Star Citizen: March Subscriber's Town Hall feat. Chris Roberts

30 March 201601:03:051,774 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody Welcome to reverse the verse uh this is Wednesday oh I almost said it was Friday this is Wednesday March 30th 2016 uh I'm your community manager Jared hucke with me as always is our director of community Engagement online strategy spaceships Master of Disaster do we have any more that's it I think Ben Lesnik uh joining us momentarily is our chairman and founder Mr Chris Roberts should be here momentarily he's wrapping up some important business at the moment uh so Ben moment a lot in that sentence I'm not fond of it that didn't last long so our our special subscriber Edition RTV is something we do once a month uh usually the last week of the month uh these are anybody can watch but we take questions
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specifically from our subscribers there are two ways to submit questions to the special subscriber Edition one is in a dedicated Forum thread that's in the subscriber Den uh that's closed now since we're live and second is the subscriber chat on the RSI website so if you have a question for us at the moment and soon Chris Roberts you can submit your questions in the RSI chat in the subscriber tab by prefacing your question with the word question surrounded by brackets and if for any reason you don't have access to the subscriber tab but you are indeed a subscriber you can click in the lower right hand corner of your chat window under more Channel Channel and enable the subscriber chat if for any reason it's not already enabled and of course if you're not a subscriber and you want to be you can do that too how do you subscribe Alexis where's that on the website there's a
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subscriber landing page there's a subscriber landing page so for any reason you want to be kind of subscriber you could because there's all kinds of neat fun uh uh add-ins there I'm looking for it right now then the pledge store yeah it's in the pledge store there it is in the pledge store you can subscribe you want to also tell them that pads will be available tomorrow for subscribers mouse pads will be available tomorrow for subscribers you guys get first crack at our uh new uh Anvil Aerospace mouse pads featuring The Carrick The Crucible The Hornet and the Gladiator so um there'll be an email going out later today there will be an email going out later today gotta yep subscriber chat is filling up now more and more people are joining if anybody out there has questions s that don't need Chris
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Roberts we can take those while he finishes up all right the first question is about Chris's favorite tea and soccer club we're not going to be able to answer that until Chris Roberts is here uh is it I feel like it's Manchester United and like a black tea of some sort is black tea a thing yeah I think British tea is usually black tea okay what is your question about Manu is that okay I got it right go what's his favorite te that I don't know so please any any other personal questions about Chris Roberts that we can answer we can speculate on Bo Man City G hey Ben Grayson asks if there are any updates on the scitech
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hotas uh not yet we're waiting for the production prototype um we don't want to start pre-orders until we've had a chance to play with it but I think that's not too far off uh hey Ben why haven't we heard much about the Orion lately uh well it's in a holding pattern um the concept work has been done and it's waiting for uh technical assets to free up so we can start getting in the game um we are thinking about it quite a bit because uh probably heard the rumor that we are working on a smaller mining ship that will you know the Orion is the you know the Pinnacle of mining ships that's the one you want to work towards we're working on the the first step of that process right now so we've been thinking a lot about Mining and how it works on a small scale how it works on a large scale uh it's uh it's fun fun work Sun Li wants to know if we're ready
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to say what the next concept sale will be uh yes it's that's small mining ship so next concept sales the small mining ship uh by MK right yes Ben how are you doing today has to jator pretty well uh I've been really good lately um good thank you for asking how are you doing Jared I'm all right uh no good time we're all we're all happy here everything's good how are you guys we're all doing fine here how are you small reactor leag very dangerous voon wants to know if all the old B new merchantman Concepts are all trashed and the idea is to go for some different design no that's not a
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thing um usually when we we talk about more Concepts or refining a design it's it's things like okay we have this external concept what does the inside look like how do you get from place to place you get more of the Practical game considerations that have been developed since the original pitch but it's not oh we don't want the caterpillar anymore it's going to be different or we don't want the aband merman anymore it's going to be different no nobody ever aims to do that Darkstar wants to know if we've come up with a name for that small mining ship and if we're willing to share it yet yes and no respectively but you guys can guess uh Ed wants to know if the flyable starf far will be a loners ship for larger ships like the merchant well that uh brings up an unrelated answer uh if
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you folks want to check your hangers today and you do not already have a starf far we have put one in every but we we've put one on every uh hanger for the next couple days so you can check out the star Fair even if you don't own one uh CU we we just want to show off foundaries work uh it's big and cool and we were impressed and to answer his question if once the star fair is flight ready would it be a laner for something like the merchantman uh yeah yeah we we have to go through and figure out what the loaners are but yeah we we should do start loaners for the bigger ships we re-evaluate every time a ship becomes flyable all right so our special guest is here he's standing waiting for his grand entrance presenting ladies and gentlemen the founder CEO and chair chman of cloud of cloud Imperium games Mr Chris Roberts hi Chris how you doing am I
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looking this one that one yeah how you doing uh good good sorry we told them you were in an important meeting yeah I was showering I worked out very early that's the only time I get to workout is before I come to work uh and then we had a bunch of early meetings because we have to uh uh we coordinate with the UK and Germany and of course it's uh eight or nine hours behind for them so basically I didn't have time to shower after the workout so it was here for 9:00 meetings onwards and so and then Ben's like hey we got the reverse the I better get showered I want to see me all sweaty there you go now that's open development too much sharing TMI all right Chris well we've been collecting questions on the forums for about a week
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and we have our subscribers in chat the first question question we have for you is off our forums thread from snugget snugget snugget uh he wants to know if there's any news about the new holot table that we first previewed all the way back in around the verse 31 uh so we are working on a whole bunch of new UI stuff and uh a lot of everything's been sort of held up because we have this new persistence that we're going to roll out uh beginning with 2.4 and then more of it will be in place for 2.5 so just a foundations will be in for 2.4 and a lot more functionality uh comes in then so a lot of sort of the UI and management of stuff is changing around because we're going to have assistance now so we're going to move more stuff to say your Mobi glass and some other areas so we're sort of still in the process so that's
