10 For the Chairman Episode 22. May 26th, 2014

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hello everyone welcome to another episode of 10 for the chairman uh for those of you that don't know this is where I take 10 questions from subscribers and answer them to the best of my ability which I hope is fairly good considering I'm uh leading the project here um uh and for those that you don't know about subscribers that's the subset of the people that have uh back Star Citizen that also contribute money every month that enable us to do enhanced uh Community content um so what we're doing here ter for the chairman wingman's hanger some other upcoming shows we're going to be doing uh plus the jump Point magazine and also some of the little kind of fun flarey objects

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   that we're putting in your hanger but um subscribers uh generously contribute money every month to enable us to uh to do a higher degree of uh Community feedback which is great because we really enjoy sharing everything we're doing uh but it sort of pays for a lot of people to do all this behind the scenes so thank you very much to the subscribers um and uh well let's get to the show so uh just a little small thing before I get into the questions uh uh had a kind of cool package show up um a very nice uh long letter here so I'm not going to read it all on um on the show it's from uh uh th the space AKA soul song and uh he's basically a letter um so this is a model of of a spaceship that was found in a box in my old hanger used by my grandfather actual size parameters are probably 24 in meters in

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   length 26.5 width and 6.3 in height um and it goes on to talk about uh the various aspects of uh the ship and there's a little uh diagram of the different areas and stuff if we can all see that it's pretty cool and then there's a bwood model which is actually kind of pretty cool so you know they got the gun turrets on the sides that pivots the engine so they can so twist down into VL uh mode which is pretty cool right so we go down to VL and you got the gun turrets that move around and um so anyway there you go thank you soulong that's very very cool all right and this is the kind of like really cool sort of community involvement that I love the the way that everyone sort of kind of puts themselves already in the world and there's such great fan fiction already going on and people building such amazing ships I mean obviously on the

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   next great Starship uh you can see the level of talent but there's definitely people outside of that that are doing some pretty amazing stuff that you see on the Forum so um it's it's pretty brilliant actually so anyway that's great so let's get to the questions so thank you very much song and um we'll do the 10 for the chairman now okay so the first question comes from uh aie lanth can you tell us what kind of animations are planned for Spaceman uh shot and zero GS while they mag boots are locked down well some weapons have enough Force to knock someone off a wall and spinning into zero g air I can imagine some weapons may even be designed to mess with an opponent's mag boots with electromagnetic pulses to disable their boots so uh this would be really a question for the uh team that's focusing on the first person um shooter which uh will be sort of unveiling and showing

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   some of that stuff later on this year probably at gamescon uh but yeah we we're planning to do a whole bunch of really cool stuff in zogg uh we already have some zogg functionality in which uh when you guys get your hands on the uh Arena Commander the dog fighting module uh you'll actually be able to do some level Eva after you've ejected which is pretty cool um but um we're going to have sort of grabbing onto surfaces and pushing off on surfaces as part of the design and I'm assuming that we'll have sort of physical impulses so if you get a a hit it could potentially knock you off a surface and so I'm guessing if you had mag boots uh attached and you got hit then you would expect to have your boots stay in place as you got hit back unless the force is really big so all those kind of things are planned to be modeled in um hopefully with as highest Fidelity as possible so uh we'll see but we we're actually kind of excited by

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   just even the first person shooter period I mean that's the nice thing about what we're doing here with Star Citizen it's crazy it's ambitious but we're really like delivering three or four games all rolled into one that hopefully people can play for a long time to come uh okay next question comes from Odie uh who asks it was mentioned that the MPCs that you hire for your crew will be more skilled in some roles than others they might be a good Gunner but not as skilled as a pilot will we be able to review the resumes of the perspective crew to get an idea of what role they may may fit best so yeah so I mean essentially the idea is on some of the NPCs that you hire uh you know they'll be different sort of levels of them right the more expensive or the more experienced MPC um is probably you know if he's a pilot he's a better pilot if he's a Gunner a better Gunner and uh and you'll definitely be able to sort of

