Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - All About Alpha 3.5

29 March 201901:06:461,820 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of reverse the verse live this week all about alpha 3.5 and our guest this week probably needs no introduction but we haven't had him on the show in a while so we're gonna do it anyway Chris tell us who you are and what you do for star citizen well I'm the janitor I travel between the different studios to make sure all the floors are clean I told you I'm gonna have every department on this show by the time we're done we have janitorial on today so yeah I'm gonna what to do around Tampa it's a working studio and in my spare time I work on this small game called star citizen I was calling to say small key yeah all right so let's reverse the burst in case this is your guys's first show for
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whatever reason it's our weekly Q&A series where we take questions live from members of the star citizen community so you can submit your questions in one of two places either live in the twitch chat where we're broadcasting now where you can preface your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets it helps our community management team pull it out from all the other conversation and emojis and and icons that are going on you can also submit your questions live on spectrum which is our bespoke communication platform on Roberts space industries comm same process question brackets help us identify our questions to get things started we were collecting questions throughout the week like we normally do that also has the added advantage of letting people vote up their questions so we're gonna start with some of the highest funded questions that actually apply to alpha 3.5 but there were a lot of questions and there were maybe a bit more forward
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facing we're gonna get to those later in the show we're not gonna ignore them but we want to start with our alpha 3 front 5 questions since that is the subject of the day and we are we're we've got a patch incipient right now it's on our our PT you start with the flight mile probably one of the biggest features ok our Corp is probably the biggest feature but for a lot of our game for a lot of our backers the flight model the new flight experience has been something we've been talking about for a while how happy are you with it is it where we work here you were expecting wait definitely it's a step in the right direction I mean there's a lot of stuff that still has to be dialed in and we've got aspects of the aren't finish so you know the next quarter one of the things we're working on is some of the VTOL harvest stuff so we've got a there's a bunch of we've actually on our internal
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stuff we already have done a lot of work on it and there's so we've been playing around with it it's it's quite nice which is going to make these sort of low-speed hover stuff much I just feel better and give you a little bit more control and also sort of play into the sort of the takeoff and landing I mean because really like you know with the rebuttal of the flight model we wanted to get more realistic as in you know the maneuvering thrusters couldn't you know put out six or seven G's in every direction and we're at least as strong as the main engine which was like ten times as big visually so we wanted to sort of go closer to what it should be like you know me not 100 like it spam the expense does a pretty nice job of sort of you want to call it some of it you know it's still science fiction but
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it's got a little more sort of science fact behind it and so you know you know your main er your main thrusters you main engines should provide most of your thrust and the maneuvering Jets are helping wavering and generally they should be more useful in space and less useful in atmosphere and atmosphere maybe you know various you know lift surfaces whether she wins or tale or whatever will happen would help you yeah so we'd so we wanted to move towards a more realistic model where you know if you had a ship that had atmospheric features which we have quite a lot of they give you an a permit they you know they have an advantage an atmosphere over a ship that's not as atmospheric you know friendly so to speak so like you know the Harold yeah like the Harold that would be a good example of one it's in so app is very friendly you know or the Starfarer is like a big radio tanker
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and and so we wanted to have that and I think that we I can already see I can see people flying it people having fun and seen the difference between the atmospheric and the outer space and and the fact that the maneuvering thrusters are a lot less powerful than they used to be and that you can get additional forces from you know lift on your wings if you've got more so all that aspects good the the sort of VTOL harvest side of stuff will enhance things because like really watch it happen on a really big ship where it really doesn't have the power of its yeah here we go well this is a big ship it said nuts but but basically you know like say Star Ferry right so Star Ferry should be able to slowly push its way up but it doesn't really have much more than say like 1g or something never
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being able to go up here so then you have to engage your main engines to sort of go forward and start to go like that and then that's how you would like leave the atmosphere right and if something had big main engines that rotate down and they could probably go like this pretty easy or much lighter craft but I think it would give a more realistic sort of take off an entry and I think with some of the VTOL and hover changes that we're gonna bring in for three six you know landings will be cooler and better and yeah we'll also be able to get that sort of you know kind of I know what you'd normally see in movies are a helicopter gunship kind of things where you can sort of been hovering and you know like doing this so the Valkyrie and stuff could be cooler with some of the newer stuff that we're doing so we're doing that we also have there's a bunch of stuff that's moved in the work with the flight model although it's not fully
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finished out so we're still trying to balance the kind of component and the heat system and the power system so there's some hiccups I mean it just this is the first time all these things are working together and in fact some of these items and components a lot of the our aspects of the power system and the heat system weren't properly working before so we finally got them to be working and now of course there's you know we've got I don't know it's like 80 plus actual fireball ship so back and making sure all that stuff works and it's balances it is a gonna be an ongoing task over quite a few patches so you know this first one you know there's some cases where it's like oh well this is you know not necessarily you know what would people would call fun or balanced but we'll just when you start to sort of dial back in and also bring in more aspects so like the you know one of the big things for the next patch is sort of the wherein the tear and the
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misfires on item so as the item gets used more and if it's a lower quality potentially could have a misfire or have a critical failure and then I would impact systemically like the ship itself in its operation so you know whether it's a thruster doing that or it's a power plant or or a cooler doing that then it would have a negative impact on your ships performance and you would see it because it's all done systemically so so I guess the short story on the flight model is I think that we've made the right its changes it's not finished yet it's gonna be a continual work on progress we also have some other aspects like the e VA and the missile flight guidance system that we need to switch to use the the newest system from the older system the newer systems a lot more like it's a lot more efficient in terms of processing time and power which is good because that
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means we can have more ships out there AI ships more Blair ships so in general and these are it's a very good step in the right direction I think from what I can see from the feedback I've seen so far and PTU in general people liked the changes I know there's some you know debate back and forth on aspects of it or aspects in combat and I also sort of think that there's so many variables still to sort of play into this that it's not going to like people are gonna have to sort of learn how to do things differently right now I really like people did things the old way and now this new way you know some people you know a little sort of like everyone is when things change they're like I don't like it this is a new way but I think there will be more variety and there'll
