Star Citizen Live: Subscriber Event Special

17 May 201901:11:252,232 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hey everybody, welcome to our very first Star Citizen Live Subscriber Special Event Edition Bruhaha. I should have read the card, but it's over there. I don't I can't see it now. This is we have a live studio audience full subscribers. Let's show them off. Yeah. Yeah, look at that. Oh, that's cool. I like that. I like the slow pan. All right, that's enough. Oh, that's a lot of work. That's enough. Oh, we're back. You think just cuz you make the show possible? Whatever. Now, of course Star Citizen Live is one of the shows that our subscriber program makes possible. It's one of the many perks of being a subscriber.
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So, we wanted to do something special and invite as many people as we could fit into this room, which we estimated at 40 and we were just about right. So, today we are taking questions exclusively from our subscribers. We have we have a couple from the folks here that are live and we'll be taking them of course from our subscriber chat on Spectrum. So, if you want if you're a subscriber and you want to submit a question today, you can go to robertsspaceindustries.com, go to Spectrum, go to the subscriber section and put your question there with preface by question capital letters surrounded by brackets so our community management team can pull it out from the detritus. Before we get started with the questions here, we do as always want to introduce our esteemed panel of guests and Sean. Starting immediately from my right, Josh tell us who you are and what you do for Star Citizen. My name is Josh Herman. I'm the character creative director here
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at CIG. Basically, I am in charge of all characters from starting to help at the idea phase and get them in game. So, if they walk and talk, it's a character, then involved in it in some way. So. And making his return to Star Citizen broadcast after a a long and well-deserved hiatus, we have a lead gameplay programmer and formerly known as the bug smasher, Mr. Mark Abent. How you doing, Mark? Pretty good. Uh tell us who you are and what you do. Um I think you just did. No, no. I I said you used to be a bug smasher, but what does a What does a lead gameplay programmer lead gameplay programmer do? So, there's We have two lead gameplay programmers here in LA and my responsibilities is mostly with vehicles, more vehicles, and vehicles. Um so, if a vehicle has a problem, uh usually someone comes up to me and goes,
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"Hey, why is the guy teleporting when he spawns into a ship?" And I look at them and go, "I don't know. I'll look at it later." Um all vehicle bugs. I got you. I miss bug smashers. And features, too. And features. Yeah. Features. Well, bugs turn into features. It's features turning into bugs. And uh last, but certainly not least, no stranger to to our broadcast, director of technical content, Mr. Sean Tracy. Sean, tell us who you are and what you do. Uh Sean Tracy, I'm the technical director of content at Cloud Imperium Games. Uh that means that it uh it's very broad. Um it's very broad and it basically as Chris decides that uh I need to take a look at something, I take a look at something. Um generally it has to do with all the content getting in the game. We have a couple a couple technical directors at uh Cloud Imperium
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and my job is really to keep an eye on the data and the processes that we all use uh to get characters in, to get vehicles in, uh to get props in, to get whatever. Um so, yeah, it's managing all those pipelines. You got it. And uh of course, if this is your first broadcast or whatever, I'm Jared Huckaby, uh associate creative producer for the subscription program. Uh basically, if it's comes from the subscription program, uh I'm going to have my hands in it one way, shape, or form. That's that's uh from the new flare that's been coming out to the changes in our broadcast recently. Basically, if it's if it's for our videos or or for our subscriber program, I'm one of the guys. Uh for the videos, I'm one of the tremendous team of folks here uh who would take too long to name all of them, but we do have Justin You can't see Justin. Benoît, you can't Justin's over here though. It's been a while since you've been a
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part of the show. I'm happy to have you here. You can sit back there. All right, so we are going to get started now uh with our questions. Uh Scott, I understand we've got somebody from our live studio audience here with us. Nine lives and he's got a question about controls. Yeah, I was wondering uh with the new flight model if we could have separate uh bindings for throttle forward and for the strafe forward and backwards. Cuz right now you can't do that with the new flight model. For the strafe forward and backwards and then decoupled from which? Well, I'm using a HOTAS. So, I'm using the the left hand for throttle forward, but I'd like to be able to strafe backwards and forwards for things like landing on pads and you're getting into hangars where I can just put it under my right thumb and just strafe backwards and forwards. Sure. Uh that's probably not beyond the realm of possibility. Actually, we
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should take that in and we'll play it put it on the player feedback. There's no reason why we couldn't do that. Um not that I'm aware of anyways. Uh we did a pretty massive change anyways for 3.5 anyways. Uh like the controller remapping stuff. Uh and we've got actual What's quite nice is that we've got resources on this now which is I used to joke about the button bearing coming in and changing things. So, like somebody would just randomly change a freaking key mapping and then everybody got confused. between every single patch, the buttons just changed massively and it was it was enough to drive us crazy. We should have told them. Yes. Uh so, yeah, it's really good piece of uh feedback. We'll put it in. Uh we'll we'll review it and then yeah, see what we can do. Yeah, this is the part where I have to say it's not a guarantee that's going to happen or whatever, but No, no, but I want to make sure we get the No, we make sure we get the bit of feedback and and and Yeah, Dil Colson has
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a lot to do with it anyways. He's not actually doing the control bits of it, but he definitely has that things to say about it. There's no question. has been experimenting with some things to get that finer control on like um atmosphere and that so that you can get that fine tuning. It He's still prototyping it. Uh I'm sure we'll hear more about it. But there is like discussions and prototyping going on for it. Yeah, cuz what we're what we're toying with right now is the VTOL mode stuff. So basically we had the same sort of requirements for some precision throttle control. So it makes sense. Okay. Thank you guys. You're welcome. Thanks, guys. All right. Um let's see. We we're going to take a Let's see if we have a question from the live chat here. We don't. So who do we got next? Chicago. Mickey. Let's go ahead and as soon as you've
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asked your question, let's go ahead and return to the seat so we can get the next person up. Shame, I might just bring him PC. PC here. I was wondering what tech is holding back the implementation of the like cargo ramps on the cargo uh caterpillar for them to actually go down and move up. Cuz right now you can just Oh, you mean like all the way down so that you don't it opens up but the ramps don't actually go down. And it's not low enough so you can jump on them, which also bugs me, too. I had to kind of like jump my Um and actually I don't I actually don't know that there's any tech stopping it. So when we originally had that um problem, it was when we had the caterpillar, uh we want to combat it with a few systems that we didn't have at the time. So we actually went through and built a lot of systems to do this. Uh one of them is called uh the interaction state machine. And this
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thing allows us or allows designers to specify states using our interactive state our interaction system. The interaction system is that thing where if you hold F and you look at floaty text words on to enter a ship or something like that. That's basically our interaction system. So design now has a way to bring in arbitrary states to say, I don't know, if I'm in this state, the door opens up, the door closes, uh stuff like that. And inside of that state machine, there's ways to do certain things like playing animation, play sound, um so forth. And there's also another thing that it says, from game code, if I do a certain action, trigger this state. So, we got the interaction state machine. Um
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parts that we're missing are some of those variables to say, "Hey, switch to that state. Hey, switch, uh based off that interaction, play this animation." so, well, I'll go back. We have all the animations. We have the interaction state machine. We're just missing some of those things to trigger the state machine to go into those states. So, the thing holding us back is probably it's in our backlog, and just we haven't gotten to it yet. Um eventually, we'd like to get to it. We just need to stick a designer to attempt to bring all those state machines, to hit all those things. And if we have to add some code into it, then we'll add some code into it. It's hard, cuz even with 500 plus developers around the world, there are still finite resources. Yes.
