47:48
I can answer a question they didn't ask. Sure. Which is um is auto loading always going to work work the way that it does now? Sure. to this is we're going to build on that. Right now, auto loading is built into the commodity trading experience in part because that was the quickest way that we could do it. Um I think we'll always want to have that because it's convenient in order to just make those decisions when you're doing trading. However, there are times when it would be convenient to auto load things that aren't necessarily part of a transaction or after a transaction. Like mission cargo can't be auto loaded. Mission cargo, but also items in general that you have. Maybe you want to load
00:48:35
those into the ship. And so, a a full auto loading experience is a feature that we're currently looking at as far as making it to where you can just have full sets of stuff. If you don't want if you just don't want to touch the freight elevator, right? You just like don't like it and that's fine. Um we're looking at having an experience for you to where you can say like, "Okay, I want this arrangement of stuff." And you know, as long as it fits into the cargo grids on the ship, then it'll it'll move them around. And now that we've uh made it to where the cargo grids support so many different items, that means that there's a lot more opportunity to to make that work. Of course, there'll be a small fee associated with it, but um it will I think support you know, it's kind of a a bigger solution to instead of just like solving it specifically for mission items, um it's something that
00:49:24
you can do more generally and then also, you know, we talked about small vehicles, right? Ground vehicles, getting those into your ship. Well, that would be a solution, right? To if you You want to you know, drive it out yourself. Not not just spawning a ground vehicle in the cargo, but spawning a ground vehicle in a cargo crate. That can then Uh what I'm saying like you could have the ship um stowed and then request to have the vehicle loaded into like the ground vehicle loaded into your vehicle. Yeah. Okay. will the search bar accept actual item names in the future and not just the internal identifier? Uh right now, I mean it's it's using the locks what we call the lock string. Um so I mean it does, but there's
00:50:11
the the problem is is there's various kinds of data associated with these items that are uh in different places and what we haven't done is is really built that out. Um but like it does use the localized uh item name. but there are other kinds of fields and stuff that I could uh be built out. In fact, one of the bugs that we had one of the bugs that we had when we first added it is that the it was just using the lock name and not the localized name and it would make it really confusing because some things are really close to the actual end string and some things just aren't at all and you would search for certain stuff and it wouldn't find them. And the reason is because it was searching the locked ID but not the localized name, but that's not the case anymore.
00:50:59
But there are other kinds of fields that it's not searching on and sometimes I think to make that a little bit confusing, sometimes there's different strings shown in different UIs. So like for example, the the shop UI might use like a different string for the purchasable display um from like the item ports editing and stuff like that. So more to be done. But it is using the localized name. There's a localized name and a lock name. Lock ID. Lock So like the localized name is like if you're playing, you know, in a certain localization on the client, right? You you see the English version or the Spanish version, whatever. Is is lock ID and lock and lock ID short for localization? Uh yes. So that's Sorry, this is some So
00:51:48
there's a localization and a lock ID, which is also short for localization? Yes, but like the way to think of it is like a lock ID is a single identifier for something that will be localized, right? So we have to have some hook, some way to reference a string that has a variation for all the different languages. So that that hook, that identifier, is what we call a lock ID. I get So it might be like if I have like a a mug, right? It might be mug black one jellyfish cuz there's a jellyfish on it, right? Um but then the actual localized string that the players would see would, you know, some Jellyfish mug. Yeah, jellyfish mug. But then, you know, you'd have a different one in German, in different in Spanish,
00:52:36
uh etc. etc. So that lock ID is what in code and and just like the systems normally pass around because it's it's something that's understood both by the server and the client and if you change your localization at runtime, it's it's something that it's consistent. It's also um uh a more it's a reference, it's not like a uh unstructured data as a string. Yeah. I I could go on more, but yeah, so that's basically it. Which is just more of an identifier that then gets localized. However, when you search, you want to search on the localized version and that means that on the client, the client needs to say when we do a search, here's the lock ID, but here's the locale, here's the localization that you're going to use and then on the back end, it needs to use that for the string
00:53:23
