Persistent Universe Panel 3 - Getting Social

30 January 201501:05:321,782 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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all right I got some uh a new person introduce here we got John ersin he's the studio director of uh Cloud operium Games Austin [Applause] this panel is going to be a bit of a hodg podge of questions uh and answers about uh game development and getting social we're going to start off with kind of the most recent plans for the uh social module release which I put up there in convenient bullet point form for you um we are hoping to get this out uh March April kind of type frame um this is a bunch of things that are
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taking already existing comp components of Star Citizen uh an arena commander and making them more social hence the social module um the big component of that is multiplayer hangers right now kind of you know the way the game works is that the hanger that you play is local to your computer and so we are making it so that it'll actually be talking to a server for matchmaking purposes and have a little bit of more persistence um which is I know jargony so I'm going to let these guys explain a bit more about what I'm talking about uh yes so basically uh when we release the social module uh as Jason said sometime in March the key features that you'll wind up seeing in there will
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be uh the chat system the ability to basically maintain a list of friends um you will wind up uh having the elevator that I mentioned earlier that you can take from your hanger and actually transition for the first time up to an actual city um but before I get get into that uh just going back to your hanger um you will see the Sim pod uh to again as mentioned earlier that will be your new access point to Arena commander and the uh upcoming firstperson uh shooter module um you will be able uh see uh you will be able to um once you go up into the city to uh Traverse to each of the shops will actually be in the game all the ones that we mentioned earlier
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with the exception of the clothing store will not be there um you'll be able to navigate through the interface inspect a lot of the uh the item inventory um you will see uh some very early NPC activity we're probably at about the uh 40 50% you know uh level in regards to the underlying technology there's still a lot of uh significant work to do um but we're starting to get the first flickering bits of you know of capability into the hands of the designers um there's still a tremendous amount of uh motion capture work obviously to do we're going to wind up having multiple sessions throughout the year and so what you'll see with the release of this social module is going to be you know NPCs wandering around doing some test animations this is uh call you know consider it a a a uh a a
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very very you know early uh version of what you're going to see in the game there won't be any of the uh evolution of characteristics that I mentioned earlier um the economic simulator won't yet be plugged into the main game um back to your hanger uh the big feature you know the big namesake feature of this whole social module is the ability to uh invite those friends uh to your hanger and what effectively winds up happening is thus you know up until this point when you ran the game you were running just on your local client machine and then when you joined uh an arena Commander you know game for example you'd actually be transitioned over to a Ser you know to one of our servers and you would you know compete play with other players um what's going to happen uh for the social module is a
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pretty significant step along the technological road towards getting you into the real persistent universe that will be another Milestone you know sometime probably around the middle of this year to where we'll try to expand you know the scope of what we're doing a little bit farther um but getting back to the ability to uh invite you know other players into your hanger um when you extend a player an invitation when you join the game you will still be client side when you invite another player to your hanger you will still be client side however something you know kind of magical happens when they actually accept accept the invitation and basically uh from within uh from within an elevator you will both be shunted over to uh a version of your hanger that will be instantiated on one
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of our servers and in that regard it becomes very very similar to what we're going to wind up doing in the near future in regards to all of the uh points of interest that you're going to be visiting in space in this case that map just happens to be a clone of your hanger um and then there is uh there's some possibility at this point that you may be able to uh that you may be able to uh transition uh up into art Corp although we're we're we're uncertain as to the level and so if we do it it will probably just be for uh demonstration purposes as opposed to what we would release uh immediately thereafter that will probably be another what Tony is saying is that originally he was just going to have multi player
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in the hanger and I said well I would like to try to have it on cop when you're wandering around as well and so he's going to try for it but he's not promising in the very first release I I made the mistake of pointing out to Chris that given the way that we were organizing and building the technology um and what would actually be available you know in that early March time frame that what you would expect to see after you invited another player to your hanger if you both got into your elevator and if you then selected our Corp would be well your friend would effectively teleport back to his hanger at which point you know Chris uh you know essentially said well wait if you can share the hanger why can't you share art Corp and that is totally exactly it's it's so yeah don't let the don't let the multiplayer hanger team let off
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the hook well it it's actually less a multiplayer in regards to the uh the backend uh server functionality that's actually coming along that's now starting to make some very significant Leaps and Bounds um the real problem is more one of optimizations and that's something to where we need to do for all of this initial MPC functionality that's coming online it needs to be optimized such that all of that logic operates client side and in the the the server is only giving the basic commands of what these characters you know need to do and then the actual execution the navigation from point A to point B the actual you know playing of the animations all of that needs to happen client side so that we can actually ramp up the number of players and so it's it's really you know getting multiple players into cities um
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given the you know given where the technology is very soon going to be um that's less of a concern versus the you know versus the couple of solid months of optimization work that needs to be done to really allow you to you know to to to scale to something to where instead of you know eight players we can actually get up to 30 40 50 60 players and at the same time provide enough NPCs because you have to take in account too uh the cities are you know relatively large you know hundreds of meters across and so in order for us to actually make them look busy we're not talking about putting 10 or 20 or 30 NPCs we're really talking about having you know hundreds and hundreds of NPCs per planet now at any given time you're probably only going to see a subset of that but it's still a lot of network traffic given you know the fact that that part of the code
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base hasn't yet been optimized about the uh contact system and uh how it relates to in-game chat uh for contacting your friends or people you've played with previously um the contact system that we're doing is uh a fairly simple list um what are our plans going forward to make it kind of a more robust friend system for for the for the short term uh what the friend system is doing is basically it's adopting your contact list from the website and that's not a bilateral type of thing in other words you can basically form a contact on the website regardless of whether that person actually accepts you and so it's not you know it's not a true friend system to where I extend you an invitation you wind up accepting it and now we're both linked to each other um that will that's
