Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Prototyping Gameplay

14 September 201800:51:31868 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hi everybody welcome to reverse the verse live game dev edition we're back in LA I'm your host Content Manager for global video production Jared Huckaby and we're doing something we haven't done in a while how long has it been since you've been here on our teammates has it been like maybe three or four months since we've done it since we've had you here we've prototyped gameplay that was I think that was that was over a year ago I was when the show was a happy hour happy argument we have kx4 no systems designer here in our Los Angeles studio and every once in a while when he can spare a little bit of time from from his busy schedule we like to come in here and do a different type of art TV where
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we kind of explore the process of game development now the star citizen as a whole is probably your single best resource for behind the scenes of how game development works between a TV and calling all Deb's and RTB and happy hour and 10 for the chairman and bug smashers and lawmakers like that we like to joke that by the time all is said and done if you've been watching all the star citizen's content from beginning to end you'll have a 300 level class degree you know in game development this is one of those types of shows where we are going to well why don't you tell us what we're gonna do today kids well I'm going to be prototyping out some gameplay I'll be doing some stuff that isn't really set down in terms of what what we're looking
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for so we have this notion of research in the game and there are some designs for how that would work and today I'm going to explore in prototype form one of one of my designs for it this is all very tentative of course and not indicative of what we're gonna have but it's more the fact that like I've been thinking about what the the gameplay for that could be and wanted to play with it wanted to try it and so why not prototype it the easiest way to know now the backers who follow the project are familiar with concept art for ships and you know you come up with a concept and then when it comes time to actually
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build it out sometimes the ship can change pretty drastically between concept and reality even in subscribers who have access to subscriber vault can even see different concepts for the same ship drastically different concepts in much the same way designers concept different game systems that you know maybe maybe research will work this way and then maybe it maybe a difference is I know maybe research will work this way yeah so for the ship design a lot of the concept level design happens in white box and well let's put it into engine and actually walk around the place to see what it feels like this actually is probably better described as design concept because even though I'm making a prototype but it's I don't have a fixed
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design that I'm working from what kind of making it up as I go and so we're gonna see what we end up with and perhaps your most famous version of this was a grabby hands yeah back when yeah that led to that was the beginnings of what would become eventually the interactive system which looks nothing like the thing that was exactly originally but gave us a place to try out a bunch of ideas see the things that we wanted to achieve see the ways that those things conflict with each other given like actual use cases and start to have a better understanding when we go to actually make the full finalized design of what is the problem we're solving mention so while the DNA of grabbing hands can be seen in today's interaction system the one one look of
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it is obviously very different what we're going to be doing today is is a similar prototyping of a potential research gameplay it's it's not to say that this is what it will be when it makes in the game but who knows that some aspect of this may in may influence may it may impact whatever the eventual design is it may at the very least serve as inspiration for things we do or don't want to see this the types of interactions that we want to see the player doing or not doing and it's also actually kind of a testbed for some new of the new UI attack that we had that lets me make screens and alter those much much faster than before so we'll do that before we get started any updates on javelin basketball was that the last one we had you on yeah
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that's been asked the community we've had caters on for a couple of these was javelin basketball the last one some one of you guys can I'm sure that YouTube I looked into into doing the the air hockey one was right I couldn't spare enough I know we did try it we did try to do one of these four air hockey for a while then we forgot about that sometime to come back to yeah it's amazing for all of these that we do for every you know every week is an RIT v52a years several 50 about there are for all 50 that you we actually do there are probably another 50 that we attempt to do that we attempt to prototype that we tend to get approve that we attempt to see if we can make work and efforts to the light of day that air hockey was one of them all right so let's go to the lumberyard and we can see our lumber and we're here in our in our format made
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famous by bug smashers yeah hi Mark hanging out in there we are the bug smashers today so you're in the Arab League hangar lots of reflections Angelo is that the the glass sheet are going crazy yeah I this is this is just a big computer so I'm not a hundred percent sure the state of this yeah well look at this wall this wall is nice okay so I have started this a little bit because there's a lot to do for this idea just as a as a basic overview of what I'm going to approach for this is the idea is that you'll have some artifact or sample or thing that you bring over to your research station and you'll put it in the box and from there you will begin the process of probing and performing tests on it
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attempting to find out the its secrets so to sort of in as those secrets is basically a form of like mastermind as near the classic game of like well I'm going to try working rings yeah and and find out how close I am and sort of try to iterate my way towards a solution I have referred guess who that that's right in school I don't actually know that one I'll try out general guess who it do you have red hair no and you put down everybody that does the heads right oh it's a person wearing glasses question yes if I get but do I have that wrong was the name of the game not guess who I don't remember all right so to assist in this I wanted to also like that's not the it's not the end of