parsing. And we actually have a different database that it searches on um that has a different um localization on each because that's that's the only way that we you can make it work. You have to have to have you search on different um partitions of the database on the local localization. I I I I I get it. Sometimes I ask questions for the community, sometimes I ask questions for me. That was a question for me. And now I have to go fight Yensland. That's unfortunate. there are many items that do not work particularly well on the freight elevators. For example, mining bags. what's being done to resolve this? Great question. Uh unfortunately, another thing that got cut. This one in particular it hurt me because I made the the packing and the attachment behavior and the system uh the packing and
00:54:13
arrangement works, but there was there's one bug I'll get to in a second that didn't um and unfortunately, because most of the items work another thing that was sacrificed to the release gods. Uh which hurts me cuz I like I I um I want it to be good cuz I like to be proud of my work, but um the the issue in particular with those, I feel I'm going to get a little bit technical for a moment is uh the pivot. So for things like cargo boxes, the pivot is on the bottom in the center. And whenever I originally wrote the packing system way back for the the whole C, the only thing that we were putting into the cargo crates at that time were the cargo boxes. I knew that more things were coming, so the packing system itself can expect any
00:55:01
kinds of uh dimensions and handles multiple orientations, but the pivot was something that I just didn't have time to generalize. Um I had to just essentially kind of like hard code it to expect the pivot in a certain place on the item. and the the technical challenge there is you might say, well, I'm holding the item, how do you not know where the pivot is? The the problem is is when you're doing things like calling stuff up from a freight elevator, you don't have the item. The entity isn't spawned, you don't have the geometry for it, you can't directly access the pivot. So you have to have some way to know where it would be uh without loading like the skeleton and and deriving it, which would be incredibly slow. So what we have to do is like essentially like kind of bake that data out into a data set that could be read from an asynchronous persistence
00:55:50
query or based on the class data. So that's the work to be done here. It won't take too long, but and it's possible it comes in, you know, very very soon. But that's essentially it. It's like that the reason is uh the mining bags and these things, their pivots are in a different place than most of the other items in the game and the system isn't yet expecting that the pivot might be somewhere else than where most of the other items' pivots are. And for that reason, the way that it rotates around and the way that it orients itself on on the cargo grid is just wrong for that particular thing, which is particularly for the mining bags suck because they're situated in a way that actually puts them through the freight elevator and sometimes when you get caught they actually drop down, which is awful. So like definitely aware of it. Um but
00:56:39
yeah, fix is going to be forthcoming. If you can get technical. Um okay, last two questions, Chad. You're almost at the end and then you can go and start your day proper. Uh will we be able to spawn multiple ships at once in the same hanger? Got any more? How how how do we envision that working? So yeah, I mean definitely it's it's a thing that um we're looking at on the design side and so I don't want to give like complete answers cuz that's something that might change a little bit, but in in short we want it to be to where you can spawn multiple ships, especially in these XL hangers where you
00:57:26
have these huge platforms and certainly you have the room. There's just some thought that has to go into um all these different permutations. Uh let's say you have a ship on the platform and you want to get another ship. Right now, the way the system works is if you get a different ship, we're going to stow the first one. We don't always want to do that. How is How as a player do you express that or how do you understand that what's going to happen? Do you have any control over the arrangement of it, etc. etc. So those are things that are getting like pinned down on the on the design side. Um but the goal itself that you we want to be able to spawn multiple and and give players more control over that is something that we're going to do. Uh and last question is will we or have you ever considered the ability to name
00:58:14
our cargo boxes so that we'll know what was in them when we move stuff around? Yes. Um another thing that is on the design side we're still working on. Um I remember talking about this like a year and a half ago. Uh about like how we could handle this um because before this release, we we added the inventory containers uh at the end of last year, but we were working on it, you know, before then, especially on the design side. So this is something that we've known about for some time and those boxes all look the same. So if you have lots of different boxes, how do you know what's in them? And we've had lots of ideas so far as tinting and labeling and naming, etc. etc. So and then also potentially wanting that to be something that you could maybe search on in the freight
00:59:01