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one of those ones to where um it's it's it's possible you know it's another one to where there's a lot of you know there's a lot of focus being put onto that issue right now um my guess on that one is probably you're going to have that more robust that true friends system as opposed to the the the initial iteration this is probably going to be more along that midyear uh that midyear Milestone one one after the social module John we've got uh a platform that already has a pretty robust kind of friend system we're going to be connecting to that at some point you want to talk a little bit about that sure so in December when we launched the lobby system and we launched the contact system on the website we started uh by populating the lobby system with your we site context
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on the web there's not a great interface to be able to respond to a friend request in the affirmative without either sending an email or doing something like that so we have kind of a Twitter esque style where you follow somebody and that makes them a contact and so as we have more robust interactions in the game where it makes sense that you you initiate a friend request and then they have a you know they're connected to their client and they get a popup and they can accept it or they have a mailbox or something like that um so as this moves more into the game we can follow some of that on the web maybe we'll have a mailbox on the website as well or some other things but we're sort of starting with the simplest iteration that that gets us um the functionality it gave us the functionality we wanted
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in the lobby system in December and then we'll just continue to iterate on that as we move forward lock step with the game another thing just to add in relation to some of the stuff we've been talking to is basically the fact that uh start you know starting uh starting with the social module will have you know the initial phases of persistence and this is another one to where each iteration of you know of the persistent you know Universe you know module throughout this year will wind up adding more and more functionality and what we're aiming to do is basically uh give you the capability to pull over everything that you've purchased on the website and actually store it you know for the first time over in our persistent Universe database now since the game hasn't actually launched we don't really want that Hornet that you pulled down from the website that you will eventually be
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able to take out into space before we actually officially launch you know um whatever you want to call you know the the first you know full iteration of the persistent you know Universe module um we don't want that ship to basically be able to you know be blown apart and you lose it given you know the fact that you know some aspects of the game will still be you know unbalanced Etc and so what we're going to wind up doing is adopting a middle ground that will probably persist for the next you know uh eight or N9 or 10 months and what it will effectively do is pull down everything that you purchased from the website stored in the persistent Universe database and you will be able to log off log back on and whatever changes you've made to your ship um whatever damage you've incurred um in the relatively near future that should start to persist until you wind up uh actively you know uh telling the
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system you know probably via pressing a but either on the website or within the game to reset your status at which point it will go ahead and clear out whatever you know the current you know version of your inventory is and reping all of that stuff down and so what you're going to have for the short term is kind of The Best of Both Worlds to where you'll have all of your equipment you can go out lose it get it broken Etc and then start right back over and and this will be wind up being invaluable as we go through you know uh testing you know through this year and we've actually got things like mission status uh ship damage levels uh inventory loadouts all sorts of things that we actually need will need to do a lot of testing on so these are all basic building blocks of the game that's exactly at this point we're talking about persistence and data architecture and server configuration and writing of
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servers this is all stuff that we have to build to put various aspects of the game that in some cases already work and in some cases have to be built from scratch uh together to be a big consistent and persistent Universe yeah the the social module will be the uh you know the the first time um the first time that the game will actually have some sense of uh true persistence that doesn't rely upon the website with the contact system that we're going to have um we're going to have a little bit of presence info I expect at some point where uh if John and I have played before and I've made JN a contact via whatever method uh and I see him pop online um what could I expect to see like is he online or is he not online uh would I
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see what system he's in yeah eventually you'd be able to see what system Etc it's like we should we are actually aiming to try and get that into the social module so that when one of your contacts goes online then you would actually be notified um in regards to what system since obviously you can't actually leave you know uh since you can't leave right since since you can't yet leave the planet you can pretty much rest assur that your friend is on St yeah I've got a question though that I'm sure somebody else is going to want to ask so I'm just going to head it off at the pass which is um if John popped online and he's uh on Tera which is light years away from our Corp and I'm on our Corp am I am I going to see that he's on Tera or do I have to use some kind of out of game method of knowing where he's at so we can hook up uh you know I I I think you'd wind up knowing
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that he's immediately there it's one of those things I mean the way that we're doing this is that there's no way you're going to prevent like fictionally you shouldn't be able to know him but everybody's going to otherwise everyone's going to have TeamSpeak or Skype or something so we're essentially treating sort of like organizational chat as being the one magic FTL thing that happens that but what that but the thing that you won't have happen is you like the accepting the missions or delivering the goods are all the things that require you to interact with the universe will still be bound by the rules of the universe yeah we're doing this for the missions won't propagate like if there's a mission in um you know the I guess the Stanton system and I'm in Terror I if I go to the tdd in Terror I may not even see what's available in Stanton now my now Tony could tell me
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hey there's some cool missions in Stanton get your ass over here and okay that's FTL but I got to fly over there I got to do the jump points and then maybe they may or may not be there until I get to stanta so you know in terms of transfer of goods or items they will all have to happen inside the universe so like if you going to sell someone a ship and you're in Terror and I'm in Stanton and I sell you the ship we we agree on it we have to I have to get to where you are to close that transaction um and uh you know bring the ship to you so all the things that are mechanically inside the game that we can enforce but the actual communication between friends between organizations needs to I mean just essentially it wouldn't work for us to sort of force it to have the same sort of time delay communication that would be really in
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the the fiction so um we mentioned here shopping uh browsing different shops on our Corp um it kind of goes to figure that if we don't have persistence um on the planet side that means we probably also don't have persistence for something like player inventory storage yet because we don't um absolutely and that's why I mentioned so you will be able to browse you'll be able to get a sense of how the interface is going to work how you'll you'll actually see you know rifles you know an ammunition AR raid within you know uh within uh you know the personal weapon shop and stuff um but you won't actually be able to you know buy them store them in your inventory you know equip them anything like that yep yes yeah oh yeah no never you'll never be