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   kind of see their um status I mean I think the way to think about it would be you know we're not going to do it in an abstract manner like you would typically see in an RPG where i' be like okay well this guy's got aiming skill of 20 and this guy's only got an Aiming skill of 15 it would be more that you would sort of have the reviews so sort of think of it like you know a hiring board for NPCs like you get on Craigslist or eBay or something and you would have okay you know hey I'm so and so and I love to shoot things in my turret and and then there's a bunch of sort of uh you know the equivalent of Yelp reviews where people would be like oh you know he was fantastic he's a he's a crack Shard and you would sort of get the idea of the skill level based on sort of the price and sort of the the reviews and some of those reviews would be sort of the infiction uh level of reviews for uh the NPC so we'll try and dress up like how

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   good a pilot is based in the fiction of the world um but that will give you an idea so uh you know you you won't necessarily know the behind the scenes numbers of how skilled they are but you'll get a good idea of okay well this is an experienced pilot or this is a rookie pilot and uh you know you pay more for the more experienced guys than you do for the rookie ones um but of course the rookie ones potentially could sort of learn and become uh the veteran guy over time um okay next question comes from dstro who asks I'm just curious about the current relationship between cig and krych currently how much of the Star Citizen build of the engine going back to krych as it sounds like a considerable amount of effort is being put into it from your end Double Precision for example sounds like a massive undertaking for cig and something that c kte would benefit hugely from so we got a really great

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   relationship with kch I mean that you know we share Tech all the time um you know we're always sort of appraised and looking at their newest stuff uh even some stuff that you know they haven't released generally to the public or shown um so we have a really nice prision we sort of openly share stuff so we'll give them some of the stuff that we do back their way and of course we're taking their sort of upgrades the engine uh double Precision uh I don't know we haven't had that specific uh discussion is a pretty big change uh because uh you know the whole engine works in 32bit not double and uh there's a there's a fair amount of things that have to change for that so I'm not sure they would necessarily want to take that back into their standard engine because double Precision really is needed for a big space game but not necessarily for a first person game but we definitely have an ongoing sort of Technology sharing relationship where we go back and forth

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    um okay next question uh comes from uh ganin uh who asks can you give us a bit more information on how player created missions will work can we just put a bounty on anyone or do we need a certain approval how will will information runners or Smugglers know I require their unique skill set that's a pretty big question uh you know there's a certain level of like there'll be this sort of simpler player creative missions where it's like I need to hire someone to escort me or I need to hire someone to take uh you know item or items uh from planet a to Planet B so those are all pretty simple um in terms of uh you know hiring someone to uh you know putting a bounty on someone I mean you can't like in general you know there's two levels are like in the real world

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    like if I decide okay yeah I'm going to pay someone $10,000 to kill someone well I can do that but that's not necessarily legal I would have to go to some under you know I don't know some underworld Hitman and pay him and I can get caught in trouble for doing that um so in terms of like the Bounty stuff I think you know if you're putting bounties on people that you know I'll pay you so much to take out this pirate then you're probably not going to get in trouble with the uee but if you put a bounty you say I'm going to pay you so much to take out my rival uh Trader or you know someone I just don't like in this regulated space then you know not only there's a person that's taken the hit run the risk of getting in trouble but if someone's commissioned the hit then potentially you can get in trouble with the uee uh so it all sort of depends on a sort of mission per Mission basis but generally I I think there would be a certain amount of uh you

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    know missions that players can sort of request from NPCs and then there's the other low level where that you can also request them from other players and then you probably would be able to have sort of a more nuanced mission to other players because obviously you're not dealing with an AI or an NPC um but uh you see the last part of the question is how will information runners or Smugglers know I require their unique skill set so uh well I mean I think it all sort of depends I mean because there'll definitely be cases where um you know getting information or a data packet from one place to another part part of the universe is very important and that potentially will be people that are trying to prevent that data packet from getting there so it really it's sort of like kind of a a courier Mission uh is really kind of what the information uh runner missions are like uh and a lot of

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    times if we generate them then potentially will be say another Corporation trying to block that information so there'll be some conflict along the way um and then you know on the Smugglers uh set you know uh things like a Smuggler or again like putting out a hit on someone which really is sort of like placing a bounty on someone unless you're placing a bounty on someone that's on The Wanted list um that's where you would go to the shady areas on on the various Environ planets so you know uh a lot of our planets have you know like Terra for instance has a sort of more kind of shady um you know sort of Slum area versus a more hoyy toyy area and you would sort of go to one of the back Alleyways or one of the sort of disreputable bars and that's where you would sort of find uh someone that you could sell or buy stuff on the black market or do smuggling missions or potentially take a hit out for you so