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be more potential with all the things that have come have arrived and will be coming in it will just allow for a lot more interest and options for players especially in the in the PU because it's not just about combat right it should be about a lot of other things like fly as well as the combat and you know how you're getting around between places we've got a lot of aspects that we don't really have right now in the PU like you know like we were showing in squadron where there's a coil which is this sort of huge gas cloud nebula that has you know it's kind of dangerous and you know but they've got your components well yeah and also just like how you would you know it's in this way so in little atmosphere so you would perform differently in it but we'll have versions not necessary of the you know specifically the coil everywhere but now there'll be areas where you'd go in to
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say scoop and collect fuel for instance and there just be all sorts of different you know textures of experience you can have out in space and down on planets and so that was one of the bigger reasons to sort of move to a more systemic model so I mean there's a definitely more systemic modeling they'll say the thruster you know frost does get damaged and especially when they start to misfire and which will be sort of in the next patch I think you'll start to it will be interesting and I think we'll start to see over time people realize some of the subtleties and then there will be different strategies and techniques that people use and so I just I think in general I think it's a really good step it's not finished yet but I'm quite happy with the direction we're taking and I seem and from my sense on a
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community side I think that most people like it too so oh yeah there you go I had about three follow-up questions to that and you ended up hitting them before I could ask them so I'm just gonna move on to the next remote something I did here Chris all right what were the ones that you say I picked off well you mentioned heat let's talk about heat for a second why are they why are the heat limitations in quantum been extended to the the larger ships than the single-seat fighter is it's it seems like it seems like when I when I'm watching twitch streams or even in my own limited play experience ships our ship seemed to be overheating trying to get to where they're going much Brett I don't know if it's as fast as they should be or not what can you tell us about the current state of heat well in terms of quantum well so the quantum
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side they still need to dilate I mean like the concept with the quantum side is that you know the small sort of single seater ships really aren't built to sort of travel across the system just in one go and there's a reason why you would want a bigger ship like a freelancer a constellation I'll go even bigger you know like okay I want to take a bunch of cargo and in a whole sea or I want to you know fly in my idris and go from one side of the system the other side so they the concept has always been that the bigger ships are much they may not be faster but they're better at extended travel right so extended quantum travel and and and and that's unlike this would be a reason for instance like okay I've got a Idris and I've got some Gladius now I want to get from one side of the star system the other one well maybe
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that Idris can do that and like to quantum jumps or travels or whatever we want to call them and but if I did that for one side of the star since the other side of star system in the Gladius it could take me ten or twelve right so now that's why the Gladius is on the Idris and then you do the long travel and then when you get to where you want the Gladius launches I mean it's just the same reason like in the real world it's like yeah that nuclear carrier can just you know pretty much drive around for forever but the f-18s that you're launching for it certainly can't you know circumnavigate the globe so that's the concept in terms of it being dialed in for the ships that's an ongoing process right now so I think right now it's not necessarily dialed in right the way I would sort of feel is something like a freelancer a constellation really should be able to sort of jump from one
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planet to another planet now it may it should be able to do it from like one side the star serves the other side it would take several but you know a bigger ship like a address or a claim that could you know they could do multiple you know it's patently almost the star system or half a star system and whatever you want to take it take it and and and and sort of the limiting fact they were that we were considering which is because we you know have this heat mechanic and the cooling mechanic is that the quantum drive itself is you know creating this sort of magnetic field around your ship that's sort of pulling you forward but you know that takes a lot of energy and that generates heat and requires cooling so the bigger ships have you know first of all they have the bigger power plants but the bigger cooling capacity so they can really deal with them like if you look
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at the interest and you see the power plan in the address I think we've showed off in a prime you know it's like submerged in it right a pool of like coolant right so and that's and so that's kind of the concept that you just don't have the room or the equipment's we all do that on the smaller ships but as you get bigger you have more capacity for that so it's kind of nice because you know yes the big ships can't fly as fast they come over as fast but they have the advantage of the distance and so I think what people have been complaining just the you know not that concept but the doubted it it's not dialed in so like you know I think I was talking to John crude this morning about it because I know this news question is coming up and I'm like okay well I mean so well you know it's you know from this planet to this planet it's like 90 percent of the way you get there with a mediumship well okay so we're you know if that's a
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freelance for economy should be able to get the whole way unless you're interdicted or there's some article in the way but you know so that's a matter of sort of dialing in the numbers but for me it's the the concept that I've just talked about is very important it's like that gives you a reason to have the bigger ships because they are the ones that you can travel the greater distances with you know and that's why you would sort of have a bigger ship that you would like have your smaller snub-nosed riders or you know the gladiators or whatever landed on board if you sort of were traveling around so because what we want to do is have a reason for all these different sized ships we don't want someone to be able to sort of just get an Aurora and just do a jump across the star system the same way that you should be able to do that say with a much larger ship let's switch gears to another feature about 43.5 the facial
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customization system which we just showcased on a TV yesterday if you had a chance to check that out check that out that was very cool the question from the chat said is there any way that we could expose a numerical representation of a player's custom configuration as a genome so players could get characters that are twins siblings or or people who aren't interested for people who aren't interested in role-playing who just want their avatar to look the same after every single death of a spaceman and we actually did show the DNA gene do you know I'm on that so we we have talked about exposing it in much the same way I don't know if anyone's go into a car configurator that you can do online for a lot of different car manufacturers and you can say oh I want this color and other than you do you sort of customisation the car and it gives you like a lot of times a code right and then if that code gets plugged into that configurator or it's ended your ship their ship dealer it's all there so