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And of those 500, there's only so many designers. You know, not every not everybody's a designer. And then I'd like to fix something there. There's not 500 developers, by the 500 plus. There's 500 employees, yes. And which and a big percentage of that is not development, right? So, it's not 500 developers. 500, then you go smaller to developers, then you go smaller to designers, and then you go smaller to the designers that are that are capable and knowledgeable to work on this subject. And there's only a few of those designers that are working on actual ship setup and everything. And the other trouble, too, is say we have that tech available for a designer, um if we don't have an engineer ready to help them with any problems that they come with it. So, like maybe hey, I'm like, "Hey, it's ready, go use it." They hook it up. If I'm currently working on a feature for something else and they're blocked, then it they have to wait until I have time or someone else has time to
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go and look at it. So, I know specifically that which one that caterpillar thing he was referring to because it was sent to a designer and then he got switched to UI and now it's in our backlog until we can get to look at it again. It's just one of those we'll get to it eventually. Um we just have to sync a programmer and designer when a certain one production goes or when it's one of those features that we want to actively get and get done and working on. It's probably something we'll end up looking at next quarter, too. The active feature team, one of our larger engineering teams that is a mixed up team of designers, engineers, animation programmers. So, that's a we're meant to be looking at player interaction system next quarter anyways. So, that might get looked at within
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there. And, you know, we have other tech coming online like the object container streaming that is a little bit higher priority. So, some things do get bumped down. We still want to do them. They're still in the backlog. Um it's just other priority shift. Sure. And I want to mix in a question from the subscriber chat right now. Any updates on roads making it into the PU? For instance, we recently revealed the Tumbril Ranger bikes and people are asking about roads. We've heard Chris talk in the past about the roads tool. Uh yeah, the the the person responsible well, that would be responsible for the roads would be very upset if I said much about it um because it it came up a year ago, kind of did some stuff, a year later, nobody had used it. Then they started use it, didn't work
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anymore. So, it was it's a matter of priority um that one and no, there's no real in the next 3 months anyways plan for for doing much for roads. I think there's going to be some stuff in the planetary tools V4 possibly, Uh but it's not a guarantee anyways. So, um yeah, they're kind of a non-answer I realize, but it's there. Yeah, of course everybody wants roads and and to be able to to to set them up, but uh more realistically we have to be able to scale up again all the planets that we need to be able to make. So, it's you could kind of got to decide, do you want to zero in on some some smaller not smaller stuff, but uh specific things, or do we go broad so we can do uh uh all the tons of content that we need to do? And the decision has been right now go broad, make sure we can actually
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make all the stuff we said we're going to make. Um and then we can improve the stuff that's there. So. Scott, who you got for us? It's on here. Hi, my question is uh for Mark and maybe Shawn. Um so, how do you think uh scanning is going to help the exploration mechanic? that is a good question. Um I don't have a direct answer for that, but what I can tell you is how we're going about the scanning system. Um so, we actually had a big discussion with um uh John Crew. He's actually the vehicle director. So, anything that like the vehicle team will has to do, we have to go to John to make sure that it it works
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with all the pillar directors and um if design works out for all other systems. So, John did a wonderful job. He went through an entire radar and scanning infrastructure, looked at all the designs, prepped out everything, and gave us basically the scan Bible, the radar Bible of how we want everything to work. And in that, we discovered how we want to finalize what scanning um information and how we get to that information and how we store that information is. So, before um I've talked about this before in other chats, it is our scan information has always had like I think we called it four levels. You had surface scan and those could just be arbitrary values for like, I don't know, the health of a ship, uh the the player name, the model name of the ships. And then we had this
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other thing called detail scan where you could have two bits of information for maybe for for the passengers I have the name and the health. Um the trouble with that system is it worked great for a few things like ships and minables, but it wasn't broad enough where if I scanned a signpost or an arbitrary cup, I could retrieve information that would be helpful to me or helpful to um a mission that I'm working on. Uh so the scan back end is getting changed to hold technically arbitrary information. Um we could store and this is actually happening right now. We can store any information on like minable rocks, we can store any information help you get that, you know, optimal level to mine to all the contents inside of it, to passengers their entire faction, their um their player health, um to cargo,
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what type of cargo is it? Is it illicit cargo? Is it stolen cargo? Uh so we're broadening how and we can store this information and what information we can put inside of it into a data model that we could technically store and put on anything. Um so it now that we have this data model, we could technically now put it on an arbitrary item and um design could put arbitrary information onto there. And this kind of gives us into a little bit of that um random data mission access stuff where you get a mission and it says uh maybe you have to go to this location or someone has stolen this cargo or there's arbitrary data in I don't know, maybe there's a jump point here or Bob killed me at this location. I don't know, you could store whatever
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you want in this arbitrary information box. now that we have that, we could hook up the mission system to install this stuff. We could hook up the mission system to read this information, and then the mission guys could act on that information so that we could have um I don't know, a mission saying uh I want you to go steal this cargo. You get the cargo, and then you have to sneak into an area cuz if someone scans you and they find illegal goods, that you could get shot up. So, the entire scanning system data structures changed to allow this bigger and broad um gameplay that we want. And how that would affect, I guess, exploration is if you come across a data model or some kind of information item,
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you could scan it, recover information, we could display it to you so that it could be relevant to, I don't know, a mission or maybe something that's uh Shawn decided to put his location of where he put his gold, and I killed him, and now I could look he put his gold here, and his combination is 1 2 3. it will open up a lot of doors for design to make some interesting missions, and hopefully we can provide tools for you guys to put information into those scan data to make that interesting mechanic in gameplay. It's like watching bug smashers live. We've had lots of debates on how we want this to work and how it's going to work with other systems. When we shoot bug smasher, they used to just sit next to Bark and just listen to him. Well, I I was have I mean, I'm having flashbacks right now.