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able to it's just for show no I mean why think it' be important to point out that that's like sort of the next Milestone so we're kind of planning to have sort of three major persistent Universe milestones this year first one's the one we're talking about where it's the social sort of module where basically you're there in your hanger you can have some friends visit you you and some friends may or may not be able to wander around AR cor you can at least go out to AR cor walk around get a sense of a Planet Side location get a sense of kind of what the shops would feel like uh and what the environment ultimately is going to feel like and then the um next stage of the persistent Universe one of the parts of it would be you know more of the persistence being able to buy and sell um and and exit the planet and un leave the planet um exit the planet ideally you know do Quantum travel
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possibly I mean obviously we're not going to have you know finished effects and stuff for the Wormhole travel um but there's very little you know once we've got those you know pieces of the puzzle in place uh nothing prevents us you know other than you know other than the lack of Art in terms of you know the final quality art from allowing you to transition to other systems I mean I think our goal right is that we're going to have the social module now sort of middle of the year is is going to be the next stage which lets you back and sell and you can leave and perhaps fly to another planet and land on another planet and then what we'll do at the end of the year is sort of like a mini version of the pisant universe with you know not all the functionality we're going to have in the pant universe and certainly not all the content but I think we're talking about potentially what five systems L uh yeah well we we've we've been aiming for five but we were really
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talking about more in the way of unique art sets and stuff and so once we actually are talking about you know reutilizing taking advantage of something of this you know modular you know uh you know functionality um we've recently you know started to expand our Horizon and so it's possible we could be in the you know call it the you know mid to high single digits yeah one of the reasons why we're up here and using slides and bullet points and words is that uh many of these things are systems that we're still building so these are tools that we're building to uh to to store uh and manipulate the data that we need to make a system and to make an inventory um and so you're seeing some stuff that is very early as we mentioned um earlier in the in the and and and another reason just in regards to you know the um being you know call it somewhat conservative in regards to how
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many plants you know you're aiming to do is we're actually aiming to do one of you know probably one if not the most visually ambitious which is Terra Prime which is just you know mind mind-blowingly gorgeous but it's also a tremendous amount of work um that was one to where uh Chris Chris took a look at it you relatively recently and basically it got bigger shocka I know do you see a pattern here don't show things to Chris yeah there's a problem with and it's actually it's it's it's it's an interesting one because um Skelton and myself and the team at behavior and you know uh some of the other guys that are you know involved with that stuff um we were basically doing teror Prime but we
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were trying to keep the Su total effort I mean all of you know all of these art sets you know all of these you know first stage cities basically like right now uh Terra Prime uses what we're calling like this super you know super modernism you know architecture um building the first of those takes you know quite a bit of time utilizing you know all of these pieces and then adding you know what Skelton referred to earlier is the you know the hero Arts you know pieces to basically customize an area that's considerably quicker and so what wound up happening in uh in terms of Tera Prime is we were aiming to keep it within the same ballpark in terms of overall implementation you know difficulty effort Etc as you know some of these other you know planets uh you know like uh like art cor at you know Stanton or you know Nicks um and
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basically you know Chris Chris just pointed out how this you know how this was one of the largest you know if not the largest you know uh trading centers you know uh areas you know within within the within the known Galaxy and therefore it made no sense for it to adhere to those same limitations and so what we're really doing now is basically uh inv I mean to to clarify it was always the city size is was always huge and it's massive I mean it is like massive it's like seeing a huge metropolis and it's like really awesome and very um cooly detailed and at some point in the future I think we'll probably share some of that that the issue was more about what you did on the planet side so um uh to try and scope some stuff down Tony and Mark were trying to confine the action to
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basically Terra Tower and and and for me I sort of felt like I wanted to have more of a texture at the beginning so we definitely want like the feeling of the world's busiest space port there um and then you probably want to have you know you know another area which is sort of the rundown in the it's called the blocks which is sort of the rundown sort of uh um you know sort of more more dangerous area of of of Terror and so then you would sort of land and then you could go to terwer which is sort of like your sightseeing you know the beautiful um you know edifice with all the high-end shops and then you could you know be around the the uh the space port where you would sort of do sort of more ship related things um that would also be appropriate for there because you know before it was trying to like put um some related stuff inside terara it just sort of felt weird we were basically trying to squeeze it you know
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squeeze you know um what is now by you know by pretty much you know uh but we're what's what's happened is teror prime has gone from something to where we were trying to take a large concept and put it into I wouldn't say small but you know a a practical package um so that it wouldn't you know wreak too much Havoc you know in regards to the schedule um and basically it's now become more epic um it and this is not something that's going to be done as you know Chris pointed out before this is not something that's going to be done on every planet it's just that Terra Prime is a special case and as a special case it makes sense to put in uh the amount of effort that it takes to do it right according to you know all of the original you know concept uh and you know and uh and Game
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background so Star Citizen has been uh in kind of development for a little over what two years now um how many people are working on it worldwide at this point do we know thate C uh uh I there's a quiz have the most recent numbers I mean I think there somewhere between 300 and 320 yeah it's a big group how many do we have 180 in house and then how many do we have in Austin John alone about 60 about 60 in Austin yeah it's uh starting to get a pretty good sized group and we need more hey speaking of more where's sea Tracy today they're having a baby a plus one yeah Sean's having a plus one his wife I think is probably having their baby as we speak y so congratulations to
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Sean speaking of growing the team Chris one question that we got was um how much has changed about your plans since you first started building this game smaller yeah I've scoped it down um uh uh well I mean I think I I mean well this I mean obviously the scope's gotten bigger because the funding's gotten bigger and so like essentially when I first started it out it was you know uh it was going to start off with a much more limited set of you know like for instance a great example is the uh uh you know being down on the planet side so the original version of what I was thinking of doing was you know the high fidelity out in space and it would be sort of High Fidelity models down on the planet side but we wouldn't be