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we've definitely considered sharing that the other stuff that we're you know we've got a whole bunch of stuff that we're going to work on for this quarter you know q2 3.6 so there'll be a lot more on the DNA so what we're just seeing right now is the beginning so we actually have some pretty cool stuff going forward so there'll be more options more variety we're actually gonna overhaul a little bit of the user experience to make it easier to sort of sculpt a model your head in a much more sort of 3d manner so what you see right now it's good but we're gonna we've got a whole nother level that I think it's going to go beyond that that we think is going to be more intuitive and easier to sort of make the head that you want and it's also part of what we need for for squadron anyway so it's going to go in
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this specific squadron or you call it the Calliope machine or whatever and so that will be very cool and the other stuff that we've talked about is the possibility of like as you you know like we have the death of the spaceman and you know you're you pass on to your next of kin you know some element of your you know your DNA is surviving and then you just sort of modifying from there and you know we're still discussing you know the possibility of like blending am a male and a female together alright I mean you can blend multiple males together a multiple females together but male and females slightly more challenging because the actual rig itself is different like all in the DNA system there's a proto rig for a male as a proto rig for a female and the there's there is a slight difference in the
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mapping between those two in the bones so we would have to have a smart way of converting it but it would be really great to say oh yeah here was my mother it was my father and this is what I look like and you can do some modifications from there or whatever so those are all things that are on the table but we will have a lot more hairstyles I mean right now the hair is pretty weak so we have a whole new hair shader setup that we aren't there isn't in 35 right now but it plan is to release it with the next one with in with with new sets of hair and that would be an ongoing process so it won't be all this new era like that's it no more hair and that's what you get in three six it'll be like okay we'll roll out some room and then continue to roll them out so because the current hair assets were built using this an older technique so this newer technique will be will create better hair and
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we'll just sort of slowly just be adding new styles you know we're considering fake she'll hair beards mustaches and a bunch of other stuff so it's gonna be cool I'm glad you said you computers and mustaches yeah that's I think that's all chat wanted to know their beards and mustaches yes a beards that have 14 different colors did go talk to Josh I have talked to Josh I think it's like I think it's possible I think my beard terrifies Josh all right let's move to our court our crop obviously the new planet that we that we've added in 3.5 there are a lot of buildings I think a lot of buildings and many of them have hangars on top are not hangars but landing platform landing platforms on top that are even recognized by the HUD
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and stuff like this uh this question is just says what are they for housing issues no that's sort of like the early stubbing in for additional content around arccorp so what the longer-term plan is that there could be a building and you could get a mission to go in there and take out a crime boss or something so if you look at those hangars there is actually you go down stairways as a door we just don't have an open at the moment right but the concept is to add procedural content you know so not too dissimilar to for instance the underground facility that you have in her stove here in our cops early places delivery missions or maybe even some combo missions or whatever and then on top of that you know on a longer-term plan we have what
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we have sort of the first stage of persistent Habs right now which means that like if you get this have and you have your stuff and moving around and leave things there when you come back it will still be your hat will still have those things in those kind of positions how you arrange and do everything but the real long-term goal is that you get an actual you as a starting player you get your starting you know apartment have whatever you want to call it and it's that it's always like building five apartment 28 that's always yours it's not it's not like that changes every time you log on to a different server and you know obviously in something like a cop there is a vast amount of building so there's plenty of space even if we have tens of millions players but the longer-term of the system ham system is to LRU a persistent location and then one of the challenges
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of that is like okay well you know there could be a thousand building blocks then that any one of our players do because they have their own system address and how do they get to those so one of the discussions or one of the ideas is there's lightning pads on top because then you could just fly to your your own little apartment and then we just have to figure out how you get to the sort of the central area is there a bustah fits the girl ring runs to a thousand places or is there a little sky taxi that can come get you but those are those are the kind of things that we're talking about like we were talking about like in person if you expand it it's along the rail line and then you go and maybe there's a place that has you know three or four buildings offer a plaza and that's just that's repeated around different areas of the city and so you know just every time we add more players and it gets filled up we open up a new one of those sections and go from there so that's the longer-term plan for it so people would have their own like real
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estate you would the idea is you should be able to start like everyone will get their starting location and then you know in other planets or even on this planet you could go and sort of get yourself I want the big penthouse while I get this you know you know balling penthouses on the top but that's a you know ten million credit place I've got to earn enough money in games I can go so I can go go buy that place so that would be the other aspect and then I know one other question was on this was about Windows why did the player head not have any windows and so now it's actually something I've talked with you in about how we can I'd like to be able to build it so not all the Hat because like you know in apartment complex is the same every apartment complex has necessary windows but there certainly should be some of them that have a view so that is a long-term goal for us is to sort of build that in so he can wake up and open the shutters of you have and
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see the sunrise you know across the skyline area 18 that's the landing zone in art Corp right now very high but highly buttered question was is this the only landing zone that we're gonna see it on our carp are there plans to do an area 17 or so it is not going to be the only one although it's going to be the only one in till we've sort of fleshed out stansson system so our sort of goal that we're trying to do in staunton system right now is get it get all the planets in and get all the basic landing zones in right so and then we're gonna go as we're also creating other systems we're gonna go and sort of be expanding the existing stuff so you know you can see more areas open up a novel you can see more areas open up in our core you could ultimately
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see more areas open up a micro tech etc but first we want to get Louisville you know Hearst and Louisville working our core Perry team working Microtech new beverage working Crusader orison working and then we sort of and you already seen a little bit of like in this release there's now a small but there's a direct line from the spaceport to the business district right and which makes sense right because it's like that was how it would be done yeah just we didn't have time when we did the the early release so you know our goal is as we were improving things so we still have things to do and the city tech you know this is our first iteration as everything gets better so there's a lot of lighting stuff that we can't do just yet in terms of real time kind of illumination global illumination and stuff and we have plans for just those