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Well, my favorite thing on the bug smashers was they're they said, "Just talk like you're talking to someone else on the game." Mhm. And I'm like, "Okay." So, that's what bug smashers was. It's like, "I'm just going to talk about how the game system is going to work as if I'm talking to another designer or another artist or someone else." the things I'm most proud of about this project is that we never dumb stuff down for people. So much of so many of our backer community are are in tech fields, are are are in science fields and whatever. So, it's like we trust them to understand and if they don't, they can look it up. Uh Josh, I got a question from the live chat for you real quick before we before we go to the next question here. Uh this person wants to know if we're ever going to see UEE uniforms in the persistent universe. A lot of folks have want to role play as you know, mustered out
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uh soldiers or or even like a a a former admiral or something like that. Uh we actually have seen seen quite a lot of chat about UEE uniforms in the persistent universe. So, we haven't had an official plan on if we're going to release them in the PU. We know that if we do it, it will be after Squadron because so much of the focus of Squadron is about the UEE. Um but also at that point, we would have to get into more interesting stuff about like what ranks people would be cuz there's all of our ranks are pretty fleshed out as far as like what they wear, what the rank looks like, what the colors are and that are um specific outfits for different types of uniforms. Uh I think it's definitely possible. I think it would really depend on what the UEE would be in our game. So, are they like a peacekeeping force or what are what
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exactly are they? they a guild? Are they a faction? Are they a group? We already had NPCs for the NPC. Yes, that makes sense. So, I think it would be once Squadron is released, we start talking about what how we they or before how we want them to be in the PU. Having said that, the designers love to try to sneak them in. Yeah, there there's been occasions where like you know, they'll try to populate designers are allowed to populate the landing zones with a with characters. And so, sometime they've pulled in UEE outfits. And We had a couple admiral corpses for a bit. That was Yeah, there was a couple of those and we try to make sure they don't get out there, but aside from accidents, not till after Squadron. Yeah. All right, Scott, who we got? We got Fire Medic. So, now that we have some precise
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persistence in halves, um what can we look forward to seeing going forward on like the pathway to full persistence? Well, there's a misnomer there cuz there's actually several types of persistence in our game, right? So let let let's just run those down real quick so we know what we're talking about. Want me to get it or you got it? Go right ahead, man. Uh so there's multiple levels of uh persistence. The one we're currently aiming for is um going to help us get server-side streaming. So right now we have a client-side streaming. So if I'm um a ship and this cup goes far away, it will stream out on me for the client. Um it's great because I don't have to run that asset. I don't have to run any logic on it. I get awesome FPS. Trouble is that
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cup's still on the server and it's still updating and it's still ticking. Uh so one of the things the next evolution is to get server-side streaming. If there's no one near that cup, the server doesn't need to know about it. Uh but one of the problems that brings is say we get server-side streaming and that cup goes away. If it was some ship and it got damaged up because of some combat, if we bring that back on the server, we need to bring that thing back with the damage that it had. And that's where the next evolution of persistence is. And we have a lot of teams working on it. We actually have um Chad McKinney, the other lead gameplay programmer here in LA. He's working on it along with a bunch of people in the UK uh to get not only the engine setting this up, but the actual persistence working on that. And
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to get that working, um Chad is going to have to adjust how and when we store uh persistence. So right now with our persistence model, um if I own this cup, I store I saw this cup can have persistent information cuz it's bound to me as a player. But that AI is not bound to a particular player. It's bound to the server. So this is where we start getting into global persistence where that cup is saving its persistent state, its damage, its health, its who's inside of it to the server's version of the persistent um information. So this model will allow us to stream stuff in and out in each dedicated server to unroll a entity and
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then bring it back on that dedicated server. That's the fundamental next evolution of the persistence and server-side streaming. Further out you get stuff like server meshing where um maybe this cup's owned by a different server. So then you have to store his persistent information not relative to that particular server, but into the global universe. Um that's a much further away thing. So the first step is the server-side and the server persistence. Now once they have that system, just like client-side streaming, it's going to change a lot of the game code. I'm talking tremendous amounts of game code. So that's why the entire company most of the engineers are going to be focusing on this. So as the tech comes
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available, um game coders including myself will have to now um change the system to expect that that cup is no longer potentially no longer on the server. So I need to look at that cup and go, what do I need to save in the general persistence so that when it comes back, you it is at it's as it was. Um an example of a system that gets heavily affected by this is probably the ping system. So right now with ping, you could ping out and you could find things that are outside of your radar. Which is cool. But, if that cup could be seen by me and it streamed out on my client and on the server and I ping out and I'm expected to know that there's something there, I won't get that any information. So,
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now I have to change the ping code to run um we're calling it a service and that's basically a it's not the game itself, but it's some extra code that can read the persistent data. So, the ping code will now go, "A, ping service, is there anything within these vicinities that I need to potentially know about?" And what that thing will do is go through um that location, find all the persistent entities that are streamed out, and kind of look at the information, and then read those variables that we stored in persistence that the ping would need to know about so that I could display to you guys that there's something interesting there. So, that when you go and fly over there, it could stream in and go, "Oh, there's a ship." Or it's Sean Tracy needs help because he blew up a ship.
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Simple stuff. Simple stuff. Easy peasy stuff. Yeah. It's like the world's most easy stuff. But seriously, like and and to to to maybe to jump on that one, the the server object container streaming will have a dramatic effect on the performance, like like dramatic. Um and there's there's a big reason and I'm not sure how much we've talked about this, but we are we like we are hitting and honestly we hit them a quarter ago. Uh but we are at a very serious limit right now of content on the server. Um it's actually really hard for us even to run our servers locally on our PCs now because of just the sheer amount of RAM that we need. Um so, we've we've gotten to a state that this has to like there is no more content that we can shove in here. Um we have to have this um um working. Um what's also nice about it though, um and I know it sounds like oh all of a sudden
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every single game program is going to have to work on this full time. Uh what is nice about it is there's pieces of it that they'll have to work on. So, we have all these feature teams all across. So, there will be a core set of guys that are working on it that that that will be their day-to-day, you know, poor Chad and uh guys like this. But then um what they're doing is that they're setting up tasks for those game teams. So, the guys are still continuing work on features. So, for example, actor feature team has player interaction system, inventories, all these other things to be working on. That doesn't stop. We're still working on those and then these guys are going to be feeding in tasks that they need to do pretty much at the same time. Uh but this will take precedent over any feature by far because this is the thing that's stopping us um and stopping you guys from having really really significantly better performance uh not just on the clients but on the servers as well. And in the end, our server performance, yes, it's still
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degrading down um and it's only because there's just too much stuff on it. On the other the cool thing about this, too, is the persistent team has laid out an internal basic calendar of when they want to get certain things in. It's not a direct thing saying this day we're going to get this. It's more like here we currently are on the schedule. Um when we get to this point, we're going to have to talk to these gameplay teams to get these things switched over and these guys have to do these switched over. And those teams will go out, do their switches, and when it's done, we'll move the clock forward. So, it's like a progression system of sorts. We're turning back the doomsday clock. Get it back, yeah. Um but the content was great. It does give us at least gameplay engineers a a diagram of when we need to complete stuff and when we need to switch things
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over. Maybe to go right on top of that and like a huge No, no, no, but huge props to our uh He's been standing for so long. Oh, he just got up. He's fine. He's been sitting there the whole time. No, but really big props to like our planning and and and and production team and the directors around that because even when we started in on OCS, like it took a long time. Uh but a lot of it was we had to approach it. We're kind of approaching some of these new things from a naive standpoint. Like we don't really know what we don't know as we dive into it. But because we've already done the client server or the the client streaming side of it, we already know uh pretty much exactly what's going to happen in here. So we were able to actually plan this one pretty rigidly. It's not like crazy R&D stuff where we're like, "Oh yeah, you'll have it in 3 months." And then 3 months later we're like, "Actually, that's going to be 12 months." Um, so this is it's big props to those
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guys. That's called game development and not game construction. Right. Right. But this one will be construction is the hope. So. All right, who we got, Scott? We got Nerd Show and Tell with his question. Hey man. Hey, how's it going? Good. When can I have a pet volleyball in the game? When can I have a what? volleyball. Winston. Actually, um, so you could have it now if we made the ball. I mean, it's a big that's a big ask though. That's quite the asset. I mean a month of subscriber play. This is 6 to 8 months of work at least for an artist, right? a turtle. And then you got to rig it. And then we got to animate it. Um, but seriously, we should be able to put it in now. Didn't we have We had a basketball for a while. Um a basketball asset. did a basketball or
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we we did we did a happy hour back in the day where he created he created a basketball Right. uh, mechanic because it was seen in the artwork for the javelin. It was like a half court. So we like, well what how we wanted to see how much it would take to build an actual Shooty hoop mechanic. And then I guess there wouldn't be too much aside from just keeping it persistent. Yeah, but the turtle persists now. Yeah, right. Sorry, too much? There you go. I do I do want to say that that's not the same as a commitment that we are going to add a volleyball pet. That's them saying it's not technically a huge achievement to get it done. But For an artist it might be. Nerd, let's talk after the show, man. Who we got, Scott? Who else we got? Pons plus one with a good question. All right.