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    it'll be sort of kind of based on on the environment and context just like it kind of would be in real life so we just want to really give that sense of flavor to all the locations when you're going around it I mean uh it's not going to be a small amount of work but I think if you get all that I think this will be a much cooler more engrossing world for everyone um okay next question comes from Quick um with a Q so qy i k says when Star War citizen goes live will players still be able to buy UEC with real money and if so how will you be able to keep the economy balanced when players can print their own in-game money thanks to the whole team involved and putting this masterpiece together quick one so when the game goes live uh we will let uh players buy some U with real money I think we've stated before that we're going to put a cap on that uh you know whether it's a daily or a monthly amount it'll be a certain fixed

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    amount that you'll be able to to uh to put into the system and that's really to allow I mean well a couple of things one once the game's out um you know since we're not charging a subscription we need to figure out some way to bring some Revenue in so we can keep the servers up and we can also be adding content as we go on because our plan is to continually add more and more features and more and more content and you know it's space so it's kind of infinite so we can keep on building it out and making it uh you know just you know just a lot more going on there and uh you know we really want to make it very reactive to what the players are doing which which will require you know quite a lot of sort of game master staff and people dedicated to sort of building content that riffs off what the players are doing in the universe so you need money to do that so we are sort of re Revenue plan if you want to call it is uh you know new players are coming in

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    and and basically buying their initial package or existing players uh that maybe don't have 20 hours uh a week to be flying around and and and uh you know adventuring and making money but they've got a few hours on the weekend and you know they really like that cool ship and they just want to fly it and so they don't mind spending a little money for uh to buy the U and and you know the philosophy of the game is that there is nothing in the game that you can only buy with money like basically you can earn everything playing the game but you can you can also purchase some credits and sort of shortcut having to spend the time running missions to win some money in and by the way running missions is the fun part of the game right so that's not like a grind like it would be on most of the games that would sort of have this kind of thing uh that's the core that's the core of what private tier was that's the core what freelance it was but you know we do recognize that there's people like

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    myself who are now older and I don't have all the time in the world and so sometimes you know I don't mind paying a little bit to to for for convenience I guess would be the way to say it so those are the two ways that we think that we'll be able to generate enough Revenue to keep basically the servers on content flowing back into it um but as to the question of whether um it's going to unbalance the game because we're limiting it and because there's also a whole bunch of sort of real world um I guess simulation of Dynamics to the universe so for instance you know there there's a cost to doing business there's Landing tariffs there's sales taxes uh you know your equipment um you know basically has wear and tear over time you can see it sort of get older and then you've got to maintain it and you've got to uh fix it up occasionally so all these things um take money to

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    have happen and and so essentially uh they sort of will balance out even with people bringing new money into the system um these things will sort of take a little bit of money out and then of course the other big concept is that the player base in this universe is only a small portion of what we're really simulating so we we're estimating the player base will be no more than 10% of kind of the economy we're simulating and the number of AI or NPCs that are running around on a big meta basis uh and so at that point you don't have a large group of people like so if someone comes in and and uh you know buy everyone decides to buy some ueec which they're not going to do they still wouldn't be able to bring enough in that would really effectively unbalance The Economy based on what the other um sort of credit sinks are happening in the economy and and just the ratio of real

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    players to um uh NPC players and the fact that we also limit the stuff so that's that's our that's our that's what our plan is I mean obviously we aren't we haven't we're not at that point that so you know it could have some flaws but um we think that um it's a pretty good approach to take at the moment uh okay next question comes from command docks can you explain how bigger battles will work I am specifically interested in how the refueling replacing ammunition and repair works during bigger battles do we have to land on a carrier or or there are some other ways in the bigger Batts I mean that's kind of one of the ideas of having sort of the the bigger ships that have uh sort of Landing capacity so you could potentially land your fighter on board and uh uh refuel it rearm it um uh you know potentially do some some

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    patch-up repairs because the full repairs would have to be down on the planet um we're thinking about in you know not dog fight uh that's coming out right away what we're calling dog fight V 1.1 um that will have some platforms I think Dan was teasing it when he was doing a little dog fight reveal because we have it in our internal test off where you you later in later game modes you could land and then you could sort of rearm and refuel your ship and get back back out there in the combat because obviously some level of the ammunition you use ballistic Weaponry missiles are consumable finite right and then there's fuel which will be consumed mostly by your afterburners and so uh we're going to actually put some of that in the dog fighting module not right away but down the road is one of the things to do and then in the and that's really just laying the groundwork for sort of the bigger battles because when

