10 for the Producers: Episode 03 (2015.01.12)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hi everyone and welcome back to a third episode of 10 for the producers with a third producer uh I just want to take a moment to thank everybody in the community and all the subscribers that make this possible so I'm Travis day I'm Daren borick I'm Alex Mayberry all right guys so our first question comes to us today from wam Min our producers like project manag with whips and bullhorns aside from CR are you the guys who give the green light for a release we've got our executive producer here who can kind of give a better definition of that sure uh producers are certainly project managers um that's part of our job I don't I don't know that we use whips and bullhorns um you

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   know but we do help set deadlines we we partner with all of our developers to make sure that they know what they need to do they know when it needs to be done by and that there's nothing stopping them from doing those things you know when it comes to a green light process you know ultimately at the end of the day it's it's Chris Roberts who decides you know whether we release something but we all take part in it you know it's a big project and a big organization and there are a lot of voices that need to be heard to to make sure that you know the game is ready to go out yeah kind of nice to here we've got different stratifications on on who oversees what where you've got Alex who oversees everything on a everything on a global level uh and you got me down at the bottom who just sees little small side project smaller scope of projects and Travis is kind of right in the middle mhm yeah IO um we're like one of those

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   Russian dolls you can stack them on top of each other or within yeah nesting doll thank you yeah yeah and you know I mean it's not just about whether something's ready for release we we also make sure that you know if we're crunching people are fed that uh you know if we're traveling people have their their itineries and and their flights booked and their hotels booked so you know we try to make sure that everybody has needs met and that's that's also part of the job yeah definitely actually something you said that's a really good point because a lot of people have this idea that that producers are like task Masters right and and that is could not be farther from the truth it's like yes we deal a lot with tasks but the interest is not hey you where are you at why aren't you doing this it's more like hey here look I'm organizing your life I'm organizing your dayto day this is all you know

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   gives you Clarity and it's really a it's a partnership and our responsibility really is to get things done but we're not the ones who do them yeah and so it's really not effective to run around with you know whips and bullhorns because that doesn't really inspire people to to do great work instead we need to partner with them and make sure that they know they can count on us to to line everything up that they need what we can do to support them make sure they can get get their stuff done right yeah I think it was you that said it's like if you have a room full of producers there's probably not a lot getting done in game development I said that many times all right uh second question comes from eks can you provide clarification regarding the update referred to as double Precision is this only to update Map size or will it allow the game to

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   use more memory as it relates to the 64-bit update so in this particular case when we talk about double Precision yes the goal is to update the map size uh basically with single Precision what you end up running into a lot of times is precision errors meaning that in World space and that's what we're talking about when we say double Precision is World space double Precision it is like increasing the Fidelity of your grid and so when you normally in single Precision have a whole bunch of different things attached like for example the helmets if you guys notice if you get really far out to the edge of the map your helmets and your visors can start to Jitter and shake a little bit um the reason you're seeing that is because they're only about I think it's 8 cm from your face so as you are out say 5,000 MERS from the origin of the level it's now trying to calculate your world

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   position but then maintain accuracy for something that's only 8 cm from your face and as it starts to round things since it only has so many bits that it can store the whole the number in for your position it starts to introduce more and more air and it gets compounded when you're doing things like especially on the visor where it's the origin of the ship then you do a bone transformation to find the pilot seat then you do a transformation to find the character's head and then you do a transformation to curve the Shader of the glass and all of those math problems are just compounding the air more and more and then every frame when it does that you get a slightly different result which gives you the Jitter so that is what we're trying to do and then with double Precision you get maps that are potentially so large that it's never going to be an issue now when we talk

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   about allowing the game to use more memory that's more of a Windows thing and how Windows sees the game so currently we compile the game in 64-bit so it has the memory capacity of a 64 game so it's not limited in that capacity but that is a a Windows standard not a we're doing that in the engine standard that's how you compile it yeah I would say you know anybody that's done a lot of of modding let's say you know unreal or Quake um you know the hollow mirrors effects you'd get when you'd compile a map that's a Precision error that's a case of a Vertex not being exactly where it should be because it's been rounded and it creates an error and you get that kind of a fact I got I got nothing you got nothing next question can you read this

