10 for the Chairman: Episode 69

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] [Applause] hello everyone welcome to another episode of 10 for the chairman this is uh the first one in a while because I've been over in Europe mostly in the UK uh first of all for the leadup to Citizen con uh which went over really really well um I think well it felt to me anyway that a lot of people really like what we shown we're busily right now working on finishing off 2.0 for you guys to play in the very near future uh but this picture back here actually uh is something that I've promised one of our uh longterm backers um um a gentleman called Hank who um sent me this for my uh birthday uh but I was

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   over in uh the UK shooting Squadron 42 so I didn't see it and then when I saw him at games conon he says oh have you seen my uh painting that I sent you and I said no I haven't seen it yet and then I saw him again it says in car and was like no still I haven't seen it so I came back went over to community saw it and it's awesome so thank you so much that's a really great um painting of a side and we'll get it framed and we'll put it in the new office so thank you very much um it's good to be back here in Los Angeles the weather is uh well normally a little better than England although it was kind of rainy yesterday but it's certainly warmer than Europe is at this time of year so as much as I like going to Frankfurt as much as I like being in Manchester it is kind of nice back when there is sunshine out here H and it's uh good to be back with the team I haven't seen for about five weeks cuz I was uh you know doing the

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   working on the citizen con stuff and then also finishing off the selects uh for all the Squadron 42 peap we shot so sitting with the editor picking the various takes we want to send over for motion capture and also for um sort of the facial capture so that's going to be super cool uh you know we've sort of revealed the cast which is great uh but as we go along we'll sort of give you some more in-depth stuff and be showing you sort of the facial and the body Tech as we move along because what we showed was very early and it's going to be so much better by the time everything's done so I'm super excited by Squad 42 as I am about staron 2.0 which is going to be cool so for those of you who don't know uh 10 for the chairman is where I take 10 questions from our subscribers and answer them to the best of my ability our subscribers are the subset of our community that contribute money every month to allow us to do a higher

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   degree of community content and it's one of the things I think that sets staron apart from other crowdfunded games and just generally games and development uh because we have a huge amount of uh interaction with everybody in the community it's amazing to have all of you support us in building this game and uh you know we like to share the development uh with you guys so you can sort of see us building Star Citizen and building Squadron 42 as we go along and without uh the subscribers contributing the money we wouldn't have the funds to have all the additional sort of community staff and video staff and be able to do the multiple video shows every week and uh you know the many posts um we do every week on our website so we have more posts and days in the week and I think we're up to three or four video shows a week which is pretty crazy uh but it's all really down to subscribers so thank you very much it's

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   it's a lot of work to do all this content but I think sharing the um journey of making the game is uh something that for the team's really fun I mean I know that when we as a citizen con uh you know it one of the first times that the UK team really got to experience uh being around uh you know the community and the sort of support and excitement enthusiasm I mean there's 130 people in the Manchester office it's our biggest office and it's full of really talented people but you know they hadn't really experienced it in person until citizen KH and you know I I have to tell you that after citizen Khan for you know the next week there was a massive Buzz uh in the office and uh you know it just it makes you when you you know making games is hard making a game as big and complicated as Star Citizen is is is Sever order is harder than normal uh but it's worth it when you

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   know there's a you know a huge audience of people out there that can't wait for the game are excited about it and also excited to sort of learn how it's getting put together and be involved in the process and give their feedback and all the rest of stuff so uh we're all super excited about uh getting 2.0 into your hands in the very near future we're all working on that very hard uh in all the all the offices um so we're all pretty excited to get um see what happens I mean I already go online and see you know YouTube videos of people doing crazy stuff in free flight so what people are gonna be able to do in um 2.0 is going to be a whole another level above that so that's gonna be awesome so let's get to uh let's get to it um and I'll answer the 10 first first of the 10 questions here so the first one comes from Mario who asks what are the plans about the separate release of Squadron

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   42 will you treat it like any other retail game with TV commercials or will it be something smaller so uh for us you know I think we not standard so we're not going to be doing the typical sort of um you know big publisher blanket the TV commercials I mean first off we've been pretty much taking all the money we raise and putting into development as opposed to things like marketing I mean essentially everything that we've done uh in terms of marketing has been completely viral it's been sort of PR driven and Community Driven and you guys have actually been the best marketeers for us we haven't been doing banner ads we haven't been doing anything and I and I would I would say for squadron 42 especially at the beginning especially on the PC I you know I don't think we see a a massive benefit of doing sort of TV advertising um because uh you know