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are bigger projects but in something like arccorp weathers you know all these buildings where there is you know there's a lot of artificial light and between that day I mean quite different and you want sort of the lighting effects and the shadowing to feel better so we think we've done a pretty good job with the tools that we already have but it can be a lot better and so that'll be and you know stuff that will be improving and then also improving kind of the fidelity of the buildings and you know like you know taking like maybe some of the stuff that we've improved our Corp and then bringing it back into some of the Louisville buildings which you know the first pass of Louisville was lower poly than some of the stuff that we have in art corp right so so it's just an ongoing process that we get the stanton system doing out we get the base lining things and then we'll start to improve those well worth doing the
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other systems and as we go we'd learn more and you know and how to make everything work better and be efficient and stuff you're probably a little too high level for this but I'm going to ask you because I want to see what your answer is what's the deal with the Turtles the Turtles The Tortoise I actually didn't know I had to ask you in so basically Ian said he liked one of the references that we have for our Corp was sort of Hong Kong so so you sort of remembered like you know you back alleyways it was a little you know you you know all these sort of slightly shady you know hulking anything vendors and they were a bit like bunch of you know Tirta tortoises and like cages and so he wanted to get like some bail money and the prop team led by Ben cash like they like to do fun things and so they
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did it and put it in and now I you know see endless posts about turtles toy toys but yes it's a so it's kind of cool yeah I mean they all like to throw in fun things occasionally it's just you know I've been living in three point five the last quarter you know weekly NHPA then we need one like proper he's a bit yeah I didn't think I could be surprised by anything in three point five then I see turtle though I'm like how did I not know about girls I am curious what happens if people take them back to their halves and see if they persist that they can build a turtle collection or not I believe they did see I haven't seen that yet I'm challenging the Stars in community to see if that can happen all right before we move on from art corp let's let's talk about the let's talk about the no-fly zone okay time with no fly zone what what's what's the deal there is our court going to
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always be just covered in no-fly zones well I mean the idea without commie want you to fly between the buildings I already seen four people are doing video so we have a you know a kind of hard deck that below you're really not going to go below and then you're if's s gonna take over I'm not sure you know right now some of them will be fighting through some issues with getting all that to work well and have the right performance but ultimately I mean the idea is that you I mean we don't really want players taking their spaceships and lending and blending in the central plaza because it'd be a problem if you want to prevent you from doing that we don't want to blow you up if you do that though what we would rather do is you know take over your ship or fly you away or if you get that rather than blow you up you just said like face to black and then you fades up and you're in it so you know you're in a jail cell in our Corp or whatever like for you know
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unauthorized flying and your ships your ships like impounded you have to pay a credit fight to get it and yeah but yeah we don't even want to kill you and we also don't want to have like too much HUD a are visual stuff that gets in the way the pretty shitty numbers yeah yeah you want to see the city right it's silly so we've been talking about ways of so even the currents I think it's improved in three in three five but it's still probably too much so that will be something we'll be continuing to work on it's a hard bounce because I mean even in the real world today you can't take your Cessna and fly it over any any part of the city and land it on any Street and you so you got to watch to keep away from the LAX and if you do do something like that you you will be in trouble
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yeah alright unless you're like having an emergency landing that you have to do any other land on the street but even that it's dangerous so yeah I mean what we really don't want to do is we just don't want so on just you know taking their hammerhead and crashing it into the central plaza trying to kill as many players in AI as possible but it makes sense from a lower point is what I was getting at because you know with less than 0.1% of humans own private airplanes and you can't fly them anywhere you want today nine hundred forty years from now when everybody owns a private airplane well not everyone's gonna know you know I will die when I was pregnant so you're playing one of the whatever you want to call it with maybe another time Sam for the top five percent can do let's see what else do you get let's talk a little bit about the Hut it's move away from our core it's talking about the the head and three point five this question says what
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what is your vision for addressing visor clutter can we expect the cleaner Hut experience in the future this person was really enjoying the no HUD bug that the female character had at the moment yes absolutely so the current state of the player and the vehicle UI is absolutely not even close to what we want as a final state and it's sort of become more and more messy over the years as we sort of added features and but it's not being considered holistic I mean I kind of sort of feel like in some ways our best version of the hood was all the way back in you know when we did the dogfighting module so we're actually engaging in a kind of full recon cept of how everything should feel and look it's not it's not coming online yet because it's gonna take a while and where we were but we
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want to we basically want to build it to as real character its usable and also different manufacturers have different fields and it's a lot more contextual so for instance you know like the visor clutter right like if I'm sitting in my cockpit and I've got my two monitors here and I could measure that my ship style should be here my ship target should be here which is exactly how Wing Commander worked right I don't need I have these two big things clearing up my visor unless I have perhaps I want to say oh look I want to cast this to my visor and you'd have a button on the M of T to cast it up there and it could be contextual where it gets smaller or bigger depending I mean like right now there's a huge X there if there's no target like why would you waste space like that you want to have like as uncluttered view as possible so we've been so we're so there's several things one is the feel and look of that the
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second is working on the tech itself to change to make it much easier for us to implement it so up until you know very recently you know we've relied very much on flash and scale form which is sort of a gaming orientation of Flash and it's very difficult now that many people work in flash anymore anyway and it's just awkward so we we've started about a year ago we've been building our own sort of UI building block set to not have to deal with ActionScript not have to deal with flash it's a totally different thing and it's been led up by by Zane and Bowen who's a senior lead UI engineer and so they're starting to pull it together where we have these various different building blocks that we can put together and it should be much easier for the game teams to implement
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the UI R and quicker because right now is it's one of the reasons why our UI like the UI is a bit mad it's just hard to get UI resources to deliver all the needs of UI we need for like DNA or we need for cockpit so we need for maybe glass screens or whatever so so we're we are going to fix it it's going to be much better there you go Chad is going crazy yeah for those of you who are also savings were pre-recorded I told you when we did the one pre-recorded episode all right let's stay on the HUD for a bit let's talk a bit about the the HUD against bright backgrounds white background you know the Sun is obviously very bright we have a couple snow-covered planets that are moons