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one of the reasons why uh on the sort of hollow table we decided not to be spending a bunch of time on it until we had the persistance and the various aspects because we sort of have to handle the you know not cuz the actual end goal is for you to not have to go to your hanger to change your out load outs around you may want to be able to do it live say you've landed on a landing pad you may want to pull your mob glass and go yeah can you please move this you know weapon from here to here and all this sort of stuff and so um that's kind of in progress so we'll start to see beginnings of that in the next 2.4 and it will Carry On from there but we are aware that people would like a easier to use holot table um which you know we we are we are dedicated to doing I mean that's that's something something that Paul andell put together in a week uh about two plus years ago um so it you
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know the overall concept of using 3D is pretty cool it's just the fact that there's a lot of usability issues and not detecting and being able to filter it well and all the rest stuff which will will get uh um addressed and then you'll have the ability probably to do manage stuff from your M Glass as well as from dedicated stations ultimately in the game but our longer term goal is to sort of never have you leave the base game so right now consider that Crusader so we'd really like you to sort of start on Crusader or you know stanson is actually the system that's going to be but eventually the the the full pu and uh you know you don't have to load a separate loading you know to go to a hanger and then go to AR Corp and then go that that's all going to be going away that will all be gone away by the end of uh by definitely by the end of this year and probably before that so
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that's sort of what we're working towards and that's kind of one of the reasons why you haven't seen progress on the holot table mainly just because uh there's a lot of other sort of foundational work that's happening and we don't want to do work that we're going to have to re-engineer now you just got back from the UK what what are we working on over there everything uh well so you know so you know now this year I'm spending a lot of time so I'm spending you know when I go over to Europe I spend a week usually in Germany and then about two weeks in Manchester and then I'm back here for two to three weeks so like next week I'm going to go to Austin uh for you know most of the week and then I'll be back here for another week and then I'll be back in Europe so um generally it's it's more about spending time with everybody face to face and uh I'm really this year the focus is trying to pull
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all the sort of elements uh the sort of foundational energy uh engineering part so uh the kind of backend server the you know how we scale the sort of Game servers so we can have as many people as possible so there's some sort of ongoing engineering that hasn't debuted into the sort of live environment that will make it much better and more efficient and more reliable than the current system which is sort of some of the stuff that we've redone but it's also some of the old stuff and so it's kind of it sort of it's a lot of it's sort of held together with gum and wire and tape and all the rest stuff and so we have a completely new sort of foundational uh system that we think is going to be a lot better it's very sort of NextGen in terms of um Cloud servers and everything that we'll we'll we'll do so it's pushing that uh pushing the AI stuff there's a lot of AI
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work that we need to have working for squadron 42 and then ultimately in the persistant Universe uh and yeah just spending FaceTime with everyone that's why I'm back here spending time with the everyone here because it it you know you can do Skype meetings all day long and all the rest stuff but actually being there and having that sort of one-on-one um sort of iteration and conversations makes a big difference now you said the word persistence easily half these questions are about persistence people have heard in our at uh a newsp on the verse that we're starting to work on the the very beginnings of persistence and testing out what can you what can you tell us about where persistence is and where we're going but I don't think they've heard that yet CU it's Broast tomorrow wow right ahead of time but anyway so uh well I mean you
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know persistence is is is the ability for um your game State the state of your items your inventory your ship your person to position beyond the game session you have and so up until now that really hasn't happened so you know you have a a set of items but really that's what you've sort of pledged for or backed and you have sitting in your web account uh and then every time you load into Crusader or you load into Arena Commander or into the hanger they're sort of instantiated there uh but if you take your ship out and it gets damaged and then you leave the game and come back everything's pristine it's not damaged um you know if you earn you know you don't really have the ability to sort of like have reputation persist or money really that persists we have the the sort of wreck implementation and
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Arena Commander but it's it's kind of sort of slightly hacky because you earn in the game and it gets written back to the web platform and then the web platform communicates with the arena Commander when it comes back so getting persistence in is a pretty massive step so uh you know in the next full patch we release um all the sort of um kind of temporary stuff goes away way and it's communicating with a persistent database that's sitting in the back end in the cloud and uh we will be serializing out sort of your states of um you know your what what inventory you have what's equipped on what like item port and that will persist and uh CU you know right now you can kind of change things around in the hanger but that just writes it out to a local file um so if you went and went to another machine and logged in with your account and did it again
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none of the changes you would have Lo that you made on that other and your original machine would would actually be um you know transferred across and so all those things will be now that will persist so whatever you set your loadouts how you set your ships that will persist um you know we're going to persist um your you know so several levels of things that we plan to persist I'm not sure if everything will make it in for the next release but over the next few releases it will happen but you know we'll be persisting your um money so we're going to go with what we call Alpha ueec um for the initial period so that will be that people can earn doing missions and doing other stuff and they can use that to buy in-game items So eventually the Voyer direct store on the web is going to go away and you'll be buying those things in the game uh not all of that will happen right away
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because we have to implement the shops for that so we'll have some of the shops um you know and then more and more will sort of come online and once we have the full set then the Voyer direct will go away on the web so you'll be able to sort of buy and sell and then States will persist so if your ship is damag damaged or your items damaged and you got to repair so we'll start to move to a to a game model where if you fly you know you got to you got to pay for your you got to you know right now you get rearmed and refueled for free and so it actually affects gameplay so the the intention of the game play is things like uh you know ballistics or missiles should be actually pretty hard-hitting and Powerful because the downside is they're finite you're using ammunition or you're using your missiles and and so you have to go back and buy more and so that's kind of the idea where ballistics
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are a little harder hitting they go through Shields but the downside is that you have a final amount of ammo whereas an energy weapon maybe do may do less damage or gets deflected by the shields but you have essentially an infinite supply of the ammo there so what you ultimately want is at a place when you've got play when you're flying around in space you would sort of switch to ballistics or use missiles in a case where you need to sort of quickly inflict some damage because if you don't you may be in trouble or there's a moment that you you can do because it's a it's a you know it's a it's a commodity that is Expendable right so you have to replenish it and so that will actually change player and combat Behavior because that doesn't happen right now people just fire all their ammo and then they can go to cry asro and get it refilled for free if they're an arena Commander when they sort of respawn they just get their stuff back