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   we're hoping that the game's going to speak for itself and there'll be great word of mouth and we'll kind of go from there and then you know if it's doing well uh and you know making this money then maybe we would um sort of do some more traditional uh marketing to reach some of the audience that we don't normally reach through the sort of typical sort of PR or viral channels that we've been doing uh but I think we certainly at the beginning anyway uh Squadron 42 will be sort of much more um kind of gorilla style marketing I mean maybe there'll be one or two things maybe a banner out or two you know who knows but uh we're not really planning on sort of doing it the full sort of EA treatment um you know because we much rather put the money into the game to be honest with you uh you know like I said if we sell a bazillion copies and you know maybe we'll double down a bit but um front off you know up front it will be

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   um kind of what we've been doing now um with probably some more sort of events and publicity to sort of raise the awareness so there you go next question comes from uh Commodore fly who asks if having down Shields prevents you from entering Quantum travel will a ship be able to remotely hack another Shield another ship Shields to temporally go down or reboot as to force the ship out of a Quantum Leap or not so much Quantum Leap but Quantum travel likewise would it be possible to use something like a probe or or other Mass like my ship to interrupt the course of a ship in Quantum travel to render similar results so yes I mean we've talked about having sort of uh kind of uh the ability you know you know beyond things like EMP but you know electronic warfare and hacking other ships disabling systems or interfering with systems and so if you

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    manage to bring the shields down by doing something like that yes it would force it would stop a from being able to go to Quantum Drive also the whole point of uh having you know the quantum uh drive and the quantum travel as you you can't have objects sort of in your path because you're just going a straight line you're going very fast so if you are in the way of a ship entering Quantum travel or there is something with mass or or um you know like a probe or whatever uh in the way of the travel then yes it will pull that person out of uh out of quantum travel and that is the uh the whole idea um so that'll definitely be active in the Pu I'm not sure in the very first version of 2.0 we do that I would actually have to check so that's um sort of a latest hpu thing but um that is the whole idea of the design so um there you go next question

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    comes from vacation who asks will you have NPCs crying a ballistic turret are they aware they have a finite number of shots and how do they Pace themselves well yes we'll definitely have MPC you know they'll be able to crew various stations so turrets um you know engineering communication stations all that kind of stuff um and if they're crewing a ballistic turret yeah I mean part of the idea of sophisticated AI is for them to sort of know their weapons right so if they're using an energy weapon they would sort of know that they can't use it too much or else it's overheating a ballistic one they should you know maybe make their shots can if they got not so much ammo then maybe they won't be as liberal with shooting as if they had lots of ammo so that will all be part of the AI I mean obviously AI is an ongoing Quest will constantly be working on it improving and adding so the early a AI may not be as

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    sophisticated as the stuff that we'll have later on down the road but but all those would be factors that should and and will be considered in the AI all right next question comes from heroic Frog who ask will there be any incentives to keep your original ships whole I.E ship's name displayed as a decal after X amount of flight time or simply a different paint job becomes available Etc well I definitely you know I'm planning and wanting to have the ability to sort of name your ship and you know so put decals or name it um that's uh you know not necessarily going to be obviously in 2.0 but that is definitely something we want part of the Pu and and uh you know a persistence thing so it's sort of you have your own kind of identity right you want to have your own Millennium Falcon that you know you've done all these things with and

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    has a history um so um you know I think that uh you know will let you name it and do some other stuff uh and um you know I don't know what necessarily there'll be other incentives to keep the Hole uh but I you know I think you know potentially long term we can have aspects where you sort of wear it in or get to know the sort of boundaries or edges of your equipment I mean we're definitely going to do that on components where you'll know which ones you can overclock and not overclock and stuff like that and you set it up a certain specific way and so tuning and getting a new ship setup will you know take a little bit of time in investment so you know a lot of times if you got a ship you've got set up you want to keep it that way and you w necessarily want to lose it um because you'll have to set a new one up the same way and it'll just take a bit of time to sort of dial it in so to speak um so

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    there you go on that one all right next question comes from jimjo who asks what kind of missions will we see generated by the game will be able to have a Freel have a freelance as a prisoner transport for the ueec prison system or as a drake Herald latch onto a bigger ship and take information from them yes well I mean there's going to be a vast amount of missions many more than uh uh done here but yes I mean you know there potentially could be things like prisoner transport missions I mean obviously I've talked about things like Trading missions Bounty Hunter Missions mercenary missions um you know there's information running so that's the Drake Herald which would be you know taking data from point A to point B um you know I'm not sure that the uh you know the Drake will Herold will naturally latch onto a bigger ship but it certainly will take an