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rather that are very white this seems like an easy fix yeah the community is very good like put a drop shadow on there or whatever this seem well why is this persisting what what are we doing about this well we did try to we did do some things whether it was brightening or looking at putting a drop shadow when we haven't finished that definitely will require more work I mean I from our standpoint since we are trying to move like refactor the UI tech so we're moving to our sort of our own system that's more flexible that is much more sort of 3d object a holographic object centric that you know summer I mean because all this stuff is sort of engineering time on graphics and we've got everyone's got you know two years
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worth of work in their backlogs so we didn't really want to focus too much time on a dead system and have that sort of come in more with our new system because in the the old way it's too patchwork in terms of how the various elements get this displayed it's too custom it's it's it's a pain so we'd rather sort of change things out and then working like a more unified shader so you know we've done some stuff to improve it but yes we haven't finished and we will we will that is something we would like to make make you know a better solution whether it's more a drop shadow or it's sort of detecting kind of like what the value of the background is and adjusting to that and a more sort of dynamic basis yeah one more question about three point five
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before we start jumping into the future stuff yeah we have you here and we know people always wonder if it's coming whatever let's talk about the fps in our Corp right now it's not super ya know it sucks so I mean basically you didn't see that I can see I mean the the problem that we have is that you know the client-side object container streaming made a massive difference for the client frame rights which is you know people can see it using Google Play 16 plus frames a second but on the server since we are not doing the streaming as we add more content so we've got all the moon's you've got Hurston we've got Louisville now we have our corporate or our Corp and into merrier 18 and also just the
00:33:50
object in the NCA out on the server increases you know just keeps increasing as we add more of this content so you know I think we have something like three hundred and thirty thousand entities that's been updated on the servers so our server frame rates you know we've done it actually quite a lot of optimization on our NC updates and a bunch of others so if we had exactly the same as we had in three four you would see a an uptick in the server performance the problem is because we've now just added a whole nother planet and a bunch more moons and a bunch more entities that are sitting around all the time on that one server the server is the bottleneck right now so the server starts to get slow like really slow you know I mean our target for the server ultimately is we want to be at 30 frames a second but you know now the server's could be like 10 frames a second of 5 frames is that kind of that manifests it on the client side because the things
00:34:39
are moving around the server at a much lower fidelity than they are on the client and that's why sometimes you can see jumps or jitters even if you've got a decent frame rate on the client side and object container streaming on the server is is you know what will fix that and it's also the first stage of server meshing so like the concept would be that you're playing the game and you know there's a server that only has arccorp streamed in an area 18 streamed in and it's just simulating that and there's the one that's doing the same for Hurston and there's one that's doing the same for a-movin or whatever and as you as a player you go between these locations you're getting handed off to these different servers and the server's dynamic and can stream in whatever area they care about simulating that's the first step of so the very first step of server machine and object and which you need to have the object container streaming it's basically the object
00:35:26
container server object container streaming plus the very first step of the server meshing is we have sort of servers that handle areas and they're sort of static and in there and the final version of that is that's just sort of fluid it's always just spinning up and adding servers as it needs it for load so that's kind of what we are we are working on that right now so we have our top men and then we really have taught me not the greatest loss talk version of something like Christopher Paul T and Steve Humphreys and stuff this is they did advocating this is this is what we're working on for you know to get going because it's gonna because we won't be able it's the same problem we had we without the object container streaming we really you know couldn't have added the hurt her Stern on the client side and unless we get our server stuff up and running which is happening
00:36:14
right now we're working on this we won't be able to get the full you know stansson system with all this detail all working once because the server's themselves get bubble net because you know outside of the entity updates we still have the issue on physics where the physics is sort of constrained to a limited number of threads and we're also making we're working on the physics system to stop that so like this physics system will move from this sort of parallel threaded system which has four separate physics friends running to a what we call it phase batch model which would be you know you update all the entities and every core in the in the server just does all the entities together they all work together get it done and then once you do that then you update all the physics every core does it then you do all the rendering with every core which is as you know a server but in a client you would do it but
00:37:02
that's what the phase model is so instead of being parallel you basically do things in steps like okay of the entities update physics update animation render right and and then as you do each one of those phases you use every single call you possibly can on the computer to do that work so it gets done much quicker so that's the that's the bus so we're moving from the parallel threaded model to the phase batch model which is we've already done a lot of that that's a lot of what we've been talking about on the NCS system and we've been moving over to that on the rendering side that's why I like moving to Vulcan is important because will can allows you to do that like we can't do that with the x11 doesn't matter how many cores are working on it like these you know you've got a constrained pipe in the x11 but in Vulcan you can do a whole bunch of stuff in parallel so what moving to that and that will allow us so combination of that with the sort of
00:37:51
object container streaming first-stage meshing on the servers will allow us to get this these star systems expand out and we're doing all the stuff so that's that's all that's all the background tech work that's happening right now that's all you asked we leave it we leave it on we leave the camera and Chris most of the times because I'm just I literally I'm just sitting there like mm-hmm that's so easy that's not easy that's a lot of time there's a lot of people working on it no no I mean it's easy to do these shows when you you get my next questions look okay so you brought up server meshing that's one of the big buzzwords persistence is one of the one of our big buzzwords we talked about the pillars at citizencon that we need to get to where we want to go let's do this just do a
00:38:40
quick kind of update for persistence how is it where are we at now how are we looking is there anything you can share well okay so I mean there is a level of persistence now like for instance what you leave on your ship or what you leave in you have now should persist obviously what happens in your items their stay and stuff should persist you know between patches right and we're not between patches but during the patch and then we do like the database but we're doing a complete refactor of the whole database the item cache and that's a that's the that sort of the other big sort of hand-in-hand job that's happening with the object container streaming in the server machine so we can much easier like we can persist everything so the goal is if I'm running
00:39:28
around and I dropped my gun in the woods somewhere in her stone and I leave I come back that gun will be there and obviously there'll be some limitation like if will only allow so many objects in certain areas and if someone was sort of when everyone's not looking god I so well so I'm probably skimp and took like on and got rid of it will do sort of garbage Cleanup if there's too much stuff there but the idea is that fluidly you can persist anywhere in the game whether it's in space whether it's on a planet whether it since room or location so we're refactoring the database to be able to allow to do that and do that in a fisherman fishing manner in way so properly persist States objects and locations which also is you know necessary so if you as a player decide I'm going to set my base down