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so the idea would be to sort of manage your sort of belongings in a way that you would in the real world which would be you know okay make sure that my ship's repaired make sure you know ultimately we're going to have age and wear on the ship so you'll have to keep them like you know maintained like right now if you owned a a jet or a helicopter you would have to rebuild the engine every so you know so many hours of operation and so we'll start to move all that towards persistance Will which will actually start to change the gameplay Dynamic and it'll be more much more like a real universe so uh but you know we're not we can't do that all all at once but it will be starting to come in over the next X number of um you know major patches that were going to come out uh and I think that will it will be big because you know then you'll actually
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have things to work towards uh you know we'll open it up so you can start to use Alpha U to uh buy ship components and uh even upgrade ships or buy new ships uh and the the the way it's going to work is Alpha U you know is Alpha U which means that we can sort of wipe at certain periods because you know what happens if there's a bug or there's an exploit or something that we do so so if you if you're you know the know downside of alpha U is it you know what you've worked towards at some points will will potentially go away um we'll probably make it so you can spend your normal ueec that you have and then we won't wipe things that you got in that case and we'll probably allow you to take your regular ueec and also sell those items back whereas with Alpha U will be more like final game implementation where if I buy a car I drive it off the lot and then I want to come back and say
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I don't want this car anymore they're like well okay but you you know it's depreciated or whatever uh where that probably wouldn't happen with the the regular U so um in the sort of alpha but we'll start to sort of roll that out and I think it will make uh that all of a sudden will start to change the feel of the the world and the universe very much so persistence is very very important because you can persist reputations or relationships or what you've worked towards uh and uh so that in hand with um you know we're working on the backend Ser Tech to enable sort of persistent U to allow you to sort of have SE handoff between service you can have more people sort of in one area like if you're in the Stanton system and there'll be def dedicated servers in different areas and if you fly from port alisar to port
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Korea you'll be handed off from the server that's managing say port alisar to the server that's handing Port career and you won't realize it on your client side because it all be seamless to you but the authoritative server is the one over at Port carea and so all of that will sort of open it up and then the the universe that you're playing in starting with the S system will feel like a living universe and more persistent so persistence is huge I mean those are that that's you know persistent and then sort of server transition so you're not just on one instance like you are right now are s of the two big things that make it sort of a proper fully-fledged living sort of MMO and we're seeing the beginnings of that with 2.4 this isn't this isn't a list of everything that's coming in the next patch no that's not going to all be in the next patch I'm just saying that what we what we build towards but the the most important thing is the the base systems in there so we
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there's actually a very very very big change that's happened in the code base that people probably won't uh notice it will mean that um the hangers will behave differently so um because the hangers uh you know there're it's the same it's part of a persistance so they're they're going to be reading with the persistence so um we'll you know there'll probably be a little bit of bumpy uh you know whatever turbulence you want to call it in 2.4 2.5 until we sort of get the hangers back to sort of what you're used to now CU what will happen right now is you'll just pick what hanger you want to start in and you'll be in a base hanger and then you can actually you'll be able to sort of place around some objects and items and say which ship you want sitting in your hanger um because the persistence database has no way of sort of knowing the the setup of your hanger and
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ultimately our our longer term goal would be for you to let the player sort of customize his hanger so this is the beginning of that um but we'll sort of lose some of the functionality of having the big massive hangers right away until the UI and some of that stuff comes in but that that is now possible so every player potentially can instead of it being some algorithm that's figuring out oh we have so many pads and this is the ships and you do something on the web platform you'll be able to set up your hanger the way you want it and that will completely persist just the way your ships will persist and so it will be I think people will like it so it's going to so so a big big big uh change and the fundamental aspect of that's in there so everything's persisting so we had to change everything over to that so everything that's done the old way has gone away in 2.4 uh so they there I'm very confident there will be issues and
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bugs and all the rest of stuff in it uh but it is the foundation that that builds the proper full living Universe very cool all right bribase asks now that the EV Eva is physicalized what is the current plan for implementing push and pull uh well I mean push and pull is just sort of an extension of what we're doing with the physicalized Eva so uh I mean the idea is that you'll be able to ground onto things or push away from things and that will be sort of either you know pushing away as a physical impulse that you'll push away or grabbing onto things will be a constraint that would be on the the articulated body or the human body that we're simulating so when you grab onto something like if you're going this way you'll swing and you'll be constrained by the point so it'll be it'll be uh fairly physical accurate I mean it's something that's going to require a lot of playing around with to make it kind
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of usable and fun um so you know we'll probably do things like you know you can reach out for a grab point and if you're close enough to it we sort of kind of let you grab on and push in so CU otherwise if you actually have to be exact on everything it's going to be really difficult uh but that's that's uh you know the physicalized Eva is sort of stage one of what the push pull is so it's one of the things that's on the plate of um the sort of you know what we call the FPS internal team so we have a group of people that are just working on you running around uh you know on foot uh and that's the FPS team and they're handling sort of all the sort of player like motions and actions uh the state machine for the
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player um all the things like uh I think in 2.4 we'll have um I think we'll have vating I'd have to I'd have to double check but I think it's in um but you know all things like vaulting or sliding and mantling and all the rest of the stuff so ultimately the sort of uh FPS side of things will be 100% um equivalent to anything you'll see out there in the best of other fpss you'll be able to do all the same kind of things that's on our road map and one of those things will be the Push Pull and I actually do think the Eva uh and the zerog g aspect of the game is one of the things that sets it apart because you just don't get that in other FPS games so I think it's going to you know our goal is to have everything else be at least as good as any other FPS but on top of that uh you know have this extra Dimension uh it'll take a while to get there it's a lot I mean we've got about