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walking around it in first person originally I was thinking it would be more like privateer or freelancer where you would have some angles and you'd have a character to and then then um Hannis uh who you know he let now works full-time for us he's great so Hannis Appel he's in Germany he's uh he's the guy that did the original Squadron 42 um you know five minute trailer when I launched the um um the the crowdfunding campaign and and uh at the time he was working at krych as their sort of director of cinematics but he was a huge Wing Commander fan and so he sort of asked if he could help help me out on what I was doing and I was quite happy to have him help me out um and um so he he did a little preview that he sort of did thing in first I said I think we could do first first person but then I was thinking well you know we'll make it
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very L you know like okay just a location or two and and uh you know over the time as we've gotten more funding as you get deeper into what you're we're using cry engine for we're like well we got a full firstperson engine and we already have items and all the handling and the combat here and so we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot not to use it because it's already part of the package and yes there is some codee and support for it but you already have it I mean as you can kind of already see right now if you want to you fly an arena Commander you can get out of your jump out of your ship and you can be shooting the gun around and you could I don't know if anyone's done it yet but I'm pretty sure two people could eject out of the ship get to the platform and have a gunfight with each other and that's and that and that is literally because it's all inside one first person engine so uh so so so the level of sort of scope that would happen on the planet side is definitely increased in terms of
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like you know what Tony's been talking about like having the action because it's sort of sort of take a look at it and go yeah you can really sort of make this game step up to the next level and and uh you know a lot of the you know you guys haven't seen this because it's Squadron 42 stuff and because that's a very specific story we we tend to you know we don't want to really sort of share it up front the same way as we share everything in theist Universe because it would spoil the story but you know just seeing we have these things that are called gray boxes uh where we where they where the designers run the level or the mission or the you know the chapter or whatever we're doing on 42 and just the fluidity of like being in your ship flying a mission being called for a distress call landing on a space station getting out of your ship you know getting involved in combat running through going inside
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as this platform as this you know space base blows up having to run for another ship get in that and flat it off is like something that you know I've never seen or experien to that level of sort of Freedom or or detail before and you can and this is now this is with without the finished you know assets and everything else you can sort of see how that's going to work and so looking at that kind of stuff we've been saying well we really need to make sure that we have more of that and you know there's been I think you know you guys probably know there's been some really great you know fan uh stuff that people have done where it's like oh look I've eved out of my Aurora into a Rec ship to get some uh you know to collect an item and and those kind of things and and those are all things that you know looking at it as we were building it we like okay we've got the systems to do this we've got the systems to do this we now have the backing we now have the re resources so let's you know really try to make the
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world sort of feel more alive and uh you know and it's not just you know it's like Tony was saying it's not just the fact that when you're in space you have some sense of trepidation you know maybe down on the planet you know you're going around and you go down dark alleyway and you could get jumped or if you're in a particularly Lawless Planet you know maybe someone tries to rip you off when you're unloading your cargo it just adds to a whole neev level of immersion to the world so I would say you know that kind of stuff is sort of obviously definitely increased I mean we've obviously added a lot of function I mean you know it's you know we have all these stretch goals so that's a lot of stuff that we weren't planning to do originally um that now have been sort of added and it doesn't you know and I I would like to clarify because there's always this sense of oh well you've done all these things and it keeps feature creeping you'll never deliver the game but you know the concept with what we're doing and this is the other thing that I
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think has changed about when I first started building the game is that we have a very fluid um development methodology which is we're basically rolling out you know right here I mean we're basically you know we you we're pulling up our skirt and showing everything in what we're doing here on the social module in a way that in a way that you in a way that I would would wouldn't necessarily uh you know I I you know I prefer I still like to share everything I just like to maybe have it a bit more polished before I share it um but but the idea is not under my SK anyway uh uh but best best on Tandra ever yeah there's plenty of there's plenty of jokes about polishing things on the skirts yeah um but uh but no anyway so the the the the idea is that we roll out
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the pieces of the game as it makes um sense as we're building them which is an incredibly different development methodology than pretty much any other game um follows there are some games that have done sort of early alphas and then they build functionality up like Day Z Minecraft and so there is a little bit of similarity there but I don't believe it's ever been to the level that we've done where we're literally taking uh you know early components before you would even have something that would be sort of even close to what you would call sort of the holistic Alpha uh and share it and so you know that's why when we say okay we're going to do this extra feature we do this extra feature it doesn't mean that you don't get to play the game until that feature is done it basically means no this is kind of one of the things that's on our development list and we will get to so you know I don't know I've always wanted to have
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pets in a game well yeah you'll get them you're just not going to get them maybe um now you probably won't get him next year but it's definitely going to be on it'll be on the list and so that's kind of you know the way I sort of view is is we sort of share the development as we go uh and everybody gets to experience it and they also get to give their feedback they get to stress test it um and I think it's just going to make a much better game I mean I can already tell you know on our early stuff I mean I think that people have you know first played Arena kind of v v0.8 and then to 0.9 to 9.2 to 1.0 you can sort of see where the progress is has happened and we still got loads of things to change and polish and adjust and but that's going to happen on everything I mean that's going to start happening on the sort of Planet Side stuff so the very first version of the Planet Side stuff's going to be I'm sure rough and there'll be lots of things that we want to work out user interface wise uh performance