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   one uh this is from jurus Storm what is the process for introducing new game or game ideas is there a formal process like a scheduled weekly meeting where Studio heads can introduce ideas for discussion and approval or is it more informal I think it's both yeah that's uh we certainly have a weekly you know leads meeting where all of the the the studio heads and Department leads meet um meet over Skype and we we discuss what we're doing and we discuss ideas and those get kicked around um you know but then we also have Chris will come up with ideas and tell us what his vision is and then we'll carry that forward we have a design Council that kicks around ideas and then we also have the players in the community we constantly read the forums and listen to ideas that are coming from the players so it's a little bit of everything yeah I was going say

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   one thing I've observed this company is like way back in the day when I was starting in QA I was always kind of frowned upon to put in your suggestion bug but I would say that this company is super open like Chris especially is super open to QA feedback and he's always trying to get QA reports QA feedback what's the balance like what's the feel like so um I think ideas come from all places in this I agree I I've always had that philosophy through my whole career like a good idea can come from anywhere um you don't have to just be a designer to have a great idea um a lot of of our stuff comes organically in anyway right in the middle of the meeting where I like you know what maybe we can tackle it this way instead or you know we found that this didn't work so why don't we come up with this you know this kind of missile this type of gun so there is an informal process to it well and then there's just the process of playing the game itself right I mean we have companywide play tests where everybody jumps in and plays and then

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    afterwards they give feedback and from that feedback we come up with more ideas killed it all right indeed question four you want to read that one now sure next question comes to us from Krell there has been a lot of discussion around the modular design concept and how it relates to the cutless variants swapping cells for medical Bays or for more cargo space Etc can you talk about how it will apply to the constellation variant specifically with regards to the interior of the Phoenix everybody's looking at me so um you got to have the most tribal knowledge regarding the modular system I think you are the ship producer yeah so and uh this is a good question it is something that we talked about with the cutless variants immediately following cutless gate as you might remember um the idea of making modular ships is both well it's more fun for the community

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    right cuz you can kind of buy one variant but then go find or collect or otherwise purchase the component parts to make it into another variant mix and match and it kind of allows for a lot of custom options so the cutlasses are undergoing that treatment uh from Foundry 42 right now when we talk about larger ships like the constellation it's funny cuz we well I don't know that we actually talked about that but that's kind of the system that we're wanting to move to for a lot of the um I call them sub Capital but bigger than a single seat fighter kind of a ship where they'll have uh larger interior spaces with Form and Function so that as long as all of them subscribe to a similar layout on the interior space you should theoretically be able to swap out different functional areas so like say if you have a med Bay that is a certain

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    size and has this number of sleeping pods maybe that's exchangeable for uh Bounty Hunter holding cell area with similarly shaped logic there so that's kind of the next step of the room system and the idea of the room system for the hangers eventually be used on Capital ships but it's kind of a a baby version of that for sub capitals this next one comes from Haiku knives one of the big selling points of Star Citizen has been the immersion Factor we can kind of see it already with the HUD being actually rendered inside the ships and helmets what are some challenges you've faced or compromises you've had to make while trying to make the mechanics have diagetic Universe interface faes so this is where we actually went to one of the developers to kind of get their feedback on on this particular question and we went to our our UI Guru Zan BN and here's what he had to say in Universe

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    projected interfaces while extremely immersive are also affected by a multitude of game and environmental variables which in many cases might negatively impact accessibility for instance if the seat is positioned just a bit too high too low too near or if the field of view is too low vital information may be lost as a result of being clipped off the edges of the player screen if the instrumentation is too small or too distant then readability can become hindered too big and it can be overly intrusive on the viewport these are just a few of the factors we actively take into consideration when modeling the screen and instrumentation layout in the ship cockpits ensuring that the interface remains accessible to you as a pilot while still allowing the flexibility for compelling diversification in styc Cross ship manufacturers so that information

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    comes from Zay bian damn he's eloquent seriously uh but also brings to light how much detail we try to look at the UI on every perspective that if we want to make let me rephrase that the difficulty of creating Huds for each one of our ships has to take into all take all these factors into consideration no it's like you're designing an actual ship yeah yeah it would be so much easier if we did just did a screen space HUD bloody screen for damage and call it a day kind of suck but so much easier but given that each spaceship has its own unique style of cockpit um you got to give Zane much props for being able to come up with a unique HUD for each one of these ships while keeping perspective of how close the player is to the screen how close you are to the Hut how close you are to the helmet and so forth yeah