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four engineers on that team uh working just on sort of the SPs and a bunch of animators supporting them and some tech designers doing it but there's a lot of stuff to implement to implement it right we're trying to do everything in a very systemic way so uh you know there's a lot of very specific uh stuff that say cry engine does away because it knows you're only in first person you're only on foot and so it handles everything in very specific ways for a gun versus a grenade whereas with us um we're sort of building a much more generic system so uh you know gun and grenade aren't necessarily Concepts that we want to have specific different Cod paths for and so there's a lot of refactoring that's been going on to make it a much more extendable system so that down the road like you know when we decide to create new weapons and new items and new functionality um it's pretty easy to do because we've got a system and this is
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you know so the the we've talked about item uh system 2.0 well that that encompasses both personal items stuff that you would use yourself like armor you would wear or a gun or a grenade or a hat or a clothes you would wear as well as items that are on ships you know like a gun on a ship or a power plant on a ship or a seat is an item doors will be items so everything runs with the same sort of systemic code base they all connect to each other like they you know like doors need to be connected to a power and you know so there'll be a power plant like this would be the same on a space station where a power plant would give power to um you know say the doors and the lights and if someone destroys the power plant then the lights go off and you know the doors don't function you have to manually open them uh so that's so that system we're
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basically replacing everything in the engine with that and then ultimately um even the spaceships themselves right now we have this concept of a vehicle and then we add all the items to them and the items deliver most of the functionality of thrusters deliver the ability to move things around and the power plant delivers the power so really right now a vehicle is kind of a Hole uh and it can't really do anything until these items are attached to it if it doesn't I mean people will know and items go away then suddenly the sh ship stops work moving and working so we're actually going to take that one step further and um instead of it being a vehicle anymore you're basically going to have a hull item and so you'd have a hull item and then you know you want a you want a car you put the you know plug in four wheels and so it's basically like a chassis item you plug in four wheels and an engine and a steering wheel and a seat and that's a car if you
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want a spaceship it's a power plant with thrusters and uh an ifcs avionic system and it flies around and the nice thing about doing that is we unify vehicles and items so like the way damage is handled the way all these things that handle is one system so it makes it much easier for us to um sort of optimize and make sure there aren't bugs because a lot of times you have problems in in games when you have two parallel systems that kind of do the same thing and a lot of code like so you changeed something over here but you didn't change it over here and so you know and then if you you there's a bug you fix here but then you forget to fix it over here then there's still problems over here so we're trying to bring everything down to this new design so basically our what we call Item system 2.0 is ultimately almost going to be um the core what you would
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call in in in game uh programming like the core entity class so it's a core concept and then we just take U the item and the entity so to speak and we add these components to it so the components you add to it add the functionality so adds the the render mesh or adds the the you know the physics simulation or adds the network component or adds certain behaviors so you know it can add uh like an item Port component adds to it and that allows the ability for other items to to plug into it and uh so that's kind of what we shift to do it's very much a that is the uh sort of the current like the nextg way game engines are built is very componentized um you know Cay engine was built quite a while ago so it doesn't quite have that implementation so we've under the hood been completely re re-engineering all that to a very different uh component system because that's basically the the you know the
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way you would build an engine in today's world and it allows us a lot of flexibility and because we have such a big world and we want to be you know we want a space station to have all this functionality where the doors and the lights and everything work and security systems work but have the same on an Idis Corvette where you as the captain could shut down areas and do all the rest of the stuff um and you know even if you're wearing your armor suit it's powered or you got life support system on the back and if someone shoots the left spot and damages it then you won't get any Oxygen to your your helmet and you may asfixiate um so all that sort of systemic Behavior has been built in and it's kind of comes with the sort of item system 2.0 uh so there are little bits of that in the game right now although we won't be fully across to it probably for another couple of months um because it's a huge engineering stuff and they've been working on this for you know close to um you know a year now on this whole sort of build and refactoring
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what we've been doing uh but when it's in there's a lot of functionality that you don't have in the game now a lot of systemic Behavior you'll be able to do all sorts of really cool things and like boarding or defending a boarding action or on a space station there'll be more than one way to um sort of solve a problem uh and I think it'll be fun and and it will pay off in Squadron 42 and definitely in the pist universe so I'm actually really quite excited that we have quite a few internal prototypes we've done of the stuff and it's uh it's pretty cool I think you guys may have seen like the little space station prototype uh that was done um so yeah there you go that's probably a longer answer than you asked for but right there's no problem with more information now I was just thinking if if so if Ben's flying his constellation around and I can run around behind and start pulling components out and his engines will just stop yeah yeah tell you and
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and in fact actually one of the things we want to do on the bigger ships is to actually give a lot of roles for people to do besides just being the Helm's person or Manning a turret right so or being the weapons off so figuring out we you got five missiles and so when the bigger ship says they take damage like what's really going to happen is we're not going to have this sort of big explosion anymore we're going to parts of the outside damage and they propagate some damage interior and then maybe a subsystem explodes and that damage would now make another system inside of damage and so there actually will be a fair amount of hopeful gameplay like when you're damage where like players can run around and it'll be like you know an old submovie where they're like sealing off the leaks or whatever so you know you'd go and like a say power node's gone down on the right side of the ship and so the turret in the back's not working and and you know if you go back you go there and see how it's blown you take the fuse out put another fuse in power is now
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restored or perhaps if you're the engineer you'll look at your node layout and reroute the power through another node so we're building the big ships with sort of these uh sort of power plant and then kind of nodes where the various systems come off the nodes and each node think of them as sort of a a router box or a fuse box and so and maybe some of those nodes could have a battery in them to sort of store power so if power like they lose power from the power plant they've got like an hour's charge or whatever some may not have but these are also the systems could get blown or damaged and so you may there's a game play that would involve as your ship's taking damage you know you're going quick you know go back there replace you know fix the fuse or work on the engine so we want to have gameplay on the bigger ships where players are moving around and interacting the ship itself sort of functions uh correctly so it's not just about the items attached on the outside