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the design I wanted to have it so that we made it it's done here yeah once you once you've determined what the secret code is that you then need to figure out how to achieve it I like puzzles that have multiple tiers to the interaction so this is an example of one of these so we have four inputs here that get shuffled as indicated by the lines and one of them gets overwritten by in this the color white and I'm gonna represent the different values of the sequence with various colors ultimately we would also use various shapes colors are easiest to iterate through because I
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don't need to actually make the shapes so I'll use that for now did you make that circle and square I did it's very impressive I know thank you I've got any formal 3d art training actually a little bit actually if you do have that sculpting the sculpting clay and stuff on your best I see you poppin so what I'm gonna be making right now will take you'll select sequence of four and they will alter the previous state and and iterate forwards so it looks like this one ends up with white white always actually so that this is a this will end up with yeah all weights so I'll have to
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create a results screen and a control screen in order to alter the state of these I don't have the other the other test types currently so I I can take input as to what that should be so for the results screen so this is data for here this is data Forge and talked a lot about data for drove the year um actually I let me bring in the the control screen which I have started this a maybe was asking why did you start ahead of Titans because we only have an hour yeah this is very few game systems can be done also the tools that
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I'm using are new and so they're not as fast as they could be and so there's a lot of just busy working in terms of the way that I need to solve it it's all the problem now that's right you're actually talking right before we started the show that one of the tools that you need it was in the absolute latest build and this build is from yesterday so it doesn't have yeah the thing that you're looking for it so I've made a thing where you can select which one it is and you'll see very quickly why I started this ahead of time because I've only done the selectable colors for this and I forgot the Browns we'll have to add that and I'll show you what that process looks like let me see one of the nice things that we have I think we mentioned
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it recently was the a live update feature which I will go ahead and cover the screen with so hold on you make a change in data Forge and it's updated live inside the client yeah so I need to get the canvas entities put down in UI building blocks I've made the research control screen so this is that thing and this is each of those and I have a
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hundred different things happening on it like yeah so you may order these before we started the show yeah there is just a certain amount of wrote input required I didn't want to spend the whole time say you're just doing data entry and this is the data entry stream yeah so as an example I would and we don't have the ability to copy and paste in bulk right now so this is what that data entry looks like so it's gonna be as exciting as this although I mean frankly that would have taken a lot longer it's a
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I had to go through flash to achieve even as long as this will take this is drastically improved to how it's been and then I'll just do that real quick I said quick but that was a lie it's gonna take a second so part of the idea with doing it this way is that I want to be able to I want to be able to tie research in with the game at large if that makes sense like this shouldn't be its own corner of everything should tie into the actual state of the universe
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and so the idea for that is as mentioned like you start off with samples that you might get from planetside or derelicts or things like that and that's let's ask chat what what what's sample what are we what are we going to be researching today what did we find on an alien planet today we don't have votes set up like we like we have in the past I just want to see some so you see some options in twitch chat and I will pick out whichever one tickles my fancy as it were what are we what did we find on an alien planet what so that's the the what they're saying
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well it's not number one it might be number two just put it that way so yeah guy yeah we're examining some some some alien alien alien poop hmm thank you twitch chat perfect you came through and just as we knew you would before I go on with that before I fill out those two it's not super useful until I can actually change them all the brown yeah so the way that I will do that will be to use the interaction state machine so love the interaction state machine in this is the Select screen that's correct in here we've got
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the okay no this is wrong yeah control screen why does why did I name it select screen if that's not what that does oh I know what that is what are those days yeah so in addition to the idea of picking out like like doing the puzzle I really like what was done with mining and I like the whole aspect of like searching for the the valuable bit of the things and so one of the one idea that I'll prototype if we
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have time is to start off with an array of maybe 10 15 cells which could be damaged and unaccessible if the if the sample is compromised and those would be the thing that you're studying so you select one of those and that will create the puzzle that you can then solve to get the payout and to have a sort of sliding scale of the value of it so there will be physicians of high value in it and if you find a high value one you can you'll know that one of the the nearby cells are likely of high value it will interpolate between them high value booth yeah well high value
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information about this book oh yeah you'll everything about you know where they've been this is a creature that eats everything it's just nothing so it could be all kinds of interesting things inside inside this poop and to my superiors who I sold the concept of the show to and said yeah yeah I mean yes we are doing a show about alien Puna yeah that's just how forward to your meeting this happened notice okay so we are about a third of the way through the show by the way you sure that's why I was so worried about this um so for example we'll need to do check one read this will be able I don't yeah we're not