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wise um you know functionality wise saying we'll be on the FPS but the thing is that as we're playing this as we're going along and sharing it I think we're getting to really sort of craft something um with a level of iteration that you know you normally don't get when you develop and I would say that that for me is the biggest you know the biggest change because when I started this I was thinking of a you know I I wanted to get to where we're going to end up now but I didn't think we would ever be able to do it um you know from the start or plan to do it from the start I sort of felt like okay I'm going to have to have something no I mean I guess it would be more equivalent to you know like if you know I'm sure quite a few you guys have Elite right so Elites sort of got a more basic feature share right now and they plan to do a lot of extra things like okay we'll the walking around in first person and be down on
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planets but you know they have a more limited set which is now out and that's the game that they've released right well our system ours just different because we basically got so much funding at the beginning as we can say okay well no this was you know really part of the vision and and and build towards it from the very beginning and so that's uh so I say that's kind of the the the biggest difference is just sort of remodulating development to figuring out how to do open development and sharing the development with everybody that's supported the game uh while we're also doing R&D on the new stuff and you know keeping all you guys interested and entertained whether it's by you know playing parts of the game or you know hearing about the stuff that were coming up or giving you an opportunity to comment on some of the ideas that we have in terms of how you know we're
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going to handle cargo or how we're going to handle trading or whatever it would be um so I I would say the openness of the development um the the level of interaction I wanted the game to be sort of very Community focused from the beginning I mean that's why we launched a a community site before we even announced the game uh and that was one of the goals from the whole website stuff from the very beginning but not but not to the level that we're doing it now I mean so when we got into the campaign and as I as it started to say it say no we should we need to keep this up we need to keep adding to this and I think um that's been the biggest change and to be honest with you it's also the thing that uh is probably the most inv ating about doing it because you know when you work on a really big huge project um you know like I could say freelancer was a very big project
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and that took a long long time and I wasn't even there at the very end when it came out um that it can get it can get tough when it's just you and your team and that's all you're working on but having having like you know all you guys out there um be part of it and the energy and the excitement and the ideas I think it sort of invigorates uh the teams that we have working on on the game and and uh I you know I would not I would not undersell the power of that I would not say that uh you know I mean I I think that has a lot of our developers get up in the morning and they want to do great work because they know there's a lot of people out there that are every single day excited by you know what's been made what they're hearing about and uh you know I think that that that's going to end up spurring on a lot of uh you know our developers to probably do
00:34:53
things that you would think I mean still going to take a lot of time but you know considering the feature set that we're doing and when I think we'll be able to deliver the features I would say that we will be um doing a pretty good job in respect to maybe some other really big projects that went off and work for five or six years but you know they were hidden away from what was happening and I think it's because of that interaction that we have on the community so yeah as a as a game developer and as a gamer I'm very excited about this project because of those things you just mentioned um I worked on another project before this one that was one of those projects that we worked on it for a good solid three and a half four years before we showed anything at all and we're at a point now where we uh you know like I said we're a couple years in development where we're very Alpha and showing people things
00:35:42
that we just finished this week which is really exciting and definitely is inspirational um I got to also admit that like I'm not a day one backer it wasn't until you started talking about that concept of uh getting off your ship and walking around and blowing stuff up and getting back on your ship like that is what geeked me enough to give you some money and then eventually join your team right right um we just assimilate the entire world yeah first of all but thanks to you guys from day one like you're paying my paycheck I appreciate it um so most of the work that we do in Austin uh honestly isn't very player
00:36:31
facing at the moment like it's uh stuff that's behind the scenes it's stuff that is glue to take other pieces and putting them together and putting them out um John you want to talk a little bit more about um kind of the role of the live operations group and the development in QA that you uh that you work with absolutely so in addition to Tony's team in Austin that's building the persistent universe and a lot of other related components we have the live operations and devops team in Austin and this is the team that really takes the code that's been checked into the source control repository and turns it into a build and publishes it out to the server and makees sure that that is all efficient today right as we did this morning right I left Austin right as we P published
00:37:20
everything to the public and drove here to be with you this afternoon so um that process happens um continuously uh we have about nine different development channels for various purposes of you know art channels and the latest greatest code in the main Channel that's usually broken and needs fixing and then we have the the different QA channels and the live channels and so the devops team is continuously managing that making builds putting those builds into different environments so that QA can test them um as you know in December we launched the first iteration of our public test Universe system what that basically means is that we can take a build that is a candidate for live and we can spin
00:38:07
up a copy of the live universe in our uh server hosted environment and then let you copy your account over to that server set and then you can play the game before we actually publish it to the live servers some of that functionality will also feed some of the stuff Tony was talking about in the assistant Universe in its early phase the idea of being able to copy your inventory from places to places and overwrite your character data so that's an example of a building block that that team has been working on that'll be used as we continue the development process um there's a lot of real geeky technology that goes into building all of these servers and making sure that all or magic as we were talking about earlier it's part Alchemy
00:38:55
yeah but um you know even today with Arena Commander which is just a you know just like one slice of the experience we're running hundreds of servers on the back end to keep up with uh your login passing you off to the different uh Mission type servers and um game modes and uh load balancers and web nodes and account databases and um it's all really fascinating to me but it's not necessarily great um conversation starter um material but it's uh that's what our liveops team is working on in Austin and um as we cross from a period where most of the game play has been played on your computer to a to a world
00:39:43
where uh the the most important game rules are managed on the server and your computer is graphically displaying that to you then the role of the liveops team is become is quickly becoming more and more um complicated because managing all of the interactions in a live persistent server environment is a is a pretty big job so in addition to the team that we have in Austin we have um other people in other Studios that work on different pieces of that and um we also have some very close partners with um some technology vendors that we're working on because an important piece of our plan is to present the game to uh to the world as one sort of cohesive game around the world we don't really plan to
00:40:32