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of it it's also the items inside so we're having everything like you know the avionx module is really kind of like a computer motherboard you put these different um Cards into it that give you this different functionality you plug them in and that's kind of that whole idea of that sort of modular item system where you can plug items into other items and you can just sort of extend out functionality behavior and each item brings its own sort of rules and functionality of what it does okay all right well Breezy asks what are the short-term plans for dealing with server desync in the Pu and Arena Commander uh well short-term plans are we're trying uh to address them uh so I mean part of the part of the issue is that uh uh uh and this is I mentioned this in the uh attemp for the chairman that I recorded yesterday but no one's
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going to see till uh next Monday uh but one of the reasons why there is some desync is cuz the server and the clients don't run at the same frame rate so we can quite easily have a server come under significant load and drop all the way down to five frames a second whereas someone could be running on their machine at 30 frames a second or 40 frames a second and so um one of the big things that we're trying to do is uh fix some of the server Behavior so there's some uh and you know in the last few patches we've added some more functionality in places and so like the more AI you fight uh the AI is all simulated on the server so that actually stresses the server more than it would stress the client because on the client side it simulates your local um ship and your local player but all the remote clients and all the AI uh the remote
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clients all come from other clients that pass up their information to the server and then the server simulates all the I the server basic so every client basically does say like the ifcs simulation for uh so every client does the ifcs simulation for one ship normally but the server will do the ifcs simulation for all the AI ships so if you suddenly have 50 or 60 or 70 AI flying around that 50 or 60 or 70 ICS um you know simulations and the the ifcs sort of flight model simulations pretty heavy mathematically uh so we're looking at some stuff to optimize how some of the stuff done because we've more and more functionalities been added to it but we haven't really spent time in optimizing it but that's one of the reasons why the frame rate goes down then we have sort of some thread contention issues between Network and the physics and the main thread on the
00:33:06
server uh and so we're we're just trying to fix and address those to get better server performance which will help with the desync UCC but the real answer is the full-on backend the full-on sort of new serialization method that we're going to use which sort of completely junks the old cry Network um setup uh which we're fairly far along on and that will be switching out and that hopefully will just make things uh much like there'll be less bandwidth going over the over um the network uh because right now there's a lot of bandwidth when you spawn a ship there's a massive amount that goes uh and also um it just ends up sending more data than it needs to um like if you have a if you have a position change well um you know the way it's currently set up is the these things called aspects and there's only a
00:33:52
limited amount of aspects that can be sent for any ship one aspect could be like your movement which would include your position your velocity your orientation a bunch of other data and so that could be I don't know a 60 b or 100 BTE chunk but if you just change the position it has to send that whole blob of data but really you shouldn't really have to send that much data uh so our new system isn't sort of limited that way it basically only sends the bits that change and it's not limited on uh you know 32 aspects or anything like that it's it's much more flexible um um and so that will reduce the data the other big thing that would reduce the network data is when you spawn a ship like we have very complicated ships so you know you have a even a hornet which isn't a big ship so imagine a constellation or you know something
00:34:39
bigger like a staer or Idis um but say a hornet is a you know a vehicle and then it's got about 60 items attached to it so what happens right now is the server will spawn the the vehicle The Hornet hole basically and say uh spawn this to all the clients so that message goes out to all the clients and then one by one it starts adding all the items on sending a message saying spawn this spawn this spawn this so you're basically sending all this traffic about the Hornet to spawn and it's going back and forth there's a lot and the simple thing would be just to be able to say a message to say I'm a hornet here's the 60 things attached to me you go you go spawn it rather than one by one spawning doing handshake between servers and clients so that's that's a new fun what we call a spawn bundle where you basically just say you deterministically say here is the ship and here's all the
00:35:26
things here's the is attached to it you go build it and then the the client um the remote client or the you know the clients are all just doing that and it all happens and that would greatly reduce the data because something like a Retaliator can end up being about 5 megabytes of network traffic just to spawn Retaliator uh whereas in the method that I'm talking about you're only going to be passing sort of your entity ID so you know in the case of retali I'm not quite sure how many things are attached but you know that would be the equivalent of um say no more than say 150 um you know 64 150 time 64 bits so you know basically a lot less don't have to me to do math right uh so so so so those things will will make the desnc
00:36:15
problems and we're aware of them so what we're trying to do is we're trying to fix what we can on the current system because our new systems not that far off from us starting to deploy it so we don't want to do too much work fixing the old system because the new system is going to be much more flexible but the new system sort of comes in with the item 2.0 stuff but yes we we definitely want to to address and fix those issues so that's what it is thank you much that was the answer I was looking for all right Sloan Warrior wants to know if the procedural Tech will ever be used for things other than planets well the procedural Tech is definitely going to be used for what we would call planetoids um so you know um you could you can consider I mean basically a planetoid is anything that has enough mass that will end up being spherical
00:37:04
we're not going to use the the specific procedural Tech we have right now to sort of do small jaggy shaped asteroids because it's not really built to design for that but we're going to for instance we would probably have uh what you would consider a moon or a very large asteroid that could be particularly spherical um use with this so we're going to like one of the first things we're going to be using so we're going to have the procedural planets when they debut there's going two things they're really going to use one is the landing area and the second is where that's going to be our first iteration of sort of mining mineral collection so we're going to you know these are fairly large and procedural so one of the things we can do is you can fly around and we can sort of like um denote where the areas like a mineral seam would be or something so there would be gameplay sort of scanning at a high level figuring out where it is
00:37:52
going down and and locating mineral seams and then harvesting them getting minerals and taking them back and selling them for some money so that so when we get uh the procedural Planet stuff in which is not too far away um the things that we'll have is the landing and the the the mining so those are those are the things what we're s we'll probably do the landing first and the mining will'll come in right after it but we're we're we're kind of uh pretty focused on gameplay that will let you do some other things besides just combat so you know doing cargo runs doing some mining as well as doing some combat and creating sort of a very basic economic system that's going on and we sort of build out from there all right Aon Soul Strider wants to know how is character customization