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gonna make it all the way through but okay one of the reasons I like to do you keep working with dr. Singh one of the reasons I like doing shows like this is because this is the kind of thing that and this isn't a throw shade it if ei or Activision or anybody else does this show that no other game developer would ever do they did it's like I said when we make the joke about all of our programming you know if you watch everything from start to finish you know you have a low-level degree in game development it's I'm only saying that partially and jest one of my jobs here is to expose every aspect of game development and designers are one of the it's I think everybody wants to be a game designer everybody what says I want I want to make I want to design games but very few people have any idea what's actually involved in that so when we get a chance
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to do a show like this even though some aspects of it are perhaps a little more tedious than others with the data entry and stuff it's a those are one of the things I wanted to want to expose I enjoy exposing so what I'm doing now the way that the interaction state machine works is when you perform an interaction you will enter the new state which will determine which interactions you can actually trigger did that twice and so I'm setting up these interactions as being valid when we're in test track one I think I need to do one for each
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actually because that will still trigger the same in the other ones we'll just treat this as easy as this and maybe show us one yeah we'll all have to do that so to start with both of these have interaction links which exists here interaction links and I'm gonna select that and on trigger red I need to give it an interaction to set red so that is this and here we have the default state currently is white I need to create red
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I don't actually have that so that exists in the control screen result screen and touch me let's go find the test screen in the navigator and I'm gonna use inheritance this is the only way that this is even vaguely possible to make just essentially a duplicate of this and I'll make some small changes to it so I'm gonna switch I should trigger red and then in here oops in white I'll add an interaction
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but I haven't added yet because it's hard to talk well I don't normally talk while I do this no it's a it's one of the things that are most impressive about game streamers you know people who do stream on Twitch professionally and as you know it's the ability to talk and do something at the same time as undervalued in so many ways it's it's the toughest are TVs for me to do are the ones where we have to play the game and talk that's why I always bring in like a little ice bomb or somebody else to play the game because I actually can't play and talk at the same time well I'm sitting here quietly trying not to distract you obviously okay obviously so I just I was
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trying to figure out what state to go to and I said it six times trigger read so that'll bring us into this state at which point we want to be able to go back trigger white which I haven't had it yet either riveting I'm sure one of the the things about working with in development tech is like I don't have this name yet and I'll get it when it reloads but so you have to do a little
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bit of working in the dark sometimes okay so this should now be able to trigger red and we'll see should I think I need to reload that I'll do by deleting it and bringing it back into the game let's see the state machine so currently it's in white it's still in life so that didn't work let's I forget what it is okay so to figure that out I'm going to
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go to a test screen red which now it should be in control screen and on my button for a red getting trigger red I know I didn't do meet you I just don't want to spoil it I never changed this target input - why does it only have trigger white in the current state that we're in so
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they mean confirm which one that was currently in current state white trigger read should be an option oh that's why I didn't make it so that it was actually capable of doing the thing I was asking you to do that sounds like how the other day it worked for having said that I didn't actually set it up to do the thing okay inching inching closer okay I'm gonna make a light actually use lights a lot
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to really they're easier to get to here I use lights a lot to just trigger interaction States because they're very easy to see bring it up okay well when in doubt do it in flow graph I'll create a new flow graph and I'll bring it over cuz we also have interaction that's the wrong one that's the one to activate it is interaction activated
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and if so we'll switch will toggle the light on and off let's see what that does not triggering so let's see and oh I'm not dragging anything around it does not receiving that interaction this is going as well as you know now
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it's it's don't feel bad at all about this this is this is exactly what I wanted to showcase anyway this is this is game 2 felony people often wonder why developing games takes as long as it does why it needs you know 50 60 70 100 200 300 people why we make something and think it works and put it out into testing and then find out it doesn't work and we realist rating plenty yeah must be fun we've had plenty of very entertaining our TVs in the past this is this one's more informational it's okay you're doing great if I knew any way to help you I would but I don't
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okay so still doesn't have the interaction listed just weird Thanks see I didn't think that I would run into problems this early do we get I expected there to be problems but expected actually have things happened first so this is this is boring let's not do this okay I'm going to trigger that on I made it I can make a little test debug button on here that will have it change its state and then we could at least play out what should happen and so even