elevator kiosk, right? Um I'm not going to commit to one particular solution there cuz as I said um there's still some design work that needs to be done to like make the final call about like what that how that's going to work and then we would do the actual implementation. But it is a thing that we want to address for sure. Well, Chad you did it. How do you feel? Feel great. Uh definitely feel great now that the release is out. Point one is coming soon. I think that there's a lot of good things coming. I also want to just thank all the players for working with us on this release. I know especially whenever it originally came out it was like pretty rocky. There was some real surprises
00:59:50
that happened when we went from PTU to live. We tried real hard to go from that state to something that's more playable and I think point one is going to be an even bigger jump there. So I just want to thank everyone for having so much fun and and helping us with this release. It's been a big push and I'm happy that we're we we finally got here. Well, thank you Chad. That was Chad McKinney. I don't remember what is what is title. What's your title Chad? Senior lead gameplay Senior lead gameplay engineer. He and his team been in the cargo trenches for more than the last year. So thank you for taking the time. This will probably be the last show. We've done six or seven shows on cargo and hangers and this really just for this release. So this will probably be the last one. We'll see if or whatever the next thing
01:00:36
is. Take care Chad. You can leave. I got to do some housekeeping I got to do some housekeeping stuff. So folks, that's it. That's the show. This is probably going to be the last SCL for a while. There won't be an SCL next week. That if you've noticed or if you joined late in the show, you've seen this absolute horror show right here. I'll be I'll I'll be down getting my face scan next Friday to do that and stuff. So there's no show next week. And then we're into the big Citizen Con hustle there. We've only got one episode of ISC left. That'll be last week and then ISC will go on hiatus until after Citizen Con. So there might be an SCL or one or two that we squeeze in there every once in a while depending on availability and stuff like this. But
01:01:24
for the most part we're we're we're here at the at the threshold of a hiatus. So thank you for watching. I do have a couple announcements though. There are multiple occasions coming up where you can meet CIG folks in person. This is always the biggest and most social time of year here. So TwitchCon in San Diego is next week. There is a Bar Citizen on Friday, September 20th at 6:00 p.m. at the Garage Kitchen and Bar. You can there's a common link on the website the Bar Citizen World Tour you can get the specific information, but that is next Friday where you'll be able to meet some some staff that are down there visiting for TwitchCon. There's also in about a month's time there is Bar Citizen Week here here and around
01:02:13
basically balls Bar Citizens all week long in celebration of Citizen Con. They're happening in cities and locations all around the world. You can check out the Bar Citizen barcitizen.sc website or barsit.io/2952. You didn't think I was going to read that, but I read that. I read a URL. Because I was born in the 70s and I still do that. So you so you you can find all kinds of new Bar Citizens that are happening all week the week of Citizen Con in areas that that may or may not be close to you. And then the last one Atmo eSports our old friends there are throwing a major event, the largest event that they've ever thrown right next door. Literally on the other there's a wall here and then there's a wall there and then there's a building where this event happens. The big biggest event it's a
01:03:01
huge venue with actual theater style scenes, the largest eSports thing that they've done there. That is called Inter-Atmoshere. You can check out the Atmo eSports website for that thing it's atmo.sc there's also going to be a sizable CIG contingent that are visiting there. That is that takes place the Sunday after Citizen Con. The Sunday the second day of Citizen Con, but after Citizen Con ends. So it's like the unofficial post party there. Chris Roberts will be there as well as a bunch of other people. There's a big social area with with a bar and stuff and they'll be hanging out there to to to to meet people and to converse with people and stuff like that and to sign autographs, take pictures, all that stuff like that. So it's your chance to meet Chris Roberts and whole bunch of folks. That is not a Star Citizen event. It is
01:03:49
our friends at Atmo eSports, but we're we're going to hang out with them because we like them a lot. So that's your chance if you're interested and you haven't picked up tickets for that, you can check that out on their website as far as how many or whatever. I I don't know. I just I just get the details for where it is. And if I'm not entirely dead after two solid days of running Citizen Con, I'll probably be there too. I'll just If anybody seen if anybody who remembers me at the after party for Citizen Con last year, I will be on zombie mode. So just be gentle with me. Approach me slowly. Indirect eyesight. Don't come at me from the sides or behind cuz I'll spook easily. Will not know where I am, but I will be there as along with all kinds of other CIG staff. So that's the housekeeping. Thanks for watching.
01:04:36
Yeah, that's all I got. Um Bye. Sorry for this.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.