00:38:41
coming along uh well it's going pretty well I mean I think you're going to see the first part of it in uh 2.4 that comes out um so uh that's I mean our goal is we we've shifted the characters over to this new item system so everything wear if you wear a sweater or you wear a t-shirt or trousers watch they're all items that just basically attached to uh your character so you basically as a character you're a naked male or you're a naked female when we have the full female motion sets in and then you basically dress yourself just like you would it's sort of like oh I'll put my pants on or a shirt or if you're wearing armor you know you put an undersuit for the armor and put the armor pieces on and stuff like that um so it's going to be pretty cool you have a fair amount of customization um in the beginning um you'll uh you know we don't have we're
00:39:31
going to have a lot more clothes and items and variety down the road but I think at the moment with the beginning we'll just sort of have certain number of shirts and jackets and different colors um as far as the face customization that's still a little bit ways off that sort of relies on uh we uh well probably the first version of that is we have 16 MPC sort of um Arch types right now so eight male eight female and you''ll be able to choose one of them for your character um and I'm not sure if that's going to be in 2.4 but it won't be far after that and then the longer term plan is to be able to take the archetype and and mess with it and sort of you know may give yourself a bigger nose or you know but things like changing the color of your eyes or changing the color of your hair or hairstyle that's all pretty easy on the base archetypes so that would be your first so we'd have the choose your
00:40:18
head then the next level would probably be choosing eye color hairstyle hair color uh potentially um skin color I don't know um and then then uh the the final stage of that would be the able for you to actually sort of kind of move the geometry around um to you know kind of what you used to in a sort of MMO and that's really going to come in with um kind of we have this idea this infiction idea of going um to uh this you know whatever you want to call it like sort of the future version of plastic surgery you pay some money and you know you can get your face redone uh and you know it's it's part of actually the story of uh Squadron 42 at the beginning is that's how we sort of in fiction you get you know horribly uh uh burnt and and hurt in in the in the opening and you
00:41:07
get the opportunity to reconstruct your face which you know you however you want to be so that's how inside the fiction in the story we get the player to uh to you know make his Avatar be them or make her Avatar be them him or her whatever they want to be Goa um okay so just going through some of those I know I've seen a lot of concept art of pants coming out of uh team and Austin it seems every time I Ling shotgun there's pants well we going we got to we got to we're going to we're going to push some more so we need to have like uh the plan is to maybe debut a new space suit for um two four and then we're going to have some more so you have some player options of these are my space suits or an environment suit or perhaps you can buy some armor so you know rather than everyone because right everyone right now is running
00:41:54
around in the light Marine outfit and it's the old light Marine outfit so this is what you're running around now the character models now aren't close to the Fidelity that the final game's going to have are not close to what Squadron 42 has so uh you know our new sort of character Tech and Shader Tech is like a whole level Beyond what's currently in the game uh and I think beyond what we've shown anyone actually um so it's it's uh yeah I'm really quite happy with how that's turning out definitely on a par with anyone out there so you know we I don't look at Uncharted 4 or anyone and say oh yeah they're better than us so the order um you know 1886 uh We've we've got some really great stuff coming so guys like it all right there there's there's enough requests that I have to say they're asking that the hand things
00:42:43
coming across the thing asking if you could play drums like Travis par right all right I'll try not to bang it so much Chris got to be Chris guys yeah always let see so uh any ideas what the next profession design doc might be uh the next professional design dock uh what the name for the person uh I don't know uh I know everyone's quite keen on uh the profession stuff um I I I do know that like one of the the things that we're going to sort of put a system in place and codify is the uh kind of recovery system and we we're building it in such a way that it's not just recovery it's the ability to sort of
00:43:30
broadcast your position to your friends and everything else so it's going to be a lot of the same system uh and uh so you because people do this already in the game which is pretty cool that they go and pick up people that are stranded via chat and so uh what we need to do and what want to do is start to build that into the system so it actually can be a job right so someone can say oh I'm stuck in space you know pick me up and someone can get paid 1,000 Alpha U to go and rescue somean and and deliver them with persistence this becomes more and more because we're going to basically have you know when the STA era gets around flying you know there'll be you know refueling that will come with the STA era so we're starting to add in functionality and we'll want to be expanding out uh the systems like Stanton system and add more areas to it
00:44:18
and give you more things to do and reasons to travel to different places so there's a there's a lot of uh lot of cool stuff that's all happening this year you know can't happen fast enough for me or everyone else probably out there uh but uh it's you know I'm I'm I'm pretty excited because when it's all there and it's all going to be working with um the level of like detail uh that we got there's no game ever going to be like it and to be honest with you I think it'll be pretty hard for someone to try to do it and compete I mean know I think maybe the Rockstar guys could because they've got the resources but I mean it just takes a lot of work to build something at this Fidelity and level uh you know with this many possibilities and options and you know we get to do it cuz you guys are really allowed us to do it so thank you for doing that but it's going to be
00:45:05
an awesome experience when it's hold time uh any updates on the launcher revamp there's been some talk lately about new additions to the launcher being asked quite a bit so yeah I mean I don't particularly have a you know like an update as in it's going to come tomorrow or anything but it's definitely we're working on it that is the plan I mean we have a complete revamp of the sort of um content delivery plan that we're going to do so people won't have to download nearly the amount of data that they download now every time we do a patch because right now it's just very inefficient because uh basically the the data is all broken up into two gigabyte pack files and if just one bite changes in one of those pack files you have to give them the whole two gigabytes um so we're changing to a completely different structure that is only going to be about uh delivering
00:45:54
the files that changed and then the sort of pack files are all built locally on your machine so we have so we'll actually have the ability this is also for our developer side as well as the you know front-facing delivery that um essentially every time a developer checks in some code um or checks in an asset it's getting built right then and there and added to what they call the object store in our system and you'll be able to just say okay give me build of this change list and it can look up and go okay and it just adds and it can just build it from all so so essentially every like it's almost like a a you know whatever you want to call it perforce or a jit of every asset as it's getting checked in is getting it it's built and so what will happen is when we deliver builds to people the turnaround is going to be a lot quicker because it's
00:46:41