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Do you have any details to share regarding how players itineraries intended to work? Will each ship carry only what you personally store or give access to all items that you own? Inventory. Okay. You knew this was coming. Yeah. Appreciate the question. And I don't have all the answers yet is the thing. So where inventory has been has been kind of a weirdly disparate thing. Couple teams had you know a piece of it. So hey the characters they have to carry stuff around. How's that going to work? inventory? Yes. So hey the characters have stuff they got to carry things around. Hey the ships have stuff they got to carry stuff around. Hey we have boxes. And you know like there's been a bunch of different things going on. So what we're doing next quarter and I keep mentioning this anyways it's on the road map that we'll be looking at physical inventory which is actually the entirety of the system. So it it goes all the way down to you
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know a turtle or a or a med pen all the way up the cargoes within the ship being able to put stuff into those boxes. And so I don't have really rigid answers right now. But I can tell you that we are we've got to holistically tie all these different designs right now together. Like a good example we were just talking yesterday about how how strange it is that we say like a cargo size on the ships. It it's cool but we've not really um made it really obvious that yeah you have a little cargo pad in your ship and it's got so much room but there's nothing stopping me from just walking in my ship and just throwing a box in you know. So like I mean to a degree we should be telling cargo sizes from here's what you can lash down basically. But then you've got volume within the ship to be able to throw other things in.
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So yeah the the the main drive for that by the way too is mostly to do with the players inventory like being able to take anything from my from my item port hierarchy and drop it into the world and it persist and do all the things that it needs to do, and then that would give you lootables and um you saw or what do we call Star Citizen Live? Is that what we call ATV? That's what No, that's what this show is. Oh, I'm sorry. But what's the other one? Inside Star Citizen. It's very different. Citizen is very different. Inside Star Citizen you saw what Dan Trufin and that that team has been working on like harvestable stuff. So they're getting whatever they were oranges. They were fruit of some kind. Orange peels or whatever they are. But yeah, the players got nowhere to put them right now. So it's like you'd be walking around with orange peels. So we've got to figure that out is the thing, but that'll be for next quarter. Yeah. Now that harvestable collectibles
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tech they were using fruit trees because they just needed something to test the tech, but that kind of tech can apply to surface side FPS mining. It can it can apply to all kinds of things and the thing that was going to be holding that up is player inventory because when when when you when you grab it, you don't want to be like now I've got a fruit and this is all I can do. Yeah, and I mean the challenges in it are just some of the expectation is that you know, Chris really wants physical everything, but from the art side and from just the the performance side we don't want necessarily porcupine characters we call it like if you strapped everything onto the character that you're actually carrying around is pretty nuts. What's that performance issue? Performance issue, it's a visual thing. Um then yeah, backpacks. We've got to figure that kind of stuff out. And basically you don't get to just do
00:32:06
the sort of invisible bag of holding which would be the the obvious answer to a lot of this, but it's not very um let's say physical inventory. It's not very Star Citizen. Uh kind of, yeah. It's a bit of a cheat. I mean, it is. All right, what we got Scott? We got Black Dragon Tooth. Let's talk about the Redeemer. All right, that's the end of the show. We'll see you guys next week everybody. That was that was that was pretty good. Have you guys chosen a new manufacturer and what are your thoughts on making it to Varen in nature? Now, I do want to preface this by saying we actually have nobody from the ship team here on the show with us this week. So, this is not a question that anybody here is going to have the answer. Um I do happen to know the answer, and the answer is no, that we have not chosen a new manufacturer. It's not dis- it's not been decided that it needs to change uh
00:32:53
manufacturers. It is definitely something that we are considering. We've spoken about that before. Um when it was designed when the Redeemer was built as part of the next great starship, you know, it was before a lot of the Aegis style guide had been completed. You know, we we we were still figuring out what Aegis ships looked like. So, when you when we had a our our the wonderful team, I can't remember the name. Does anybody remember which team did the Re- Redeemer? No way? Don't remember the team? Okay. Man, I rely on you guys. Uh but I I remember all the people in the team, but I don't remember the people uh the teams. Wollacy and stuff like that. Uh yeah, I remember the names. I don't remember the team name. But But uh you know, they we didn't we didn't have a lot of the Aegis style guide to give them. So, so they they they they were able to free-form kind of kind of uh develop their thing. But as we developed the Aegis style guide internally, that's drifted and and
00:33:42
separated from what the Redeemer is right now. So, the question that we have to ask ourselves and and not that ask ourselves right now because it's not currently in active development, but when that time comes is is keeping the look um important enough that we would change the manufacturer so that we can keep the look and and it may apply that to a different manufacturer or is keeping Aegis more important, and so we change the overall look to match Aegis. And uh there I've seen arguments for both halves. So, it's it's not anything that's been decided uh just yet. Uh but rest assured uh someplace like uh Inside Star Citizen or even this show is probably where you're going to find out when that time comes. Uh I want to do one more question from the chat here uh for the folks who couldn't be here with us. Um this question comes up quite a bit, Josh. Uh for character art, uh will will we ever
00:34:31
be able to tell uh, the potential health or damage to a player by looking at the state of their armor or clothing? Yeah, we've talked about this a couple times I think. We've talked about armor, we've talked about damage states. Uh, we have some technical, artistic limitations right now where ships have second they have extra UV sets where they're able to draw on other materials to show their damage states. Uh, characters don't have that right now and to do that would cost additional. So, if we want to do that, that's an additional cost. But, the first thing that we're actually looking for more to kind of talk about the whole part of the question, which is being able to actually see the status of a character or the type of a character, uh, we've been talking about the different types of suits and clothing that players would wear and basically starting to potentially theme them to be different jobs. So, rather than than everybody
00:35:20
wearing similar or wearing armor that is essentially stats, but a lot of the armor looks different, but it has very similar stats. To change the stats that fit different types. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Uh, yeah yeah, sure. Maybe a little bit. Um, there's the concept that each of the armors, you know, add certain things to uh, the the player stats. Uh, you know, good example of this is damage resistances. Um, but in the end of the design really is that we have a very similar to what the ships are. Uh, sort of this this power triangle idea. So, they do whether they do good with O2 generation, whether they do good with um, climate control, or whether they do uh, a little bit better with thrust. Um, it's really going to depend on the suit itself. Um, so not and not the suit is it will depend on the suit as a whole, but what's nice about the system
00:36:08
anyways is that we we mix and match stuff. So, basically you'll be setting up your own custom profile to a degree. Um, so if you want to do like a heavy marine core uh, coupled with like an explorer undersuit, that's totally fine. Uh, you're just going to have a a different profile than somebody that would go pure heavy marine or pure Yeah, each one of that. sets will probably represent or different types of gameplay, so I would expect at some point you'll that will happen. Like the existing armors and stuff you guys have been using might be re-themed to start fitting those types. So, oh, an explorer set is going to be more towards exploration. So, what would that be in gameplay? You know, marine and combat armor is going to be for combat, so that's going to have more damage resistance. It's going to have different types of things there. Um and I think that's important so that players can see a difference in their gameplay, but also
00:36:56
from a difference like a distance read now, which is kind of what that conversation is about. Like being able to gauge what a player like the health or status of a player from a distance. This will help the players gauge what that player is doing. Is this an explorer? Is this a medic? Is this a combat person? Is this a bounty hunter? Like what is this person from a distance? So, it's less about seeing a player and seeing how hurt they are. It's more about seeing a player and being able based on your knowledge and your familiarity with it, being able to determine that player's overall capabilities. Yeah, exactly. And there'll be there'll be some stuff as well with uh so we're we're finishing well, not finishing, but but doing a ton of work around actor status right now. So, the actor status system has not just health. It's not just about health. It's about all kinds of things. So, hunger