00:40:16
here and you put your own little outpost somewhere that persists all right so we're building the structure to do that and then the other thing that's actually quite important for me and I think everyone on the game side is you know we we currently wipe the database between patches don't want we don't want to do that so once this refactor of the law of flexible and fluid sort of item persistence cash we have happens it will enable us to not have to do that and we can be much more because the algorithm like you know like when you you know sometimes that we wipe the database because some of the data schemas have changed for like Howard storing item data and stuff like that but the new setup we don't need to do that with and that's one of the one of the reasons so like the money you earn or the items you've gained or the ships you've earned
00:41:05
in the game you can persist from patch to patch so our goal is I basically even if we roll out a new patch we're not wiping the database now we'll reserve the right to go in there and make some unilateral like fixes in case there was an exploit and everybody like earned a bunch of money we were in the right to say I'm sorry we're gonna have to take that money back and those items you bought with it back but the goal would be you know people should be able to play keep their character going from patch to patch not have to start from the you know start from the scratch again because it's it's quite you know it's fairly frustrating it's like Demon Souls is like oh oh yeah I died like I start from eating hanging all the way from so we want you know like because right now the motivation for you to be earning money so you can buy that ship or whatever or buy the item go to work is it's not so great as you know the new
00:41:52
patch is coming up because you know okay well I get it and I'm going to lose it anyway so we want to we want to be able to patent we want to be able to persist that and then of course there's things like you know additional sort of insurance like item insurance so again like iron when I bought my gun and I guess make sure item insurance and I lose it then I can getting it back so I think those are all things that would encourage people even now even though the game isn't fully finished to be playing it like it's a finished game I'm building up their possessions and character and really engaging right so while we're on the the big pillar talk stuff I think it'll help if we can put this in some kind of order I think we've got we've got server-side object container streaming yep we've got server meshing yeah we've got our persist our persistence database to
00:42:41
refactor is there an order to these did obviously the server meshing relies on the object container yes so the object container streaming the service stuffs happening now and the persistent stuff is have been work on now the tasks are happening in this coming quarter and quarter afterwards and then the the first stage of the object you know the sort of meshing is is sort of some ways hand-in-hand because the problem is like even if you're streaming on the server right and you don't load everything in but if I have players that are in 50 different locations and they've hit every area where the content that server will have had all those areas streamed in so it's going to be spending the same amount of processing power that it's currently spending right now if the players distribute themselves all over a so the way it really becomes effective
00:43:29
is when you sort of say you as a server you're only really focusing on this area and how many how's that part of the area loaded in so the are the server object container streaming and that aspect of it will come pretty quickly together you've got to have the streaming aspect there so you know you can just load in this place but then what you need to do beyond that is just say okay and then you need the handoff mechanism so a ship can handoff from one server say taking care of her stone to the server taking care of general space and the server taking care of our core princess but I mean I would say you know expect to see the persistent changes come I mean I'm we're hoping to to go take a look at the roadmap but these are all things that we're working for towards this year and this is how we get more than quickly players and I well
00:44:19
definitely yeah I mean III you know depending on where we were what we're doing on this we could quite easily do more than 50 players right now because we made a bunch of performance in so like if you had a like for instance we could do if we were doing a sort of game mode like arena commander star marine we could probably have a motor that had a hundred players because we wouldn't have this huge system that we have to simulate on the server and we've made a huge amount of like performance improvements because we know we have to scale for this huge pu universe so as long as you don't have to assimilate all that then the server would actually be out you know the the processing and for the individual players of clients wouldn't be so wouldn't be so relevant so now you could potentially see us have a game mode that could have more players than 50 in a more limited fashion and then on the main you know PU side that will sort of
00:45:10
depend on the backend server side when you get a back-end server side in the way I described then we can up the player County Dennison at the seams confirming or hinting at a barrel royal mode one thing to say that we have the tech to do something not to say that we're planning to do so I want to know I'm not planning on doing that but we but we are we are looking at ways to make arena commander and star marine like I think when you have an ATV yesterday but like we want to make those relevant again so we want people because the difference is it's like you know you may want to practice dogfighting you may want to practice you know your FPS skills and not do it in a situation that you're going to you know lose things even appeal and then the other thing
00:46:00
that we're quite keen on is like some of the cool stuff like we see you know like I don't know rexella puts together like cool games or whatever it would be nice to sort of facilitate that sort of interaction or game experience happening for our community so those are all things we've talked about nothing is happening right way promise thing but those are all things that we're interested in doing and you know could do some interesting stuff because of you know the ability that you know all these performance of improvements that we've done over the last few patches to enable like the PU growing society as just you know it's like anyone knows if you play arena grounder I think it's just locked at 60 frames a second just as is you know there's no so there's like there's this potential while we're on the topic of big tech questions br br
00:46:51
man we've been talking about VR forever well so we got to get full kit in first once Falcons in which we've started to do some of the early set up work for it then VR would be after Vulcan but we need to get Vulcan in which will in which will sort of get us well so so right now even though yes we have some performance issues and so quite a few areas we can also be Brenda bound and will partly render bound because of just complexity of the scenes and the fact that the you know the x11 and how you talk to the car at the graphics card is is you know not as conducive to a sort of multi-core multi-threaded situation
00:47:39
and so once we move to Vulcan you can do that so you can have a lot more what you would call draw calls right so you can have a huge amount of like right now we do a lot of we do a lot of like special tricks on the graphics on the outside that are very detailed objects but actually keep our draw called countdown on it so we sort of I think normally aim to have like 5,000 or less draw calls on the screen anytime yeah Volken you can have 50,000 it's it's just have a lot more so they're so the fidelity of the scenes can be greater we we have to maybe potentially not jump through quite as many sort of hoops adduced as many trips and so it will allow the game to grow and then importantly if you're doing something like VR well of course you're rendering like left of my high
00:48:26