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if we can't actually run the system yet so to do that in Maine I have read and I need to alter the UI graph so there's like a connecting piece that actually associates the component building block and this is just green red and when we're in the red state you want to use that and then I
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want to actually do the thing I just said and make it so that you can ever actually reach that point in the world so I made this run test button which is apparently very premature because we're not gonna make it to that and instead of doing sets state to test status run test I'm gonna do Maine red good news it didn't work one of the questions of the chat says how much freedom is KX have in doing things like this is there normally a design brief meeting this is for somebody who probably wasn't here at the beginning
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nope this is this is calyx running rogue this this is him exploring how he thinks say potential system should work like as a concept somebody how we do different concepts for different space ships and this is also like something that I'm doing for our TV Norma I would normally have something a bit fuller before you showing yes showing it off so I think I need to restart this okay do you regret ever doing me a favor now I regret many many things do you have regrets generally this is that nice so what are we doing right now we're exporting the binary
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which should make the new graph change that I made actually happen and running the game again it decided that it wanted to put the loading stuff on the other screen so I'm gonna might move things around be entertaining are there any any questions that we can we can actually talk about while I'm flailing you do live fine man questions cold is finally gone yes I have a I have a slight persistent cough cough but the the problem with calling all dev is that it's actually shot several days before
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and whatnot so people you know I was I've been fine for since last week it's just you just saw a call there calling all the devs that was shot when I was sick so nice nothing although I think about it that might not be wrong because I made the new red but I didn't actually change anything about it so before I had asked what we should change about it obviously the first thing to do is instead of setting white red Hey look it's right now
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and the shuffle should probably be different and which maybe we'll do it out for track three out and then honey any info anything no boy that they're asking questions that are outside your purview okay I'm gonna make I make line to connect to this so that'll be 250 that I conveniently picked multiples of 250 line for 500 line 3 is fine
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let's change line 1 750 so there now we have a new thing right and to switch between the two I'll make a new button to test that out folks in chat asked do you come up with systems like this often all the time and it takes a great deal of personal effort not to make them constantly fortunately they're time-consuming in my time is not usually free so I end up just working on what I'm supposed to but yeah I actually really love doing this it's just a lot
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harder to do in front of everybody well it's only yeah it's only about 11 people yeah that's it right now it'll be like twenty or thirty thousand on YouTube though okay so now you can switch between the two and if I got the interaction state machine a bit working you'd be able to do that from here so that's something to look forward to also I forgot that these are separate screens which is why the red has that anyway and so now the can be a little bit clearer that the idea is that
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like in this case you end up with just white again whereas here you end up with black black red white and so that is just is sort of an example of how like the making the order of operations matter I think it could be an interesting way of expanding on the puzzle basically because also one of the nice things about that is that if we ended up doing things like making the data that comes out of this like of a certain tier like like I don't know maybe you can sell this data to science vendors and that research data will move you towards
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some like global goal right that'll create some event to trigger and that can in turn result in more of these science module test processes to be created at which point new puzzles can be solved so there could be some that you would only be able to solve up to 80% and you just have to accept that you're incapable of solving this puzzle and take a lower buyout or whatever as a way to like scale things over time for the given players experience I would also want to set it up so that the colors would correlate to like real properties of the thing so like electric objects or objects that are conducted
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for electricity things that you see glowing I don't know what would frequently be blue green or white included in their sequence so you'd have an idea of where to start with that for the people who have just joined this we explained we were trying to do at the beginning you want to give us a dime-store recap on well I'm currently just surprised that it didn't not work it just works differently than I thought so hey you like just turned off didn't it yeah so I set up something different than I thought I do but it's not broken oh that's fine oh no questions which ad is do you usually just jump into the
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engine and start bumping around or do you actually write the stuff out first before I'll write stuff out I have I have the notebook that this came out of which it's just a bunch of like random sketching of like the the idea that's illegible completely incomprehensible but I try I basically tried it out a couple of times and like one of the outcomes Jesus camera J so he can see it oh you just switched where'd you go so what one of the ideas was to have on top of being able to do this system of
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select for sequence types to figure out what the outcome is that an additional level of complexity for higher tier puzzles would be that your four actually duplicate so it's running a sequence of those four and then running the first two of the sequence the last two the sequence and then all those four and I end up with eight numbers so that's all very confusing until you start actually playing with it and it makes it basically now you're playing three games of Master Mind so if this ever ended up being too easy fear not it can get way crazier why great who saves I saw the light on for a