basically getting built as it goes and also uh we can look at what they have on their machine and just give them the bits they don't have or the bits that have changed and so it will greatly reduce the amount of data I think that you know we sort of we did an analysis on few of our older patches that were like 30 gigs and you know determined that like using this new system it would have been 7 megabytes uh so uh the system when it's built and this is the new the new patch is going to work with that um so everyone's working on this uh but when it's done it means our turnaround times will be a lot faster right now and we want to kick off a full build we kick off you know like well actually a full full full build where we build every single asset is about 12 hours um the sort of reduced builds uh or about three hours or so and if we do
00:47:31
a code only build it's about an hour but that doesn't include the amount of time to Stage it for the for the you know our QA Department to sanity check it and test it make sure it doesn't blow up so you know for us when we like when we're trying to get a patch out um a lot of times like there will be fixes that won't make it because we like if we rebuild it now uh you know it's going to be 4 hours later uh before someone we can deliver it live and that's assuming nothing goes wrong that's assuming that you know QA doesn't get it and something that we thought was fixed is is broken and you know so with this new method you can turn that could turn around way way quicker so I think quality of the patches the turnaround will be faster uh and data use for everybody will be F so it'll be better for us because we spend a lot of money every month I mean I
00:48:19
don't think people realize it I know they everyone thinks we're you know we're still in development all the rest stuff but but you know we spend a lot of money every month um on both data delivery and running the servers that we run uh so you know we kind of behave like a live game in terms of some of our operational costs which is cool because it's great I love the iteration I love the feedback and I think people definitely out there in the community can see that you know there is stuff that we only ever see when it goes to PTU or it goes to live that we cannot see uh internally I mean to be honest with you I don't know how all these other big online games do it because you know it's not like we're you know we we've got world class people and there are just things that you don't see until you're under scale so in like you know so when yeah I see whenever it's a big launch by whoever big publisher it is and it all blows up I'm like yeah
00:49:07
probably because you know some of these things you just don't see till you get load in scale so the way we're doing it I think is going to make a much better game long term and we certainly you know people are asking about performance or desync issues like you normally would never even be worrying about that in development this early on but since people are playing and using it we are constantly sort of having to sort of keep our house in order so to speak um and um you know the the new sort of Patcher and whole build and data system is sort of the next evolution of that so it's in progress uh I don't have specific dates when it'll come out but when it does it will I think be really good and it will it will be better experience all around cool uh following up on the persistence question people are getting excited about the ability to arrange things in their hangers because their hangers will sort of become their home uh are there any updates on when
00:49:55
people will be able to visit other people's hangers uh no I I mean I'd have to I'd have to talk Tony I mean it's it's part of our road map I mean my goal ultimately would be to actually have your hanger be like in Stanton or wherever you would but and so I don't you're not going to a load screen anywhere it's sort of like you're just walking out of your place flying out the The Hanger door and you're flying out in space um but uh you know in terms of visiting other hangers uh you know I would I would have to coordinate with uh as Tony on that is but I think the the the ideal of how we would implement it now will ultimately go away because how it would be implemented now would be just enabling The Hanger to be sort of a multiplayer mode just like you're in Arena commander
00:50:43
in multiplayer or you're in um Crusader in multiplayer um whereas really everything's just going to be sitting inside um essentially one big universe um with the possible exception of dropping out into Arena Commander but even then I think that'll be fairly seamless it'll stream you in the arena Commander assets and then just hand you off to an arena Commander uh server and you'll never real you won't see a loading screen like you do currently okay you you always look like you're giggling at whatever coming I can which I can't see no I I I I Adore listening to your answers that's the nicest thing I can say that I'm comfortable saying nice things you know me I don't I don't say nice things I'm like I really enjoy listening to him
00:51:31
true you are kind of a jerk yeah I don't feel comfortable yes Tyler's over there going yes he never says anything nice I'm not good at saying things nice I just really like listening to Chris he knows what he's talking about I enjoy it sorry now Hennessy is laughing at me these guys aren't funny no how many people are watching us on uh twitch right now I don't even have twitch open right now that's the5 that's the number people who are laughing at you it's people are like jar said something nice and you got embarrassed I don't want to do this anymore uh nrer asks a question uh as there any uh what's what's the development What's the progress on multi-core engine balancing for the client are we still working on that oh yeah yeah I tell you well they I mean it's the same stuff that I'm talking
00:52:18
about for the server in terms of better performance better scalability uh server and the client have a lot of similarities other than the clients doing the random rendering and uh sort of doing more a um sort of input output because it's having to stream in like rendering assets and sound assets um but yes that's part of the you know part of our focus is scalability so how we can utilize more CES as we go I think I've mentioned before like in the server case it really could make a difference because you know we run the actual physical servers we run on have 16 physical Calles or 32 logical um Calles or threads if you want to think about it and uh we don't we we run eight uh game server instances on that so each one gets two physical CES uh or you know four logical CES right the way to think
00:53:08
of it and uh and each one of those right now has 24 players cap so if you just took 8 * 24 if you could just have that have one server instance use all 16 cores that even with us still needing loads of optimization you're close to 200 players just on one server there so we actually do run close to 200 players on one physical server right now uh but the way the engine's built in such a way it's we can't scale it that we just can't just add the cuse and all of a sudden it scales better so we have to refactor a bunch of stuff it's partly again some of the stuff that I'm discussing that we're sort of doing in the background the new item system which is really new a new entity system uh some of the serialization stuff that we're doing uh and we're you know redoing uh you know on the on the physics side we you know we're we're
00:53:58
optimizing the current physics but we're actually building a whole new more scalable physics system which isn't going to debut it won't it won't be for squadron 42 but Squadron 42 um doesn't really need it because it's really more a single player game but we are building one for Star Citizen for Des scalability reasons because really physics is the thing that we physics is the thing that the server does the most what it does the most is physics and network stuff and so if we can make that more scalable the current um you know cry physics um sort of tops out at a c like right more than say three or four threads and it has you're not really getting much benefit uh but if we can get that scaling all the way out and more parallelism then uh we can just put everything all on one physical instance
00:54:45