have 35 different server instances that are all running their own economy server and all that stuff so part of what the liveops team is working on is building out the type of very modern bleeding edge technology infrastructure to support that kind of concept so there's some pretty cool stuff in the works but it's very early John I could listen to you talk about this all day i' I'd love to talk about it all day I don't think we have enough time though and I don't know if everybody out here is as big a geek as I am about game development I know we're all excited about gaming but uh I think it's about time when we start taking more audience Q&A unless there's something you guys wanted to mention specifically yeah no I'm down for's for more QA some QA do some Q&A all right
00:41:20
can we get some house lights up a little bit so I can see who's up did you mention while we've got yeah go ahead mention people yeah that's actually what I was going to do right now so while people are lining up uh I can see you got a line started over there and nothing over I got one over here okay while we're lining up um the next panel we're going to do is the game design idea Forum um one of the things we would like you to do is uh you got a nice pad of paper and a pen when you came in uh you want to write down your pitch and leave that with uh I said the door I don't want the whole pad just whatever you wrote for your pitch and uh Ben and the community theme are going to kind of review those and we'll talk about them later in a future uh web update and Ben was also saying anybody that didn't get
00:42:09
to ask their question could write it out and they could use those in a for the chairman yeah and also anybody who doesn't get their questions asked right now or in the game ideas Forum uh you write that on the paper uh give that to us on the way out and we'll use that for a future like 10 for the chairman uh as happens all righty so uh let's start over there Hi um hi I'm wondering about the player inventory and how that's going to work when we go into the Pu uh if somebody's shot will a another player be able to come by and take pretty much everything that they have or is it going to be more like a wow system where you get a random roll and you get a random item if for looting purposes and then how do you actually carry that around
00:42:58
and out okay let me repeat that question for the audience and for Tony um Tony was asking about the player inventory system and if there's any way in a PVP situation where one player kills another player can they loot the body can we carry that around okay I'll take it either one you no I mean basically if you um you know kill another person and they've got items on them you can loot the body so looting is already a mechanic that we have in in it so the I mean the only thing that will happen is if you have uh if like people are fighting in space and you know cargo or items are dumped out in space um the items will only persist as long as that instance is up so as long as there's people flying around in that instance and the items will be there but the moment the instance sort
00:43:45
of get basically get shut down so you couldn't essentially dump some cargo out an asteroid field um and come back to it a week later that that that level of persistence isn't in there um now if there was an asteroid base then that the asteroid base itself would have persistence but um but generally if if you were involved in space combat or ground combat and you shoot so on the items they have on them or the items they have on the ship would be things that you could collect loot them now yeah thanks good question you up hello hello all right um I had a question about the uh as far as servers and instances go um I'm not sure how much y'all have worked out about all that but um will you be able to manly manually change instances and as far as servers is there going to be one Global server or how does the localization go
00:44:34
for that so you you will not be able to change instances the in the instancing all happens in the background so basically from your standpoint in playing the game you know in most cases you should not be able to you will not be able to tell what server's taking care of you so as you fly across the star system and you go from area to area you're actually in the background will be handed off between server to server to server it's how we manage to have all the players in one universe so you can think of like each uh in each game server can basically take care of you know whatever it would be 40 or 50 people and as long as there's not more than 40 or 50 people in that close proximity that game server is taken care of and as soon as you get more than that it would be split off to another instance so you you don't know what instance you're in uh the only way you
00:45:22
probably would know is if like you and 100 or 200 of your friends all decided to to come to the same location like orbit around sa and of course you wouldn't see all 200 of them um and as far as the infrastructure happens it's what John was talking about which is you know we're working you know we've I think we've mentioned before that we're doing a lot of work with um Google and Google Compu and one of the reasons why we're doing it is because they have a uh infrastructure between their data centers that does not go through the internet and it's very very very fast so the idea that the the you know what we work what we working on is that like the game servers and the game so we've got a lot of different servers but the game server is the real time server that takes care of um the simulation so right now when you play Arena Commander you
00:46:09
are playing on a game server and then there's a bunch of servers that go above that like the system server or the economy or a bunch of services that we have that are layer on top of that uh matchmaking server and stuff like that but uh the game servers themselves the concept would be they would be able to SP span up span down around the world at different data centers if we're inside the Google ecosystem uh and then they would all Co they would all communicate back to sort of the the bigger Services um which would probably just be located at one location and because we're inside uh the Google infrastructure we don't have to worry about you know the essentially the Ping times and how long it's going to take to go through the internet and it's much more reliable on datawise so the whole idea is if you play it as a player you should it should feel like you're in one seamless
00:46:58
universe and your performance in general um should be fairly decent as long as you're you know close to one of the geographic areas that we have a data that way there's a Google data center well Ju Just just add one thing uh that you know uh that didn't get mentioned there um the primary reason why you would typically want to physically go to a particular server is because you've got a friend or a party member whatever and you want to basically play the game with them and so there is a bit of logic you know behind the scenes that will automatically try to place you into the same server instance uh with you know it'll go through this whole cycle of you know is it you know is is it a friend is it a party member uh skill levels will be considered uh what you're actually doing um like I mentioned earlier what
00:47:47
your what Your loc what your location is so generally it will go okay well you you two are in North America therefore you can be together your location or earlier I mentioned you know a mercenary responding to a distress call from a freighter Captain that's under attack by a pirate and so what he would be able to see is basically all of the activity within that solar system but when he actually selects that event as being what he wants to respond to and engages his Quantum engines to go there that is basically a key that's going to shunt him into that same server instance as that you know Freight or a captain that's being assaulted by that you know by you know by those pirates yeah we've all played that game where you want to play with your friend and you can't because The Shard or the instance or whatever put somewhere else we're working on that even if you were in Australia and you wanted to play with
00:48:35
your friend in the UK you can specifically say I want to play with my friend and you know at that point you're basically you're overriding you're overriding the matchmaking priority that says well the Ping's important well at that point the Ping would be less important than who you want to play with generally it should be fair I mean you should not feel the matchmate like you shouldn't realize that this is happening unless you actually got coordinated with a bunch of people it should feel totally seamless and and just to put it in terms of priorities so party system will override everything and so if you're actually synced up with five other players and you basically go and land at Art Corp then when your other friends five minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes later land they will assuming there's free space on that server um and it will tend to you know reserve a few slots you know for you know friends and stuff that you