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    knowing him and Mike Northeast have spend a tremendous amount of time going back and forth on what is all the pertinent information how do we catalog it where do we put it in the player's view space What view space are they most likely looking at most most of the time so it's and how much real estate each thing takes up uh if it's going to be distracting um what what players going to be most likely to reach for in the cockpit that's a lot of stuff to think of yeah yeah all right the next question comes from shinin Once the persistent universe is live how will the patching updates work will the patching be a dump one which just drops everything under the sun to your hard drive or could it be more intelligent and Patch Essentials instead loading new areas changes to them as you explore them well I would say that our our patch or launcher technology right now is just really St

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    in its infancy yeah um very polite way uh we we certainly want to continue developing it so that it is a smart Patcher and gives you the data you need not just everything um I mean the fact is if we just did a the game is huge right now and it's going to just continue to grow so the data footprint is going to be massive by the time we get to the persistent universe so you know we don't want everybody to have to download the whole game every time um but it's it's a work in progress so it's something we're still building upon so looking at other Technologies like streaming things like that you know that's being handled by the devops team in Austin so um you know they have a lot of uh plans to continue to upgrade and evolve the the launcher and patcher so that you know as we continue to add to the game it gets more streamlined yeah

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    it's Jeremy masers group yep yeah I mean ideally I would love to have a system like a game I really love which is World of Warcraft I'm familiar with that yeah it's I think a game that few people know of it yeah um but no I just I mean I love the idea that it is so much more uh targeted and intelligent about the data that it's giving you right and if you if you go back in time in Wow's history it didn't start that way you know it was pretty ugly in the early days um but you know with years of development time you you find better processes and will do the exact same thing unfortunately we have a lot of experience in the company who have been there and done that and um so we're not exactly starting from Ground Zero uh next question comes from Zappa is there or will there be female perspective with regards to design

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    functionality and character Aesthetics uh I think a a good reference to look at is the cutless commercial uh here we see a pilot taking on a vandel side and when she you know blows them up she comes lands in the hanger takes off her helmet and you realize it's a woman piling it the entire time showing that she she's pretty kickass so uh I think that right there is a good indicator of how we want to keep things I guess I don't to say gender equal that sounds so politically correct well no but I mean almost just like reflective of the real world I mean that's immersive right and mean women are lawyers they're doctors I mean I don't it sounds weird when I say it but it's like it would seem odd if you have a bunch of women running around scandy clad or you know some games it kind of breaks the immersion when you're like that doesn't make any sense doesn't look right so I'd rather see a bunch of kick

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    butt warrior women I think um you know realistic is what we're shooting for right um we don't want our females to be portrayed as fantasy avatars right they're they should be an extension of who you're playing and they should look like they belong to the world mhm and I figure how many hundreds of years in the future uh I think differences between or any perceived differences uh imagined or real be negligible at that point yeah so we're yeah we're trying to keep it trying to keep it real in fact uh you know we are are right now finalizing our our our female base model that we're going to build upon and and players will have the option to to pick their wardrobe and swap you know costumes out and and you know environment suits and all that so

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    um a lot of the way that the female will be portrayed will be up to people playing the game yeah and realistic cuz it's a scan not just right not just an artist interpretation of the female body I guess exactly all right what is next keeping it real keeping it real yeah uh this next one is from Mator 720 uh would it be possible or are there plans to develop an application that would allow players to use their tablets as programmable control inputs this way players can input commands like what is shown in a lot of the cockpits yeah yeah so this is that idea that you could have like your is it mic call it the second screen experience or something right yeah and so you could have your your iPad there loaded in and it knows you're in a constellation so there is definitely a plan to do a companion app it was one of the stretch

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    goals exactly and um what the extent of that is and whether it goes as far as to have uh awareness of what you're piloting at the time in the game and be hooked into that level maybe um so yes would it be possible absolutely possible anything's possible with the amount time and Engineering are there plans well we think it' be cool um it's it's a goal yeah it wouldn't be the immediate uh I don't think we need it tomorrow I think the answer is it's not being worked on right it's not being worked on but it's it's it's a goal we would like to you know it's something we'd like to develop and it's it's on our list of stretch goals um and it's something we'll we'll look at and what details that kind of companion app would have is still kind of up in the a yeah I mean it needs a designer to design it yeah and by the time we do work on it we don't know

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    where tablet or mobile technology is going to be at it would super cool though I've be seen the videos of some of the people that have converted like their their living rooms into like a constellation bridge deck and yeah having those and being like having your guys next to you and you're all oh man that'd be I actually saw someone on the forums made a companion tablet app that could actually change their equipment it actually I believe they were actually inputting in-game commands to like shoot their guns while they were in um broken Moon playing against Vandal I I could have swore I saw him actually using a tablet to actually enter commands so the tech is there and you sure he wasn't just updating Facebook or something he could have been well maybe we should rephrase the question then are their plans are you guys working on it no all right what's