00:37:43
and thirst and um knockdown resistances and things like this. Um so, you'll be able to tell uh to a degree as long you know, provided through animation and things on it like what a player status is. Sort of the what his current status kind of is. Uh but yeah, whether you can tell the difference between somebody at 10% health or 30% health. No, you're going to have to use FPS scanning and all that kind of work to do that. have dirt and wear, which will affect it, but that doesn't necessarily relate to the health of a player. Like dirt or wear on an item just means that it's been used. It could just be something that they use all the time, but that's not their current status. That's the the long-term effects on an item. It's a different thing. But long story short, we would like to have the exact same ship damage on the
00:38:31
characters. I'd love to have that. Um but it is it's absolutely a problem with this UV2 channel. Um and we need to use that UV2 channel for other things on the characters. So, it's a matter of literally a data set just not existing for it. So, um We've got Swiper the Fox. With salvage on the road map for the end of the year, uh what do we expect the initial rollout to look like as far as gameplay goes? And uh what technical hurdles do we have to overcome before we can start seeing some of the systems in the reclaimer come online? Yeah, one of the big ones is inventory. So, this this physical inventory stuff that we're talking about, that's that's absolutely a big one for salvage. on top of that, probably a little bit of the player interaction when we're talking about actual uh like character salvage, if that makes sense. Um but in terms of uh any tech limitations on the ship stuff, I'm not really
00:39:20
I'm not sure of any. I'm I've seen some early designs and prototypes, but I don't know anything that's get finalized on that yet. so, I can't really say cuz it's also on a a different team. Um but I know one of the hurdles off the back cuz it's something on our vehicle team is the way that we generate these debris entities um when a ship gets destroyed. Uh right now, uh when we generate these debris entities, we kind of just take the item and move it over, and then it's magically there. It doesn't have any of the pipe connections or persistent information, and it kind of just will spawn, vanish, and then that's it. So,
00:40:08
we kind of need a more robust system to keep them there and have a way to extract items and maybe potentially the resources that's on those debris pieces. The other thing is probably going to be like our debris right now, if you blow up a ship and you look on the inside, usually this looks like an empty husk and maybe a seat's floating. Um our ships spawn object containers inside of our inside of the ship. So, those object containers just have a collection of entities, brushes, and all sorts of things. We want those things to remain when a ship turns into a debris piece, but there's some technical limitations on why they don't. Um so if you put some Big Bennys in the inside of your Cutlass and it explodes, you would kind of want those Big Bennys to still be there or
00:40:55
any items you place on a cabinet or something. So, we have to solve how we're going to keep those and how we transfer those object containers and the states that they're in to those debris pieces so that whatever mechanic you use, you can extract it outside of the debris piece or somehow melt or turn those chunks into some kind of commodity. Uh I've seen prototypes of just turning that debris piece and using the mining laser on the Prospector to extract informa- or to extract those things out, but that was just a prototype of what if we did this. It's not like the final thing of how it's going to get implemented. So, long short answer, I don't know, but I have seen interesting things to prototype it. It's kind of the same thing on the FPS mining front. We were thinking the exact
00:41:43
same thing. We just grab pieces and essentially just mining pieces of ship. And even if that's like the first version, it's a way to give like you guys a system to try out until we get something much more complicated. Big Bennys is going to have to have a lot of preservatives to survive the destruction of the Cutlass, though. Now, torpedo burrito. Well, see, I get a shield, I put it around the Big Benny and then I blow up the ship. Sweet. Now you're thinking with science. Let's move on. Scott, who you got? We've got Ghost of a Wanderer. Hello. My question has to be when can we expect to see an update to the female rig and item handling, specifically with delivery boxes? My box sits here. So I can't see anything when I try to deliver. I can't see the screen.
00:42:31
That's a metrics issue. That's funny. It's happened a lot like when I go to deliver I won't be able to do anything. I go to deliver the boxes and I can't like I can't touch it. with it? Yeah. I mean the animation is just Thank you so much for that question. Yeah. So as I think we kind of said with the the first roll out of the female player was it was definitely a work in progress. Like I think we're all pretty happy with how it came out with where she was delivered because there's a lot that was going into that from all the items, from all of the animation stuff, for all the ship stuff. There was a lot. It wasn't just a single system. So that kind of stuff that you're experiencing is unfortunately one of those we just haven't gotten to or haven't caught it yet. Obviously that's something we have caught cuz we run the missions. But it's just one of those we'll get there and it's one of those things we're
00:43:18
updating cuz it's it could be animation issue, it could be design issue, it could be a metric issue. And whenever you start getting into skeletons of different sizes you immediately run into metric issues. Just some of the things we initially encountered on the ships. But it does become issues with things like items that all players are going to handle. So the boxes are a big one of those. And then other things are like cover. Cover heights, different types of things of you know, if you set in a lot of games you set a very standard cover height where if you like walk up to something you can perfectly peek over it. But if your player is 5 or 6 inches shorter and now she she can't look over it and that becomes a problem. So just kind of as we roll the female player out further, going through some more of those bugs. They're not really bugs but
00:44:06
they're like they're things that we hadn't had to encounter yet. And so now we go back and we just basically just fix them. Yeah. So I mean whatever that animation is right now that carries the boxes for sure just a transfer of the mail. And then whether that was not checked in first person or something like that or they put it in as is. But it's not a dramatically hard hard fix. So No, it's good feedback though. Thank you for saying it. We got Scott. We got Cleric Anubis. Hey guys, my question is when are we going to be allowed to follow more than the actual current cap of players that we can follow on our friends list? Ooh, good question. Any no US two stuff here. Why is that limited? I think that goes on with just our performance on with our just how much stuff that we have in our
00:44:55
servers right now. We're at that cap as Shawn mentioned earlier where adding more is just we're already at the extreme. So if we need to get the server side persistent stuff up and running. So that will allow us to get more content inside and potentially more players inside. But before we throw in more players, we want to make sure that we have the tech and it's it's stable enough to extend it and add more players. I think you're more asking about like contact list. You're talking about the friends list and groups, right? He's talking about a list of names. Oh, the friends list. Yeah, I'm pretty sure we got enough overhead to add some more player names. I don't know. That would probably be a question that yeah, US It two would know. US two or or Ben Walk. Ben Walk and his team. Let me let me let me let me let me just
00:45:42
go ahead and say we don't have the people here for the answer for that, but I'll chase it up and I'll see if I can't get an answer to Tyler Wicken and see if he can't put it on Spectrum later. Cuz I would like to know the answer. What's the limit right now? It's 50. 50, right? Is it 50? That is a year old. I would say 250. Is it two Is it up to 250 now? I thought it was 50. I thought it was 50. You got more than 250 friends? Right. I can't even fill 50. It seems like it It may have just been an arbitrary limit that someone added. Yeah, I was going to say It could totally be. Yeah, no, they're saying it's 250 now. See All right, so wow, you're you're you're way more popular than I am, dude. accepted your request. got? Nice Big Benny shirt. Uh we got to go to like Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. That that that's bootleg Big Benny shirt
00:46:30
though. Made it last night. In all fairness, my wife did. So full credit. Legal's right outside that door, man. All right, what's your question? Thanks for this, you guys. Uh so question probably for uh for Shawn or for for Mark. Uh when we get server side object container streaming in a local region, what do you think our peak player count will be for either ship combat or a first person shooter combat? Ooh, it's a good question. It's pretty theoretical, though. I mean And remember, whatever you say right now is about to be taken as gospel. And it's the law. It is absolutely what we have to do. Whatever you say right now And you mean local like for example, like in Port Olisar, like how many people will we put in there? And is going to be gospel? 10 million. 10 million server.