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    you know players will have a bigger ship like a a frig or you know Destroyer or whatever the bigger ships would be um you'll be able to land and do kind of the same thing and then also we're going to have some level of ships that you know potentially could do sort of inflight refueling or that kind of stuff or would have some level of repair ability so those are all things we're thinking about to try and make say some bigger battles where you sort of have mixed use of arms you got some couple of big capital ships and then some Fighters and people have to do all sorts of uh different things in it it should be uh pretty cool I mean that's one of the things that the UK team will be spear spearheading is sort of the bigger ship stuff because it's a primary driver of uh Squadron 42 so they're sort of working on that as we speak uh as well as helping out on the dog fight uh okay so next question comes from Neo Onyx 13

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    who asks has there been any hardcore discussion on how it starts is and will be funded after the verse goes gold and the Pu is fully operational I fully understand that this question is a tad bit early at this point in development but I was interested in whether there was any progress being made in this area okay so I basically answered this question um when I answered Quick's question about the ueec money because I sort of did it two parts explained why we wanted the real money and and uh you know essentially said what our funding methods were which were once we're live then our sort of goal is to uh bring enough Revenue in by uh new people joining and buying their ship package or um existing players that don't have the time uh to spend you know playing around building up enough money then they just want to buy some cool

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    fancy ship or something so they're going to spend some real money on U on UE but UE is going to be that ability will be limited um time limited for all players so no one can just buy a ridiculous amount uh and of course everything in the game you will be able to earn there's no sort of artificial barrier between something you can buy with money or something you can buy with with uh uh your time essentially um so if you have a time equals money there you go uh so we just sort of view them is fairly interchangeable but that's how we're um that's how we're thinking of uh funding the verse maybe it's crazy maybe that won't bring in enough money uh but I'm hoping it will because I'm not a big fan of sort of monthly uh uh like force monthly subscription I don't mind it sort of being an optional thing that you do um but we'll see but our goal is to Hope

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    uh have something that's strong enough that brings in enough money that allows us to continue to add features uh build out the Universe um you know we've talk things about like you know procedural Generation all this kind of stuff so you know and also just a high level of interaction with the the the the players and make them part of the universe and react to the actions they do and so all that will require you know a decent sized team even after we go gold I mean this is a online game so it's much more a you know I know it's the the trendy thing to say now but it's more a game as a service than a a one-off game that you'll play for a week and then put on your shelf um and so uh you know for us it's pretty important to a right now make sure that you know we've got enough money to make it which you guys have been so generous and helped us uh you know we've got you know a great amount of money and uh you know more comes in which is great because that just allows

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    us to to do more stuff and make it bigger and better because that's kind of our goal is to just make this as cool as possible um and then after we sort of have the you know all the features are in and working you can fly fully around the universe and do all the rest of stuff then hopefully continued Revenue comes in and allows us to just continue to Big it and expand it which is pretty much what you've I think you've seen on things like E online or World of Warcraft um so hopefully we can be in if we're lucky enough we can be in that situation uh and just keep on building this this really cool Universe um together uh okay so next question comes from WS W Kels w k k LS who says we have heard rumors of Star Citizen as an orts also that the arena Commander can be used for it do you have any plans on supporting Esports in the sense of

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    promoting on the website and hopefully more ideas yeah well so I mean actually our kind of thought is um you know it's like there's a lot of potential inside Star Citizen so Arena Commander definitely would be something that would be a place where people could um essentially compete uh and show off the dog fighting skills without having to risk their actual ship in the way they would actually out in the position universe and then you know we've got some other things that we're thinking about you know we've had a lot about Murray Cup racing and we've sort of been focusing we got some Racers and we want to do a race course uh we'll probably release something with Arena Commander not um V 1.0 but um just after that we'll have some timed racing courses and stuff that you can fly your ships in which I think will be pretty cool um and you know both those things could be uh you know very suited to sort of that

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    esport setup I think what we would probably do is because we always like to do everything that's in fiction is to sort of have the Esports part of of it um sort of almost feel like in fiction so if you're competing to be the best dog fighter or you're competing to be the fastest racer you're really competing in the Murray Cup in our universe you're competing in some big fictional you know the Invitational Tournament or whatever for the the dog fighting um and uh so we'll sort of do Esports in our universe so kind of like Inception one level inside something else um but yes we we think that would be fun we're also going to do certain amount of um support for people to watch stuff so not right away but we're looking at ways that we can have sort of Windows onto action so like you can