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    next our next question comes to us from corrupt we know you guys have to reallocate resources when it's crunch time to get vital items on the list done how do you deal with people's pet projects if they've done all their work by Thursday do they get to work on something of their choice on Friday our Pet Project only allowed in their personal time off the clock well I like the idea of running it like monor you have this many Math assignments for the week and if you get them all done by Friday you can go outside I went to monor school me too third grade yeah um well a little bit of everything I mean I I think the first thing to understand about any any development schedule is it's not written in stone right it you don't just make a schedule and then it all just works it moves around mov shifts yes it changes every

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    day and so you know when it's time for to get something out to the players we have to make decisions and then we have to decide what's more important than something else and we have to say yeah I know you're working on this thing right now need you to stop and we need you to focus on this get that done and then when you're done with that you can get back to this other thing yeah and I guess that goes back to another thing that's kind of well nice and unique about us is we're not shipping a disc so just because this person puts this on hold for the final push to a patch doesn't mean it's never getting done ever and it's cut forever from the game will never happen it just means hey until three weeks from now table this and then we'll come back to it yeah we have a backlog of things that people would like to work or things that we'd like to see implemented into the game and on top of that we try to at least gear tasks towards people's specializations anyway um I mean we're not going to give you know a UI design to someone who maybe wants to program

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    missles so we want to make sure that people who are actually working on the project are invested emotionally and mentally in that particular aspect of the game yeah yeah you want them to be passionate about it and you know I think it it kind of dub Tails nicely with the other question about you know how do where and how do design ideas come about M where you know a lot of people when we talk about people's pet projects generally to me in this context would mean like a prototype for something a design for something and you know KX is I think famous around the office for coming up with all kinds of crazy prototypes of illegal racing and he created that test level ship graveyard where he has his own like call sign insia didn't Murray Cup come up this way yeah Murray cup is one of those things that was initially an idea that was bantti about it was a piece of thing in the lore and somebody was like a racing would be cool and I thought I recall I don't know who did it but I thought I

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    recalled seeing a very simplified version of a race maph that then was the kind of the Genesis of what Murray cup became but originally it was it was sort of a test piece like hey I built this to test the ships and fly them around and then that that sort of evolved into hey we could make that a thing yeah I don't know if you've seen kx's hologram City it's so fun to fly around that it it makes me want to do a racing map in a city what's this hologram City it's like literally it's a one of the backdrops for like I think it's AR Corp okay and then you can just like fly between all the canyons and valleys of the city skyscrapers it' be incredibly dangerous yeah that would be cool all right all right last question comes from tac buzz killer AKA Buzz Killington seems like missiles are currently very powerful and overly difficult to evade using

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    countermeasures is the signature system being used by the missiles and countermeasures in 1.0 currently working as intended or can we expect fixes changes in the near future and that's that's a ubiquitous unanimous yes uh we are no it's working fine as intended never getting changed we like the way fire and forget missiles work period missile gate you heard you guys are joking yeah that's actually one of our our our big priority tasks right now is getting the missile system uh tweaked and balanced enough where it's a lot more enjoyable for players to use and it's not so one-sided yeah it's definitely not balanced yet I mean we put out 1.0 right before Christmas um knowing that it wasn't balanced but the idea was we wanted to get an update into players hands so that you have something to play

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    over the holiday um but you know right now we have people on the floor working on balancing the system and and improving it so the next patch it will definitely be updated yeah and specifically in multiplayer there uh there's definitely an issue with them being spawned on the client but not on the server which makes it really hard for the missile to get attracted by something he doesn't know is there that's true so it it is one of the top priorities well that's our 10 questions yeah done it okay um what do we say now it's uh I think we say thank you for all of your support and your continued backing because without our players we would not be sitting here answering these questions and even more importantly because we are sitting here thank you to our subscribers for making our presence on this camera possible and thank you for getting us to bring bring Alex Mayberry onto our onto our show oh yeah thank you for inviting me because

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    otherwise I would be over there doing with my head in some spreadsheet probably nothing at all like it wouldn't be a producer if he weren't faced down an Excel spreadsheet yeah so so uh I'm Daren VOR production coordinator I'm Travis day Alex Mayberry executive producer all right hey thank you guys I'll see you all next time Chris is out of town and uh thank you for having us again and uh see you in the verse