00:47:20
You're welcome. See you. No. Uh it's really hard to say. I mean I I think This is going to sound like a horrible answer, but as many as we can get. Uh that's probably going to be the answer. What will probably happen is we'll have our current count, put people in it, go to Evocati, see what happens, see what happens, put more people in it, see what happens. Yeah. That's probably the realistic The reason we have Evocati, the reason we have the public test universe, it's what it's when we feel that we got the we got the overhead, we'll start cranking up. It's how we got the 50. And and we do have more sophisticated testing than just dropping it onto Evocati. We have you know, I just went over it all this morning, actually, cuz we have to increase some player counts for something else. Um the uh we have headless client testing as well as the player testing. So, the headless clients are basically just a method for me to connect
00:48:08
however many clients that I want. They don't do anything. They just get in there and like I actually I really hope they just did like random jumps or something like this. I just need data, yeah, we can connect a bunch there. So, we'll be doing profiling around it. That's the whole thing. But um server object can stream me server object container streaming by itself probably not going to make that any super dramatic super dramatically improved. What will bring that one is server meshing. That's when it gets crazy because then we can actually shunt players from, you know, server to server. So, so realistically, I can't give a number. It's really hard to say. But I hope a lot. Yeah. As many as we can. Yep. Hey JJ. Hi. Your TV's about to shut off. We have a screen so the people here can
00:48:56
watch. It's It hasn't been touched for a while so we're about to power down. Probably going to botch this, but it's Rahula Mantra. Rajar Mantra. Close. So close. Um hey guys, my question is what are the current or future plans to keep players engaged during really lengthy quantum jump? Uh oh man. ongoing conversation with him. I don't I can a little bit. Oh, I'm not good at this. You Okay. What do you think? What do you think? That is that is a topic of a lot of active discussions right now. And it's one of those things that can go one way or the other way. And if we talk about one way and we end up going the other way, we get you excited for this and we end up doing this, we're going to
00:49:43
disappoint half the people. So, like that. So, it's it's a really dangerous thing for us to get into it right this second. It goes to a lot of why when you when you watch ATV or ISC or whatever you go why aren't they talking about this? It's there's a phase that certain things get into where it can it can zig or it can zag and the zig or the zag are really big. You know, when we're talking about a degree of change, we're usually okay, you know, sharing that with you cuz if it changes it's only going to change a couple degrees here. But the stuff that we're talking about right now is a big zig or a big zag and it would be irresponsible for us to get you super excited for the zig and then we end up doing the zag, which will also be awesome, but you'll end up having gotten your heart set on the zig. I'm going to say no I'm going to I'm
00:50:29
going to put a kibosh. You do you have another Who was it? Is there something else you want to ask? Cuz that's a great question and we're close to being able to to hopefully tell you something about that. just knowing that yeah, we know we know Oh, we know. We know. It's pretty pretty crappy to have a boring game. to ask another question, tell Scott after this and we'll see if we can get you back up for another one. We got We've got Hypersonic One. Hi gentlemen, love the verse, love everything about it. My main question as a hauler and a drug smuggler, I'm wondering if it's possible Well, he is wearing a Breaking Bad t-shirt. We're in LA. um one thing I would hope for is eventually to be able to spawn ships on outposts when they get stored accidentally or on purpose and that's kind of a big issue for us right now. So.
00:51:17
We want that, too. Okay, I believe there are Gosh, I feel like at one point there was an outpost where we we could spawn vehicles. Isn't that I spawn ground vehicles on planets? Right now I think they're out, but yeah. So, it's just a question of, you know, making pads big enough and and being able to spawn your ships and not making it so it's a magic teleport. You know, you you park your ship at OSR and then you hit your ride you hit your ride to Hurston and then you spawn your ship at Hurston and now you got to Hurston, you know, danger free. Mhm. And stuff like that. So, there's a lot of considerations for something like that. But, being able to fly your ship to Hurston, land it at a pad that's in an outpost or something, and then despawn it, respawn it. That's definitely something I know that that we we want.
00:52:03
Yeah. I don't The main thing and and Jared hit it is Chris just doesn't want you to be able to teleport your ships around, which is totally reasonable because we want you again if you're going out on a mission that needs the caterpillar, you want to make sure that caterpillar is close by or you're going to have to think about something else or you've got to move the stuff around the universe. That's that's kind of the idea. Is that it doesn't just teleport from, you know, Hurston to Port Olisar to to ArcCorp. It just doesn't move like that. You've got to move that ship. That's up to you to make sure your fleet's in the right places to do the right stuff. Which I think is a cool thing. Yeah, it's a little bit of you got to take a little bit of foresight into what you're going to do. But, there's no reason why and I'm pretty sure Chris wants this too that yeah, you land at an outpost, you store that ship basically so you can then recall it back at that given outpost.