it's you're rendering twice so you're doubling up you're like if you're constrained on the render side UW's Chris trainer from that side so Vulcan will you know with a powerful machine help you to be able to render proper VR at a decent framerate that you would need not to get like motion sickness so Vulcan first then it would be VR all right that's all the big tech questions I have let's go back to some gameplay and some just world building stuff a backer by the name of tyler witkin wants to know your thoughts on Hawaiian shirts are don't answer we're just gonna okay [Laughter] let's talk about mission gamers three point five added tisha Pacheco Pacheco jaycara everybody says it differently
00:49:16
all of our mission givers so far have been above the quit the question from that from the backer says kind of scummy yeah well there ever be legitimate yes definitely will be definite legitimate ones I mean there are actually already some that we've recorded and shot they're just not in the game yeah like for instance on top I believe there's a blackjack security rep that will give you sort of more lawful you know missions as from a corpse standpoint definitely a micro tech there will be I mean Hurston Constantin Hairston really is kind of a representative of the Hurston set up so I'm he's a jerk he's not evilly yes and and you know longer-term you'll be getting you'll be able to get missions from like say for instance the advocacy or perhaps the you know you II military will reach out to you for
00:50:05
something so we're gonna have both we're gonna have all sides of the spectrum both you know legal and illegal law and chaos so to speak so that that's just the implementation of the mission givers we're working on that pipeline to make it more efficient make this sort of a a logic better so once we've got that down that over we should be able to turn out more of them so there's a lot of things that that you see in the current PU that are sort of the first step of stage but we're also thinking okay well how do we scale this so we can just do this across many star systems many stuff without like you know having it all so painful of brute force and so that's kind of a lot of what you've seen in the stanton
00:50:52
system is like us doing this and then figuring out how we can you know do it much more efficiently and more hmmm let's talk about ground traffic roads we've got we've got five moons yeah five months right now two planets not a lot of roads yes well we should get roads in the grant the the planet team actually implemented the road well they call the road tool where you can draw roads planet two years ago and then the environment guys like never used it and then by the time the environment guys and said hey there's some roads they went and it was broken in the editor and everyone had so many things that are fixed but it is on our list to address kind of roads because we
00:51:40
actually had it in there we had it in the system and then it kind of broke with some of the changes because they keep on reformatting the procedural pilot stuff so you know I would I would anticipate some point in the future that there will be roads I'm not 100% sure on are where you'll be seeing that yet because I would suspect even with micro tech and the first iteration would not really have the roads in a bourbon that's a crusader definitely but so sometimes I see but yes they there is actually supported I mean want roads rivers you know there's a hole so we have a whole backlog on the procedural planet stuff of the various features we are going to support I mean you know some of them you saw some previews over the caves which could be quite interesting to an additional sort of adventures and content that you have in
00:52:29
the game so it's just an ongoing process I mean like I said every one of these team every one of our teams has a two-year backlog of like really cool tasks that I'd love to see in the game now yeah and it's mostly because we've just said okay well we're building this at this level of fidelity and you pretty much can do anything and we want to make a systemic and we want to give everyone that experience everyone fantasizes and talks about and I feel like every release we get a little closer to it and it's really just kind of cool so you're saying that where we're going we need roads yes that's right oh my back to the future I don't make the puns very out there all right everybody that's playing we don't need roads but we'll have fries I it's plane 3.5 right now I was doing so on our public test universe one of the
00:53:17
big features of our public test universe is the issue council and I was I was I was impressed to see this question come so everybody who played it and who's asking questions I've done it through the PTU at the moment one of the questions I got voted up that I thought was really cool are you set what are your thoughts on the issue council are you satisfied with it is it useful does the community use it enough do they use it well this person who just wants feedback on their fair no it's super useful so like we know in all RPG releases the oil Michael Smith who sort of heads up the aspect is we have every release as a whole sort of player feedback analysis that we do internally and you know we're listing the top issues and features and there's linking to discussions of it and the issue council repeats of it and we can look at the bugs and they get passed on to our
00:54:05
developers to fix and then again converted into our internal Gira's so it's super useful I mean that's that's I mean it's great I mean PTU is we have this huge you know group of completely enthusiastic and committed and game players that are helping I mean you can get super insula when you're developing something else now all the testers are used to stuff they've seen it from all the internal testing they've done and so it's really nice to to get feedback from outside people and there's plenty of issues that come up that we don't see internally that we only see in sort of the PTU environment or even the public environment alright we are almost there time so I want to get a couple more of these in before I let you go this one says party members can access our ships without us unlocking them they can manage power they can manage the
00:54:54
shield's the heat on our ships MFDs from the copepods but what's keeping them from being able to call in a landing pad or set jump points it seems like we're the copilot gameplay is halfway there they can do half the things we would think they'd do they can't do the other half what's stopping us here well I mean so I'm a multi Cruiser side we have a whole bunch of functionality that was on our backlog on that we will be implementing later on this year that involves you know the ability like okay I am the captain of the ship I'm gonna give you right to be the comms officer and I'm gonna give you know JJ rights to be the weapons officer and you know I'm gonna and I'm gonna you know you know I'll give you access to this part of the ship but not this other part of the ship so there's a whole area where like the captain can sort of you know granting
00:55:44
access and control to various people and it would encompass so like pretty much all the functionality so the problem is right now is that you know we've just got like a very basic like I think we sort of said well we lock the ship unless you're a part of you know the group the group right so but you know that needs to be yeah like as a captain I could have an option and Sam I gave access to you not the group or I can say you know this whole group or you know we could even have things where the captain could say oh I want the code to enter the you know the ship and on the little keypad is you know one two three four and then there's everyone knows it's one's each before linking in and answering so they'll be that functionality is planets on our backlog it just comes in with sort of our multi crew stuff which will be showing up on
00:56:33
the roadmap that will will be sharing going forward cool yeah that was my ask question when we start seeing some multi crew stuff so I know we are next big updated roadmap is probably next week I think scheduled so there may be something involving multi crew on that let's see talk about the art court visuals we saw with us before three point five here we last saw our corp gosh was at citizencon 2017 2017 2017 the view from orbit changed quite a bit change quite a bit talk to us about why that happened well the view from orbit do you see now is actually the proper view of the planet in the 2017 version we didn't have a way of distilling that down so we had a
00:57:25
texture admittedly a cool texture that was swapped out when you got to a certain level but right now it's much more like if you go if you actually do the fly down the transitions are much better and you can see you can actually see area 18 properly from space and even that level of stuff is some of the stuff that we're talking about improving going forward with you yeah cop stuff but in you know what you have now is you can go everywhere and there's nothing like brushed over or faked in the seventeen demo we did a hob we did a lot of stuff but like there was definitely you know if you went off the he went off the track of the demo it wouldn't look as nice and and that an aerial shot looking down was that was it was like a texture with the nice illumining on it versus what we have now