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while I'm gonna set up the does I only said that that interaction one directional and in fact probably doing it in the state machine is my mistake because the state machine is not aware of what is happening outside of itself I get that a lot yeah well that's that's correct actually it's the control screen one that needs to have the state machine lose its interactions did you enjoy working in video games
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before today I loved working on video games right on there's something added here it just it triggered that time but I don't know why magic QA yeah exactly hydrogen light off understand this thing ran and I don't know why it failed to
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run earlier so I think I'm going to disable all of these and then there should be no requirements for which it is this one also doesn't need any although only to restart it to me though being able to do things
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like this is important to be able to now it works I lost my train of thought by being surprised that my thing worked yeah I've completely lost my train of thought what am i doing what's a talk to us about the gameplay situation where this specific mechanic
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could work I know we talked we touched a little bit on before so the idea is generally that I I don't like when niche gameplay is is constrained to being niche game play if that makes any sense I don't like it when the thing that you're doing has no consequence outside of the thing that you're doing so trade and mining is really great because it alters the economy it alters where value is for pirates and people who are protecting things and protecting you from pirates and and also for the price of things in various areas that X the
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way that those things build on each other makes it compelling to me so having this able to link into having artifacts that could be or samples like that could exist in distant regions of space that leads to exploration gameplay the fact that those things can could decay based on if they take damage or maybe they are on a time limit maybe they they need to be cold or something and and they just decay naturally j-jane spread and switch back to the main camera so we're actually we're actually out of time yeah this point JJ so that's how hard it is to just make stuff randomly you see JJ's not there let this be a lesson to you ah well JJ
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all right well we are after this is that every once in a while you get one of these that's okay though you you did you succeeded in showing I'm not necessarily what I wanted to show but kind of the secondary objective which is that making games is not easy well it also demonstrates like our new tech a lot of the things that we're beginning to use like contrasting how long every step of this took and how how easily it broke this is a massive improvement and you can kind of tell that from for instance making the the white module versus the red module like that was added relatively painlessly I think and so
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taking advantage of our inheritance of data Forge taking advantage of the live edit of our UI tools that taking advantage of the interaction state in order to actually trigger data flow and and game flow between random objects that I just tossed into the scene and made earlier today those are all of the most important foundational aspects of making star citizen be able to exist in the way that we wanted to so you know we are wrapped up for today we do have a couple housekeeping things that I'm being told to share with you what not we have another calling all devs that comes
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this Monday just like it does every other Monday a citizen non tickets are of course still on sale and last week we have a follow-up to last week's OCS themed reverse the verse I'm being told that I can tell you that our intention is to go to evocati in the evocati is the first wave PTU early next week of course it's going to be it's going to be depending on when the build is ready and whatnot but you're actively aiming towards early next week to be to get the first builds of three point three point three into the hands of our evocati test flight something a little different that we're doing this time because three point three is potentially our biggest patch yet if you watch the OCS a strain last week you heard about how OCS is touching
00:48:15
every single aspect of star citizen like things that have been in and untouched since 2.0 had to be revamped for the new object container streaming it's like that so everything gets touched because of this for the first time in our development we are going out with two parallel PTU builds there will be a three point three that has OCS and a three point three that does not have OCS so when you hear about that next week when when that happens you know what that that's coming that's an effort for us to basically basically cover all our bases and figuring out where bugs exist in one and where bugs don't exist with other it servers request by our development team and we think especially if you watched last week's RTB the reasons for that are very very apparent
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so expect that hopefully early next week to parallel 3.3 builds coming to ebay cable Connie next week and then of course to PTU and then of course towards our targeted release with excess essence and God so yeah so that process is starting real soon I've KX I think I figured it out yeah so I do need to have like for instance trigger to read and that needs to be in double and linkable and trick to white Thunderball in like a moment and then I need to trigger oh wait no that's not
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gonna work either I mean I got I got the white one working I'm Charlie Brown in here Lucy with a football you know that because I have you can go back and forth oh there you go I still have the light hooked up so that's pretty so actually everything but you got around it trying to do is actually working at this point yes and then I wasn't he done I would need to do that to all of them now so games take time game take time we are that that's we're renaming that episode so I kind of finally come back next week you got questions about the Hammerhead we got answers next week on our TV we'll have the team working on the hammerhead here to answer your questions live so for
00:50:47
reverse diverse life that's a systems designer calyx Renault I'm Content Manager for global video production Jared Huckaby and we'll see you next week everybody you thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library

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