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    maybe log into the website and see like some cool battle happening out in space and definitely if we have like a uh competition or Esports thing would would figure out ways to broadcast the combat or ways to broadcast the racing and you know maybe once the position univers is up and running you could even be in a bar in the pist Universe looking around the TV and see you know basically our twitch broadcast of that that you could also see um D Direct on our website so hopefully that sounds cool U but that's kind of what we're thinking about um okay so the next question comes from scade who asked knowing that we will be able to name our ships and probably put decals on them I wish to know if those ship names will be unique because if not I'm afraid there will be all encounters 25 Millennium Falcons and 15 Enterprises a day in the pan universe and if the ship's name will indeed be unique then will there be any chance that a ship may

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    become more famous than its pilot okay so that's a good question I don't know uh on the ship naming whether you make it unique I mean in the real world uh I don't actually believe I could be wrong but I think that you know this the you know lots of people could name their ship Chris or Chris Juan uh so we may end up um you know not having it unique uh we haven't made a particular decision about it because the thing is if you don't make it if you make it has to be unique then you get people going things like Millennium Falcon 482 ABC uh which also is kind of a bit immersion breaking so we're probably going to let people sort of name their ships how they want to name them and not make them unique um of course every ship will have a unique ID code sort of the VIN number in our world uh that will sort of identify it um but you know I don't know I think if

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    someone becomes really badass and has customized a certain ship uh then maybe they can become more famous than than than its pilot or are the ships of the same name all right so last question comes from uh furuta who asks what type of science will we be able to perform in the game aside from ship optimization will we be able to perform analysis of the artifacts or items that we find and gather more information about them will there be any way for us to perform tests on new interesting forms of life that we find throughout the verse thanks well we actually have sort of an exploration kind of science ship uh so uh I mean we'll definitely be able to do ship optimization you overclocking all the rest stuff I think there'll be some level of um sort of Explorer artifact hunting uh uh searching stuff which we haven't fully fleshed out yet but we got

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    this whole sort of like Salvage and Explorer mechanic we got some ships specifically for it we're going to have some sort of space hwks and some uh ancient ruins and and ancient you know like U you know space wrecks from long ago space civilizations and so there'll be some cool stuff that you'll be able to get some equipment and you'll be able to take that and maybe take it somewhere else and and essentially get it built into some special weapon that um or special item that will uh you know give you um some abilities or powers that you may not necessarily have with the standard off the shelf stuff so I think there'll be that level of uh stuff I don't know exactly the mechanics of it because that we're still at early stages of uh working it out but uh we definitely want to have that sort of varied feeling right so there's a whole profession you could just go where you're going and exploring and looking

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    for artifacts and maybe occasionally there'll be one or two of them that will be useful and they use for something else or at least you could sell them so um so there'll be some level of analysis um you know so uh we'll see uh as far as life forms go I don't know you know there's the uh there's the the um the fiction in our world is that you know Finding or interacting new life forms is kind of regulated so you're not really meant to be able to discovering them uh we're going to have a kind of fun commercial up and coming not the freelancer one but the one afterward that kind of plays with this idea uh but I don't know so much about like really uh discovering new life forms although we have discussed that when we introduced one or two of the new sort of alien races we we discussing we would actually let let the a player make the

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    first encounter so you know we'll build it all up we would't announce it we would basically open up an area of space and one of the first players that would cover that jump point and go through it would actually sort of encounter this alien race for the first time so but that's not something will be possible for all the players it would be just possible for one player or if we just have a second one another player so uh and that wouldn't be very frequent but that would be super cool where you actually the person that made the encounter was actually a real player and he gets uh immortalized in the galac opedia and you know on our infiction um news um cast so anyway I hope that asks the question about the sence I mean it's still you know still got a little work and thinking to be done on it but um that brings us the end of this episode of 10 for the chairman thank you all for listening thank you to all the backers out there for um generously backing uh

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    the game to the level that you have which is allowing us to make this game at a level beyond what I dreamed what it can be uh which is pretty awesome thank you to the subscribers for kicking the extra money in every month to allow us to do this kind of content and a lot more other content that goes back to the community and I will talk to you next week bye [Applause]