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    information burst and then it will can carry it to a destination and broadcast it or or you could hand deliver a Data Drive and stuff like that um but there's going to be a whole bunch I mean the whole idea with the sort of mission system that will run in the persistent univ IE um is that we sort of have this bigger Universe simulation that happens um and that's sort of a more sort of turn-based simulation but it has 20 million AI MPCs running all around doing their stuff and they there's a whole set of rules of oh you know these economic nodes need these kind of products and so they request them from other areas and that will generate missions where people will take the goods and if pirates attack them then there'll be more missions for Bounty owners to go after the Pirates and mercenaries to protect the convoys and all those missions become available for AI or players so players can take them or AI can take

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    them or players don't take them and then depending on the outcome of the missions that that either is simulated on this universe side if there's no players involved uh you know which is more sort of like a high-end sort of turnbas simulation or if players did get involved or come across these missions um they get simulated on a you know High Fidelity basis which is sort of the gameplay you know running around flying your ship doing the action and the results of those get fed back into the universe simulation so if you kill some Pirates it gets told back to the universe simulator that says okay these two Pirates were killed in this system and so now there'll be two less pirates in that system so you could have a whole bunch of bounty hunters come in clean out the Pirates in a system and then all of a sudden there won't be pirates on the universe server in that system and

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    so there won't be so much piracy so there won't be so many missions then for Mercenaries to do escorting now of course some pirates in another system may hear that there's now um you know no Pirates there and no competition they may move into it so all what that happens the universe system sort of runs this ecosystem that has a feedback loop from the game and the game itself um basically scrapes the state of the universe system um periodically um you know we haven't quite determined whether it's you know every 30 minutes or every five minutes uh but it sort of time slices across all the systems and says okay who's in this system right now what AI do we have what are they doing what locations they are and and then it uses that to sort of generate the local um situations that you experience when you're flying around um yourself so um it's kind of like the universe system is a dynamic Mission generator for the game

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    experience you have uh and so it's got a really cool feedback loop it's going to feel really alive even if there's only you in the game um there's still going to be loads of AI moving around I've already said that our goal is to have 90% AI NPCs to 10% player base even if we've got millions of players so what that means is no matter what the universe will be alive things will be happening there will be reactions to what you do and it can be with you and your friends or you can come across other players and so I think it'll be a really really cool experience and there will be lots of missions so um you know not just the ones I mentioned or that was asked questions about okay next question comes from hardwired who asked do all the ships have the same speed while in Quantum super Cruise so no they don't all have the same speed in Quantum super Cruise super Cruise itself um uh so I don't know if you're thinking

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    super Cruise as in the definition of an elite dangerous because we actually have our own version of Cruise that's one of the new flight modes that will debut in 2.0 which is somewhere between uh you know SCM space com combat maneuvering and Quantum travel um and that will be based on sort of mass and thrust and everything else so it sort of change uh depending and you can even and that number will even change dynamically for an individual ship depending on what you're doing in terms of power and thrust and Fuel and all the rest of stuff um so that won't have the same speed and Quantum itself uh you know we've talked about different Quantum drives or different levels of mass um of a ship affecting the rate of quantum so you know we sort of discussed that the you know the best Quantum Drive um in the Galaxy right now in human hands anyway does point to uh speed of light

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    but that doesn't mean that they all do that maybe some you know slow slow boat trading would be maybe 0.1 and it would just take them longer to get somewhere uh but they can haul huge a whole bunch more um you know goods and cargo um so there you go all right next question comes from the rafe King who asks how will Communications between two ships be organized do you have to choose different frequencies talking to an alien ship in terms of the communication between two ships I mean you know it's still early days on that I mean obviously there's a simple chat system that's in the game right now um but we're sort of thinking that you know you would open a channel you'd Target a ship and you would say you would request to talk to them and then you could make that a channel that you can talk on your frequency or you could basically have it public and broadcast uh and then

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    potentially if you're talking between someone on a frequency depending on the ship and Equipment someone else could potentially Snoop on it depending on what they've got um not all the time but some people would so we'll allow you to um sort of hail ships and open secure Transmissions with them or just generally broadcast um stuff and and kind of go from there uh but it's still early day so uh you know that those are all sort of functionality and features that are yet to be properly implemented in the game but um we have some pretty strong ideas how it will work and hopefully you guys will like it too next question comes from Aiden feskin who ask will the vanal be fundamentally evil or can we find or see peaceful vanal I would say as far as the uee is concerned and as far as your point of view um the