00:52:51
But, if you go away from that, you die or you go back to Port Olisar or something like that. No, no. You got to go back to that outpost, go get that ship. There's also the It just like having physicalized inventories and stuff. If it's a small little box building with a landing pad, like where would your ship conceivably go? He doesn't want it to just disappear into the ether. Maybe some slightly bigger outpost that could have that conceivably have underground garages, you know, that your ship lands and that, you know, goes down underground. That's where it stores. We always want to look for that solution that seems realistic. We've even talked about really really crazy stuff like crazy stuff like interesting things like having even putting up missions as ship alley. So, for example, I I am at this outpost and I need my caterpillar from ArcCorp, I can put up a service beacon that says, "Can somebody bring my caterpillar over to ArcCorp?" Or or whatever. And I think
00:53:40
that's kind of a nice thing and I love it. I really like these uh features uh that are or designs that we talk about that give you guys a lot of agency to create uh gameplay to a degree. Um for example, I always talk about this like uh giving you guys some like these um uh like 10 racing rods or something like that so you can set up a little race for yourself. I love the idea of player beacons so that you can set up a mission so that other people can do things with it or or or be, you know, trolled and you know, thinking that you need help where you don't need help and um we like to give that sort of agency to you guys. but yeah. If you ever see uh what's your in-game name, Sean? Criminal? If you ever see Criminal sending out a distress beacon, It's not a distress Don't trust it. I want to do another question for the
00:54:27
chat. Uh the chat's on fire for you today, Josh. Oh. hair tech. We You know, a couple couple weeks ago, a couple months ago now, we we showed a Tish Pacheco. She had this awesome set of hair. And we Can we put a hood on her? Yeah, and then she came out and she had a hoodie on. Had a hoodie on, yeah. Uh what what's the deal there? How's hair tech going? Uh hair tech is going well, but right now we're kind of in the phase where we're trying to finalize the pipeline of how we create the assets. So, we know that we can make the assets, we know that we can get them to run well and look good, uh but the speed that it takes to make them is much longer than we want. So, we're developing a bunch of tools, basically, uh that helps speed up that process. Do you do it one hair at a time? You do not have to do it one hair at a time, no. Uh we're combining a lot of really cool tools. Multiple. You can groom the hairs in
00:55:15
Maya, and then we uh export them. So, we're doing a bunch of cool stuff where we're able to style stuff uh in the game and uh not in the game, but in and then export it to stuff in the game. Um but it's just taking a little while to get the tools. True. Um cuz we want them to be really smooth. We want to make sure that there's not a lot It should be really user-friendly to make this. Typically, hair as an asset type is really difficult to make in any type of production. Uh and it can be really tedious. So, we're trying to speed that up so that we can make as many different types as we can. So, that also probably will answer some questions that you might have about why you haven't seen new hair stuff yet or why there aren't a vast styles or why there's not a big difference in styles or why there's not long hair styles or all questions that we are valid and that
00:56:04
we have as well. Um but it all basically depends on those tools being completed so that we can make the assets quickly so that we can replace and add new things. For sure. And already, uh just to give some some context to that too, the uh the the the process that we have got online is still faster than usually it would take anyways. So, so we've already got big improvements, but because of the sheer amount of content that we've got to make, it's got to be faster than ever. All right. Like I mean, just the process has to be the fastest that we've ever used um so that we can automate as much as absolutely possible for the artists. So, yeah, cuz Yeah. And we have a whole new set In other games, man, yeah, you are going down to the per hair. all new doing everything. So, yeah, it's a lot of work. Uh but we don't want to And of course, we don't want to keep using the
00:56:52
old tech. So, that's why you don't just see more hairs, you know, thrown in there uh for that. But uh tech-wise, we're pretty much done. It's just a matter of getting it fast enough so that uh you know, how many how many characters we have right now? Uh yeah, eight. Yeah, something like that. Not a not a massive team um by any stretch. So. Uh also from the subscriber live chat here, uh will we ever see a compass or a direction finder in our helmets? Uh folks want to know what just which way is up when they're walking around in way is up, right? You got zones. So, Well, I would turn on a planet And in the in the universe, where's north? Where's up? Yeah, Okay, say on a planet, can our can I planets have a magnetic north? They do. But so can we have a compass? Could you align it to the same place that it aligns? Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Sure.
00:57:42
Uh yeah, I think I think I think Colson talked about this once. Anyways, it's like it came up, yeah. Uh but they want to put it on the HUD and they're looking at that on the HUD for the ships anyways right now. Uh I don't know about the character though. Now, we we often get questions about not just compass not just the compasses, but a coordinate system for for our planets for being able to find your location on a planet or being able to modularly tell people I am at this coordinate on the on this planet and stuff like that. A GPS for these planets. And we've talked a lot about the challenges of that because we have fully 300 realized realized 360° you know, land mass and and those you have the coordinates for this planet, but then you've got the coordinates for the other planet, you've got the coordinates for the moons, and how you transition between So but to get really accurate, like we can output coordinates. We output them all the time. Like QA has to do that all the time for us right now. It's like
00:58:29
this long. That's the other thing. To get real exact in the sheer size that we have, the the precision of that number is it needs to be it's pretty high. So would be would be not awesome to read. That's all. But Uh yeah. Uh another follow-up question on the hair, Josh. Th- th- th- th- this this subscriber wants to know when we can see some additional hairstyles for female characters. Yeah, that'll all come after the tools. So once we create that, we have a whole catalog of stuff that we wanted to make. Uh even of the hairstyles that you you can use now, we actually have more that we could put in the game, but we kind of thought that we would kind of stall for a little bit so that we have time to not have to update and there's a lot of bugs that come with hair as you've probably seen where they stick through helmets or uh they they sort really oddly at
00:59:18
certain angles and to try to limit all of that uh just to put less in because we know that eventually we're going to replace it all anyways. with this all new and better stuff. So, once those tools are done, we'll we'll have more styles and better styles and just generally more hair things. And also, one other point on top of that is that you you still are making some hairs. They're just going into Squadron right now. That's the big thing. So, they're like hero characters for Squadron. So, you guys just don't see them and we don't want to we don't want to just take one of the hero characters Yeah, oh, you know. and drop it in as is. Yeah, exactly. So, it's kind of we're we're trying to be you know, smart about where we're where we're spending our time of, you know, if you have like he was saying we have only eight or so character artists, which is a big team, but it's not a massive team to support, you know, doing R&D on
01:00:08
tools, building new styles, you know, it just placing your people the best you can. When will the Big Benny get a hairstyle? That's a good question. Little hair? Yeah, I think he's had little Does it have to simulate? Curly hair. If it has to simulate, never. Curly, yeah, like that one. Uh Tyler's sending me a couple questions it seems suspicious about uh uh not Hawaiian shirts, I know that's him. But also, backwards ball caps and flip flops What? It's all Tyler. Yeah, ball caps. Tyler dresses for the job he wants. But I don't I don't think Joe exists. We can definitely do backwards ball caps, we just need to make the assets. No, Tyler wants it so I I don't Is that something that we want? No, we don't. I don't I see what they're I don't know
01:00:56
what they're saying sometimes. I think we should do so. I might ask two more questions because we are actually a little bit over time now, but I would I'd like to get through here. Some of these are pretty nice. Are We haven't had an update on scars and tattoos for a while. Tattoos, anything to anything to say? We don't have You've seen the first version of character customizer is Yeah, well, a lot of the the updates on the characters we're doing right now are mostly on the the DNA side, so like the facial side, so that's continuing to being worked on. get Yeah, to give and I talk I think I talked about it last time I was on. Like okay, we have tech tech right now for facial decals. And basically what it is is yeah, you could do a tattoo or you could do face paint kind of stuff with it. Doesn't do scars well though is the thing. So, what the tech is is the decal layer that can go on top of the problem