which would be much better because then you don't have uh you know these D different virtual instances all contending for say the same disc asset dis access and all the rest of the stuff so it will be so we're doing that and this work that does for that is the same kind of approach and work for the client and we're doing stuff on the rendering side for more scalability so we're starting to put um the pieces in place for the move to sort of the next gen apis like Vulcan and dx12 as well as um cleaning up the whole dx11 because the problem with a lot of dx11 implementations including the the cry engine one is they really were dx9 implementations that then had dx11 put on top and dx11 operates actually you know fairly different than dx9 but because they had to deal with dx9 they couldn't utilize all the the so there's a lot of organization in terms
00:55:34
of how you do things that you can do for dx11 that also is what you want to do for Fulon and dx12 um so we're basically we're not doing dx9 we' not doing you know for a long time so we're basically getting rid of the old stuff refactoring a whole bunch of stuff down on the engine level to allow better parallelism and stuff so it's an ongoing task a lot of that's been done in Frankfurt by the guys that you know essentially wrote the engine many years ago anyway uh and this is all stuff that they wanted to do for a while so we are working on it it's just a sort of ongoing slow process but I think you know by you know you know down the road you have a very you know fast and beautiful game uh you know but it's always you know you take a look at what it what star syst looks now what it looked like in 2015 what look like in 2014 what it look like in
00:56:23
2013 there's big differences and you'll will continue to see that one of my absolute favorite aspects of this is that we get to see the development of a game live like this yeah and it's not you know even if we say okay now it's you know whatever you want to call it done release whatever it's not stopping we're always going to be improving like the graphics the performance uh the content the functionality I mean you know I I look at it as a sort of we're building a universe and we're going to keep this universe running as long as possible as long as there's people out there that want to play in it uh hopefully you guys do hope we build something that's fun enough for you but but yeah it's just an ongoing because it'll be it's a virtual world that you're just going to escape to and live your alternate uh life in yes I look forward to spending what little free time I still have playing Star
00:57:10
Citizen all right go 90 he he he wants to know he's like it's like more than flying more than fighting more than FPS more than exploration when can I have lockable doors on my spaceship uh I would say that um not too far in the distant future won't be the next patch and probably not the patch afterwards but maybe after that because one of the things that we're going to do is you know with things like the star Fara flying around I mean you're flying around in large ships and uh so then there's going to be you know that whole aspect of boarding and and Persistence of course taking a ship from someone else and all the rest of the stuff so that is gaml that is important so we kind of actually want to add in game playay um that allows you to sort of lock uh the doors and then someone else
00:57:58
is trying to do it has to hack them or use a charge to blow them open if they're trying to get in and so all that kind of comes with a new item system so when the new item system is all fully functioning all the doors all the rest they're all interconnected they all talk to each other and you can Implement sort of security and states and all the rest of the stuff so really um that side of it is is sort of waiting on the remaining aspects where we're closing out an item system 2.0 um but you know it's I would say it's uh you know in the you know with it's in the it's in the near future it's not in the far future right one of the easiest ways for players to feel ownership of their of their vehicles and games is to paint them is to decorate them how they wish uh do we have any updates on the ship paint system decorating the interior
00:58:46
anything like that uh so I would say that on the paint system not particularly that sort of lower priority for us right now I'd rather get these base functionality stuff that I've talked in like you know the item system and locking stuff down um but you know like the way you'll be able to customize say your hanger is not different than the way you could like maybe customize the interior of your spaceship I you know put a couch here or not put a couch here or put a picture on the wall and not put a picture on the wall um in terms of the external delivery you know our plans are to allow you to place some decals around put a name down and then if the ship's set up correctly with the shaders then you can change say your you know primary or secondary colors or something like that but it becomes kind of complicated on like the very big ships CU they all sort of use sort of modular parts so you
00:59:36
know it's so you know in certain level we're probably going to uh um restrict it to kind of like picking your sort of primary and secondary colors and doing decals um rather than like doing very custom paint jobs with flames left right and Center I mean that could be done with the decal but um you know someone getting totally crazy but that's uh right now the the systems in there right it's got the it's got the UV you need like a second UV set to be able to enable that there and if you play in Crusader you go and you'll meet some pirate ships and they've got a different Livery than than other ships have and that's done with the paint system so what we really don't have is sort of an ability to sort of like expose that to players like oh I can get this skin and that skin but we do you know we are going to implement the the various skins the electro skins that that people
01:00:25
pledge for them back quite a while ago so that would be the first stage second stage would be to allow further customization by players but again there sort of there's you a mountain of tasks and there's a whole bunch of stuff and you know there's there's certain things like I think people would rather have you know cargo working before they can paint their ship right I'm guessing or mining working before they can paint their ship so is that really sort of comes down to these that you just sort of make these choices it's like it's like VR um you know got you know they OA sent me my Kickstarter ulas Set uh which I think you tweeted a picture of um the Box yeah and uh you know and of course I'd like to get all that working but you know the same you know brilliant Graphics Engineers uh that would have that all working which we can because we already
01:01:15
have sort of code in it are also the same ones that are working on things like getting the procedural planet in a shape that everyone in the community can use it now that's everybody can use that versus just a a sub set that have the OAS Rift so that's those are sort of the hard choices you make the hard choice you make is well uh let's get that base technology that everyone can use first rather than uh something that's super super awesome super cool but you know maybe 10% or 5% of our community can use uh so it sucks because you know I like all that stuff too um thing fell down I got shorter go got taller again there's no underestimating the importance of prioritization in game development so it's 11:5 we started 15 minutes late we fulfilled our hour thank you so much Chris for taking the time to sit down with us on our special subscriber
01:02:03
edition of RTV uh remember if you're not a subscriber you can subscribe on the RSI website in the pledge store uh you get you support shows like this around the verse 10 for the chairman and you get yourself a whole lot of goodies like hanger flare and and and access to alien ships and all kinds of stuff so check it out uh Chris thanks for joining us Ben you got anything you want to add before we take off no um turbulent T starf is everybody hangers if you want to go check them out now shouldn't have to make any changes at all they should just show up that's for everybody even if they don't know everybody yeah it's it's the demo so everybody can check out all the work Foundry did on it's very large ship it's a very nice ship it is a very large ship and it's very cool when it flies around I have to say so we have some internal stuff that you know we've been flying it around and we've even had people like boarding the ship and and uh you know so it's I think that's going to
01:02:51
be we I'm sure I'll see some cool YouTube videos uh in .4 people say I'm a teas yeah all right take it easy everybody all right

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