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    vanal are pretty much out for the destruction of uh of humanity um you know who's to say that there isn't some stuff longer term that you may discover uh that has a bit more backstory to the vanal uh but generally they're sort of in opposition to the UEI in the same way that the vizago and the the vandals of antiquity were in opposition to the Roman Empire um and uh you know they don't think or approach things the same way that we do as humans and so they sort of see us and our planets as weak and as uh you know you know resources to harvest basically and uh you know they they take what they want where they want uh so I don't know whether you would say they're fundamentally evil or they just have a very different point of view than

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    we do um so there you go next question comes from miden who asks with the release of stares in Alpha 2.0 what will become of our hangers sard and Hollow table the demo citizen con didn't show the players in a hanger nor did I see the Sim pod or Hollow table when they requested their ships will there be a mechanic in place to customize our ship load out in the initial release of 2.0 will the hangers be temporarily disabled uh no hangers will still exist um you can still load into your hanger you can still mess around with your ships you can still change the loadouts on your ships um and from The Hanger you can access AR Corp you could access uh Alisa Port alisar which is the space station that you start on 2.0 um or you can go into the Sim pod and access uh electronic access to play

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    Arena commander and when we turn it on Star Marine um so um in some ways the Hang is still going to be the Hub um you know we have some later stage stuff that will de debut that will sort of remove the loading screens and make it sort of more seamless and streaming not not just that it's not just there yet but it will be you know in the not too distant future um and longer term for the first version of 2.0 uh we probably won't have a hollow table available a mobiglass UI available for you to customize your ship while you're at Port LSR on your space station or Pad but that is the long-term plan so that will be in 2.2 or somewhere around there uh and you know ultimately we're just trying to bring all this together

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    so you know fairly you know well show fairly soon but um you know we'll be able to sort of you know Port alisar will just be a space station orbiting in the Stanton system and you know you'll be able to fly down to visit Crusader or fly down to visit AR Corp or fly down to visit Microtech so or fly to go visit nck so all the the early stages um of the Pu are sort of just stating with SC Alpha 2.0 and it's the first baby step and we're really excited to see what you guys um do with it cuz there's a lot of opportunity for fun uh you know cooperative play with with other players or playing you know having head-to-head fights against other players or you know just encountering AI okay last question comes from fala who asks what can we be expecting as far as jump distances out

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    of ships is a Gladius only going to be able to perform one jump while a saber can perform three what about the larger ships so it's too early to sort of be definitive on this but yes obviously different ships will have the ability to have different ranges it's quantum fuel is a separate resource than the sort of boost After Burner Fuel and obviously the amount of quantum fuel you have combined with the efficiency of um your jump drive which is essentially is a modified Quantum Drive uh and the distance you're going to have to do the you know the Jump Through the Wormhole uh will sort of uh affect how far you can go the smaller ships um that have jump drives probably you know will not be able to go as far without having to refuel or collect some more fuel uh the bigger ones will be able to sort of carry on going uh for much further

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    distances so we're expecting a fair amount of gameplay long term for you know players that want to be you know they're there they're they're you know flying a sta a around and selling fuel to people or there'll be refueling stations and all the rest of the stuff so um but I would say the smaller ships have a much shorter sort of range before they have to refuel versus the bigger ones uh so there you go all right that uh is the end or of the 10 questions and my first time for the chairman for about a month and a half uh it's good to be back um it's going to be answering your guys' questions like to say again thanks to all the subscribers for making it possible I'd like to say thank you to all the backers out there for um enabling everything that we're doing so it's you know it's amazing it's like I said top of the show being at citizen

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    con every time we do these shows whether it's games con or citizen con it's really humbling and great to be amongst all you guys you you're making this happen I mean we won't be able to make this game without your support it's just the best experience in the world to be able to make a game so ambitious that I've always wanted to make and play and I think most of the people we have working on it have feel exactly the way and I think pretty much all you guys feel the same way and uh without without without the support and it's Unique in the industry I mean I don't think anyone uh has ever seen anything that has approach this level of enthusiasm and support I mean you are competing with the biggest multinationals out there that Finance games it's amazing the power of individual Gamers coming together to see one dream and uh so you should all pat

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    yourself on the back and I thank you very much for working super hard to get you the next stage of stuff out and uh you know I think I say there's a fair amount of time uh you know it is taking longer than we wanted but the game is much bigger much more detailed much richer um than it was originally conceived to be and in the long term I think it will be a universe and a world that everyone will be happy to spend many years in I will be happy to spend many years uh in it and helping making it better so um uh thank you all and I'll see you next week bye hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our

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    YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse this video made possible by the ICC Stellar surveyors and subscribers like you for