01:01:44
is it only really changes the diffuse and it's on purpose it takes all the skin shading and stuff from underneath. So, it looks a lot like it looks a lot like a tattoo or face paint would look. So, that would work fine for tattoos. We'd have to come up with the the item board and all the ones that we want to actually apply to you. The other problem is we don't have a really like a really good way right now to place it somewhere. And then further we'd have to persist it as well. So, we'd have to put a port, we'd have to get the offset forward facing to you guys. And then from there, but tech-wise we'd be okay. For scars is a bit of a different story because scars need a normal map. They need depth because otherwise it looks super fakey. Like somebody just like literally you know painted a scar on somebody. It would look just the same way. So, we need something that would actually make a normal or change the normal maps. And why that gets complicated is it wouldn't
01:02:31
be so bad if it was just a face normal map, but because we've got wrinkle maps and all these 44 different areas of normals that come in anyway. So, now you've got to put the scar across 44 different texture. It gets a little bit crazy, right? So, because we've done some of these um pieces of tech with that that that again make the faces look as good as they do right now. It kind of makes it a little harder to put those scars and things like that in. What I'd prefer to do quite honestly is not even have scars forward facing to you guys, but make that happen to your character throughout the course of his life his or her life. I still like the concept of them being having life changing events. Yeah, if you get gibbed on the left shoulder or something like this every time you respond you've still got a scar left actually goes back to what the question before
01:03:17
cooler approach because then it's um then it's it tells the story right over time that your character has experienced these different things. I remember what they were talking about before with the armor. I think that that I think we've actually spent more time because of the the tech limitations on the armor about the sort of the death of a spaceman. How would that happen? What could happen to your player over time? The degradation of of what they look like or scars or limbs. Like what would we do with that stuff? I think that's more So yeah, I hope I hope that's where we that's where we take it all. Not only scars, but yeah, you know, bionic limbs and things like that. If you respond, you know, the it's your 50th time responding or something like that. Guess what? Your DNA has disintegrated to such a point that you no longer have a right leg. So you get to have a bionic leg the rest of your life, you know, the
01:04:07
rest of your respond life or a scar or whatever. I just think it's really cool to have these life-changing events that really tell a story for that given character. I think it's an interesting thing. Uh one last question for anyone. Uh Uh what technical challenges need to be overcome to bring ship to station and ship to ship docking home. Ship what? Ship to station or ship to ship docking. Yeah. No, no, no, no. It's more we were just running it through in our head. I'm sure for for Mark Abent it's the same. We're both thinking to ourselves, well, there's nothing really stopping it. One thing. It's Which one? The magical stream. Which? The CR's magical stream. Oh, the the refactor bits. Have we talked about it?
01:04:57
This is where I get nervous. So CR is an amazing programmer and he has his nice little stream where he is changing a lot of the underlying ways of how we attach things and he has the support of a lot of the lead programmers and engine tech. So in this stream he's changing how we attach things to and from different things. And one of the problems we have with our current tech is if we want to attach a ship to another ship a whole slew of problems become arise because the ship has an interior physics grid with a bunch of object containers and if you attach it to another one of those, the code doesn't handle it great and it just has problems. Um so, in that stream he has provided a way to fix those
01:05:45
issues um so that I could attach a ship onto a ship and it would work as you would expect. And if we get that tech past QA and we fix some of the the um bugs that have resulted from it, it would open up the doors to give us that ability to bring a ship on a ship so that you could dock a ship directly on another ship. Um like right now, I think on the Constellation there's a fake Merlin just because we don't have the ability to attach another ship on a ship. If we get this tech, we could then do this. We could attach another ship on a ship. So, that's one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is persistence. So, if we do attach the ship on another ship, we have to have some kind of game code understand that the ship is on here so
01:06:33
that when we stream it out and stream it back in, the states and connections are established. Um then there's also the other aspect of gameplay. What does it mean to dock another ship on a ship? Do we have to um vent atmosphere in one to another? Do we have to decompress? There's another side of it that's getting handled by um I think it's David Colson. Yeah. Um so it's coming and there's pieces getting it to there. So, once all the pieces are in play, I think that's when you'll start hearing more about it. Cool stuff. uh um That's about it. I got one last question. It's actually for me. It's from the subscriber chat about uh we've been doing a lot of talk lately about a potential of revamp to the subscription program. And the question though is just when are we going to learn more about that? Um
01:07:21
we're we're in a for those of you who haven't watched the first episode of IS Inside Star Citizen 4 weeks ago now. Uh Chris and Sandi were on towards the end talking about how we want to do some some uh revamps to the subscription program. Not just uh the smaller ones like we're doing to currently changes to subscriber flair uh that you've already seen, but we want to we we want to pursue larger changes uh more in-game benefits, more tangible things um that that that present a greater value. Uh of course subscription subscription subscriptions make shows like this possible and whatever, but we want subscriptions to do a whole lot more. It It's not It's already it's you know it's the shows and it's the jump points and it's the wreck and it's the ship of the month and it's the subscriber uh uh promotions that go
01:08:09
on every month and it's early access to events and there's a there's a whole bunch of subscription perks right now. But we think that after we're in our sixth year of the subscriber program now I'm looking at you like you might know. I I think we're in about our sixth year of the subscriber program. We're ready to push it forward and see and see where we can take this program. So it's not just a hey, you know, get give us some extra capital and and and help make our our programs nicer. We want to we want to see if we can't make your your Star Citizen experience uh uh better by it as well. Um now of course you we're still we're still in that zigzag freight a phase. It's just like the quantum travel thing. If I if I talk about any of the specifics that we're considering right now and we don't go with that, then we yield disappointments and stuff. So we're not quite ready to talk about the specifics
01:08:56
just yet. But but rest assured that the discussion will happen in a form much like this. You know, you you you you what's we'll talk about the options when we're ready to to keep it to to go forward with it and uh we're very keen on the ideas or we're very keenly aware of the pay-to-win and stuff like that. So, it won't be we're we're going to try to steer clear of that stuff and whatever. So, it's uh Yeah, in case you guys missed at the beginning of the show, uh I I've recently been made a creative producer for the subscription program. So, that's why you're starting to see some changes. It's a big part of my responsibility going forward. So, so we're in tight little talks with Tony Zurovec, with uh Todd Papy, uh with our with the design team, the missions team there to find ways to to incorporate the program within the persistent universe
01:09:45
more and make it much more attractive uh for you. So, and we'll and you know, you help us, we help you. I think I think that's a fair trade-off and that's where we want to go with that. So, yeah, that's it for our subscriber event. Thank you so much, Mark, Shawn, and Josh for taking the time to be here with us on the show this week. We've never had us live studio audience before. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Okay, cool. All right, that's it. No more Jared, let's wrap it up and something I got to get back to work. Jeez, that's anticlimactic. You sign it
01:10:32
off or something at least. Uh go back to work. You've been watching Star Citizen Live. I'm Jared Huckaby and you're not. Yay. Yay. That's how it ends. It's very abrupt. It's really like Post show. Thanks for watching. For the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42, you can subscribe to our channel, or you can check out some of the other shows, and you can also head to our website at www.robertsspaceindustries.com. Thank you very much for watching.

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