00:49:21
know follow uh you know follow right behind other players um you will be thrown on to that same instance automatically the whole idea is basically to give you the effect that you want without forcing you to do any sort of you know manual manipulation yeah Tony I think you just follow answered his follow-up question too which is excellent so you got a twof first sir next over there all right so when you're exploring you've you know charted a wormhole or such once you get out and you're ready to sell the data can you edit the data and then say anybody who bought that data for the jump point be exiting maybe earlier where you want them to perhaps into the arms of a waiting Fleet you are you are devious sir I don't I I I don't think we're uh I
00:50:12
mean at the moment I don't think we have the conception of you being able to um uh basically sabotage jump Point data uh I mean it's a nice idea but you know it's at the moment we've got a lot of other things to do I mean I think the idea would be chart it um you know it's basically tagged inside your nav computer as you charted it and now you have the ability to uh sell or trade it so you can share it with your friends or you could sell it to a service that will pay you money for it yeah and conceptually the mechanic will wind up working just like a whole lot of other stuff it's like if you chart a if you chart a wormhole if you discover the location of a comet if you discover the location of an asteroid field then assuming you're working on your own and not for an organization to where the Discover of that is automatically shunted to that group then that's
00:50:59
private information that information has value you can go to someone that will actually buy that and you know based upon what that information is they'll offer you you know a price commensurate with the value and so in that regard a wormhole to a wormhole to a system that's actually got you know uh you know that's a shortcut that basically you know makes it much easier for freighter to get you know uh you know uh you know from point A to Point Z without having to take the secutus route there's more value on that than you know than potentially some of these other paths I think the point here is that real actual data has value yes just a thought all right uh next over here yes we've been talking a lot about background processes and data today um so one of the
00:51:47
questions that I had was specifically dealing with how that data is going to be made available to players either through the game interface itself or or through API support where we can mine information from third party programs if that's on the thing such as uh General character metrics uh kill data organizational statistics or even things such as short and long-term statistical trends of the economic data that's being run in that simulation will that be available to us as players either ingame or out of game or how do you plan to address that did you guys catch all of that just want to make sure there's that's a yes pieces of that I can sort of take that at first at least there's two pieces of that when I listen to your question there's some information that's
00:52:34
already available from the website today and uh a number of industrious fans have figured out how to access an API that's already exists to pull a lot of the organization data and do some very interesting data analysis and data mining that I like to read on um various Reddit posts and Forum posts myself um so we'll continue to expose more and more of that API as as it exists on the platform so that would also apply to leaderboard information your citizen dossier and the information that's available on there which um we'll continue to push more data on to your citizen dosier as we expand further information about kill data and pilot data and pilot skill and preferred ship and a bunch of stuff that's already
00:53:21
available in the leaderboards as far as what you do in the game uh that's probably maybe a question for Tony and Chris is like from a design standpoint how much of that would you want to make available in an API because from a technical perspective it's not that hard we already have an API we can deliver it it's kind of a design question guess I mean it's there's a certain level where you would be uh like I definitely think that we will be uh reporting um elements of the economy just like if you read a paper you can see all the stock markets doing or you know what the forecasting economic growth is going to be so I think that we would probably have some of that that may even be on the you know you have a live Ticker on the website or something so that level of stuff we may do and if
00:54:09
that's happening I mean basically I would say the rule of thumb would be the sort of stuff that we would expose on the website or we would expose to a second party like like we've talked about having a um you know you know sort of like an iPad app or something like a tablet app where you could go and you know check your character out what his inventory and maybe look at what missions are available out there and it you know basically do some you know busy work that wouldn't be flying around in space that would require you know the power of a a full PC but you know like organizing you know a mission that you and your friends are going to do or all those kind of things we would probably expose to you know tablet app or the website and those things would be I would think available via an API I just don't think we would have like the full systems exposed at all because that would um you know potentially be very problematic um
00:54:58
for someone looking for an exploit something historically we've been pretty open with our data but yeah I don't know if we're going to be that open I don't know if that don't if answered your question but oh yes yes it was mainly about just exactly like how much you wanted to make available outside of the game I understand like if we go to a trade Hub or so on and so forth that it'll seem like a living stock market to where we can see a lot of that information but what would the support for like organizations for third party applications outside of the game yeah I I definitely think you'll be able to do like inventory man management Mission management um you'll probably be able to see sort of big economic Trends uh and then the stuff that John talked about which is sort of organizational structures leaderboards all that that will all be exposed um because that'll
00:55:46
be sort of our public Bas I would say all of the macro data from the economic simulator in regards to unemployment rates of planets population sizes commodity price cuz essentially that's going to get fed to the star map on the website so the same stuff so I mean the rule of expose our the stuff that we're feeding to the sort of like whatever you want to call it a do we call it a third party app it's not really a third party app we're but what I'm just talking about that we're like we're we're putting towards the website the platform on the website we're putting towards a uh you know a tablet app or something that someone could just you know at work check on check on what's happening with their organization that all that stuff will be exposed give a fair amount of input and control over that long term you guys are up that's right okay so when persistent Universe does come out would be able to leave our ship let's
00:56:34
say lock it and join our friendship and leave what our ship despawn or in cases if our ship gets destroyed would we be able to come back with a salvager or hire a salvager assuming it's not destroyed completely to salvage parts off of The Vessel are you talking about leaving your ship in space or leaving in space uh that's a good question I mean I would we've had a few discussions about that yeah I mean you know I mean you know my uh like we've had the discussion that if you do that then your ship just ends back in your hanger and then there's a discussion is that an exploit because you're like far away from your hanger and this is just a quick way for you to get it walked back to your to your ship or does the ship like just take over autopilot and fly itself back um so I'm not 100% uh like we haven't
00:57:25