00:58:12
is actually is made up of like the different like procedural areas plus you can see area 18 and stuff like that so the the new way is is is a more accurate way than we have in seventeen and you know okay doesn't work as well in the individual screenshot because they were most Khorasan which is what we modeled that texture after but air 18 is instead of like harrison and haven't got these concentric circles or anything like that yeah it was yeah you said I gotta have an end of that one final questions is anything you tell us about organizations we get asked about organizations a lot we first introduced the organization system some time ago they're not actually in game the organizations aren't represented in game one of the questions that got voted up was about
00:59:00
org buildings org hangars the ability to share ships among our members is there anything that we're that we can talk about yeah that's not party listen unless that's you know that's along the same lines and stuff that was only left multiplayer gameplay it's also factors into the forty five stuff so you know right now you know like we still haven't got the proper full functionality because you should be able to like say you're doing for VoIP you could walk into a bar and everyone in your vicinity can hear you but you can also be on a comms channel to your buddies like if they have a radio but right now you're either in one or the other one it's kind of a bit clumsy and so these are all things that they have to do some refactoring on the backend services to allow like multiple channels at once but we'll we'll fix that and on the org side
00:59:48
it's having like permissions and you know on a group basis so we have a whole bunch of stuff that we we have plans for that say yeah okay like if you're a member of this organization you'll have access to this location or hey as an organization we could we could purchase a place and then all the other people that are part of the organization are given access to which is again not dissimilar to the way I was describing their the multi cruise ship captain behavior so we want to fully bring the org stuff across into the game that's always been the goal that was the first step of like getting the spectrum partly integrated with what we did and we haven't finished that off yet so that is on is on that is on our sort of roadmap it's on our backlog and you know again it's just we have five hundred and forty
01:00:35
people and it doesn't seem like it's enough they've all got loads of work and you know it does become more calm cane because as the game becomes bigger and has more features just adding new ones becomes more complicated because you've got to test it with more things and you've already got an existing game so it's so in some ways you know the trajectory of like how long it takes to get a feature in is longer now than it would have been say four or five years ago where you didn't have all this absolutely this whole inertia and momentum of the the current code base and the current functionality I mean it just when you think about it like if we change one aspect say on a ship right like well you know what we've we want to make the thruster effects but let's redo our effects manager for the thrusters right there are you know 80 plus functioning ships right now so that
01:01:23
effects team has to go in to every one of those ships and change it out it's the same if like we changed how like landing gear worker so and that's what happens as the game gets bigger and you change the system over or you improve the system around new system you have to also make sure it works with you know this huge you know amount of stuff that already is there and so it just it just makes things just take a little you know the testing takes longer a lot of the work takes longer than you think it is because it's just sheer scale so you know in some ways you're where we're prisoner to our own I don't know whether you'd call the success but our own ambition but you know it's it's I feel like you know all these things we're talking about our we have them on a road map they're not backlog we're and we just knocking them out I wish we
01:02:14
could knock them out a little quicker but I think at this point it's sort of the the trajectory is the directory I mean you can even see now like three five has actually a lot of stuff and it has I mean we have a female player which had a huge you know I mean I was no you know it's just a it's just a different character but it's not because the dimensions are different usually in a lot of games the female character in the male character are exactly the same size it's the same skeleton it's just a different skin that's not the same for us we actually report you know we change the the proportions and everything to be more sort of accurate to the differences between male and female and you know and so that had a whole bunch of knock-on effects right so we had to deal with you know cockpits we're sitting down are using things just because you know it's just it's a matter of like reach and
01:03:01
that's why you have sliding seats and cars and stuff like that and so they took a lot and then of course there was all this equipment or the army you had that all had to be like changed to have the version that would fit on a female character versus a male character that's a master amount and there's arccorp which is obviously a whole new planet and there was a bunch of some of the new tech for the buildings and you know it was still not even close to and like how are you and the one over there and then the DNA which is a massive thing the face customized a completely different I mean like you may know I've seen that another mmo's but like that system underneath it is a completely different approach than almost any other area well I know any other MMO users at the moment and it's a has one learning every face rag they're all is blended together and then your and you know you don't have the crazy monster creatures that you
01:03:49
sometimes see people throw up on YouTube and stuff and and we've actually got some improvements like we we can do a symmetry with it and you can't do it right now but in three six very likely we can make you do in symmetry so you can make some ugly people but there would be potentially ugly people lots of degrees but yeah so you have that so that's massive the flight model that was a huge you know engineering and then speaking of ships so like yeah this is you know a lot of what the fallout is on some of the fight model stuff is you know like we've changed the flight model and everything has to be redone or rebalance and then of course the heat management and all these systems and all these items are on so you're talking you know hundreds if not thousands of items and you know almost a hundred different ships it's just yeah so not only do you change it but then you have to redo in
01:04:37
rebounce it so you know that's a lot to deliver so I'm really proud of like how much everyone's delivered for this quarter it's really impressive and they've added a bunch of like extra mission stuff which i think is like I think maybe this this today's PTU as they believe a new spoofing bounty-hunting mission and stuff that wasn't in any other PT there's a lot of a lot of game played a lot of functionality that's going into this and of course we're also making quality of life and visual improvements so it's a you know I feel like you know we have a good team and we've got a good pace we're still trying to bring more people on board to help shore up some of the areas that we know we need some help but you know it's kind of exciting I mean I honestly I would say look at other games that are sort of doing a live release of date and are they really doing as much as we're doing every patch in terms of
01:05:26
content and features and I would say probably not of course not many other people have 500 are people working on a book but it's it's you know it's good so we got a pace like I said I wish it was a bit quicker but I think it's what it is considering the scale and the complexity in the detail of what we're working on and you know everyone loves what they're doing and they're working really hard to deliver it so hopefully you guys drew I got nothing else to add Chris I'm gonna let you get back to work thank you so much for taking your time to be here with us today you're welcome yeah so that's it that's Chris Roberts thank you guys thank you for listening watching and supporting the game so keep up the good work I'll see you next week everybody all
01:06:26
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