like we're going to have the ability for you to save in space anyway that's the whole idea of sleeping in the beds or whatever so you know I don't know maybe the ship um you know would be back we would have it persist in that position not necessarily for other people on the instance but if you walk back into like you go to where you left your ship for the player on someone else's ship or some secondary ship then we would know to create your ship which is what I would probably think the answer is cuz we need a situation when you say you can save midp space anyway yeah no I i' agree with that um there there are in regards to player death and given the vast you know travel distances involved in stuff it's like there are certainly some design details yet to be worked out um we don't really need to go into you know a lot of those well I guess I'll would just say because like when you save and you're in space you know you log off the ship's there but it's not
00:58:13
like some someone can't just come by and have your ship like your ship isn't actually persisting for anyone else but you do you uh no and so no one can steal it while you're sleeping basically as uh no as long as you do a proper log off with your ship at a given location it's like that should be absolutely fine for you to basically you know come back resume from right there um yeah it's it's just like you know on a lot of MMOs to where you're basically going to retire your character but you want to make sure that you're not in the middle of you know right in the middle of combat and you basically log off and then you can you now of course if you leave your ship in the middle of combat someone else is around then they can steal your ship but as long as no one else is around and it logs off like it's gone like you've gone to sleep and saved then it will not be available for people and it will only come back in when you come back it needs to be a process to ensure that it's that you're not just taking
00:59:01
advantage of I'm losing this battle so I'm logging off and I know that my ship you know will be perfectly safe we've got enough time for uh one more question or um another couple of minutes of talking about Edge conditions on this particular no let's not do that oh you just saw you just saw Tony and me like Freestyle uh The Edge consition design right there yep thankfully we recorded it so we can use it later and Jake task up what again um so we talked about the uh social module as far as being able to tag friends or later on the handshake which will tie into uh I suspect like a person of interest which ties into the instancing problem but what about enemies how I guess the question is say for example I don't like uh Mr bunny
00:59:52
ears over there for reasons what should I expect the game to tell me about my enemies as far as being online or any location and stuff like that well I'm not sure I'm not so sure about um I mean definitely when you go into instances it's not just like you only show up with your friends I mean basically the part of the rule set is like you know who are your who are your antagonists you know who are your friends and those and there's actually would be slots reserved for those groups right so there's slots reserved for your friends and there's also slots Reser for your enemies so if you were going in they happened if like I I you happen to be flying around in space by this asteroid field and a group of I know the whatever the infamous pirate group that you're you you know locked in a deadly battle with uh as flying around there too they would spawn
01:00:42
in because it would be known again you know with your character your organization that would be a known sort of antagonist for you and they would be part of he would be in in terms of like knowing where they are it's you know I think that's kind of um that would be kind of the way way that uh you know either they like I was saying they just they you find a place and they spawn in or know again same would probably happen on the planet side I mean are you you just want to know if they're online or something even if you're not close to them perhaps yeah you use the contact list like that my concern there would just be the possibility for griefing you get a group of play I guess what I mean I would say that like the knowing like knowing when your friends are online one like having the like having it out of fiction knowing when your enemies are online is not
01:01:29
something that I would say we would do I would say that the when when it's your enemies that's all in fiction as in you're in the right location or you're seeing there or you've gone to where you know they are or someone's tipped you off they said oh I've seen the dreaded pirate group over by this asteroid and so you go okay well here I've set my nav destination I'm going to um Quantum drive over there and then you would go and see them that would all be in fiction but um so I don't know if that's answer the question this also comes down to the fact that Space is really big and if we're only providing the information about a contact like if this if you're using your contact list to track your enemies and all we tell you is that they're in Stanton that's a lot of surface area to cover well I mean I think well the other thing the other thing is that there are specific missions and jobs that that we're planning for in the persistant
01:02:16
universe so like one thing could be okay I'm pay yeah or I'm paying money I I'm I'm searching for this person so I will pay you know a thousand credits or whatever information and people spot that person and they send the information to you and say oh we've seen them in this location then you go there and so that sort of is actual adding gameplay to the functionality of that so you that's that's kind of I think how but that's also not like you said it's like it's also not magically precise in other words you if if someone sees them at a location and then they take off and they have not been seen in the last five minutes you have no good idea where they're at um another thing just to you know just to clarify in regards to it seemed like there was a little bit of confusion on the instancing um what I was talking about in regards to uh shunting players over to Common servers based upon their party affiliation their
01:03:05
friends um their skill sets um that's purely in regards to areas that have too many players in other words it's an overflow mechanism if you go to a distant asteroid field and there's two other players there then the server that you know that that's maintaining those guys has absolutely no problem basically merging you you know all into the same instance um it's only when you start getting a you know picture around you know uh Terra Prime there could be 10,000 players flying around in space you're going to have you know dozens and dozens and dozens of servers so when you look at and same thing for when you're actually down on Terra Prime you know the city um you know there could be 50 instances of that City so which one do you actually go into when you actually you know land at your hanger well PRI you
01:03:53
know it would apply you know it would prioritize I that and go well you probably want into the instance where your party members are and if you don't have any party members you know that are actually already on Terra Prime then it'll look and go well you probably want to be merged in so that you can actually walk around interact say hi to your friends um and and so on and so forth so this has a benefit right and the benefit to players is that it makes it hard to grief another player um and then the way that we are engineering it is such that you can still play with your friends whenever you want to so that that's not hard to do that's the the thing we don't want to do is make it hard to play with your friends and the thing we do want to do is make it hard to grief and consistently grief over and over and over and that and that is the precise reason why earlier on one of the previous panels we were talking about the the mechanism that we're using right
01:04:42
now to initially populate your friends list is not at all related to what we're going to be doing in the near future because right now I can form a link to you regardless of whether you want it and since you know and that goes into your friends list right now and we definitely do want you to know where your friends are and so that's the whole reason why we're going to wind up you know tweaking that whole system and going to the proper I invite you to be my friend you have to formally accept and at the point you do that then we get the automatic link between both of us yep and we are out of time for this particular panel in fact we're overtime all the panel's been running a little bit long uh thanks John for uh joining us here

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