Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Pillar Talk Pt. (4)2

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:02

   hello and happy holidays and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy gardner and i'm chris Robertson hop hell they saw you guys too yes three point four is coming to you very soon TM very well yeah like very soon so it will be live in your hands you know almost any moment now so and hopefully you guys will have fun with it there's a whole bunch of cool stuff in it I mean it's not been that long since our last release so we have the central business district in Louisville which is you know the money went to the Hurston dynasty and is a completely different vibe and feel than the l19 living area that you can be in a hab and the Tisa spaceport which is all sort of where the

2. 00:00:50

   you know the common workers are this is you know the this incredibly grandiose building with huge arch ceilings and it's almost cathedral like inside and it's a testimony to you know the wealth of the Hurston family and it has a new mission giver inside so constantine Hurston is in the the main building and he will give you missions on behalf of the Hurston family we also have another mission giver in Levski down in the bowels someone you have to go fine and called Wallace quim and we've we spent a bit of time getting the various missions to work including the downed relay mission that we showed at citizencon and in general getting the mission givers and their missions to work properly because there were some issues with 3.3 5/6 flash 7 so that should all be going

3. 00:01:41

   then we also have some new ships which is very cool the hawk which we had announced last year during the anniversary sale is now actually in the game you can fly it so if your bounty hunter you're probably pretty excited about that the freelancer variants are now in and that's very cool the freelancer is sort of one of our you know it's one of the original ships that we launched the game and you know it's named Lugh you know it's named there's a nod to freelance of the game but also it's trading ship and so that's a large amount of what you can and exploring yeah but you know you you can you know have a decent cargo and the freelancer max allows you to have a larger amount of cargo than the base freelancer does the duration the freelancer dürer allows you to go along the distances which will tie into sort

4. 00:02:30

   of runs our new quantum drive and jump point mechanics and then we've got the miss which is the sort of missile sort of Cruiser version that can have how much missiles it can blast at you so that's pretty cool there's a couple of little things like 600 a touring module that'll be there and I think the riot call just the the base ones had a little bit of moving around in the cargo section works in it so so yeah there's some cool stuff and there'll be a little bit more stability and support quality of life improvements with comms and you know the kind of spectrum chat stuff turrets so so anyway hopefully you guys will like it and have some fun over the holidays yes excellent so go check that out and we have some news regarding

5. 00:03:17

   squadron 42 inquiring minds want to know about the roadmap yeah no it's been it's been quite way in the making I know that we said last year and we would have a roadmap but it's taking so what took you so long taking a lot like well I mean essentially the team themselves did not feel comfortable sharing the roadmap earlier this year because they wanted to do enough work to validate all the remaining tasks and not just at a high level this is having the team themselves so their various groups down the leads and the team members to look at the tasks break them down can of give s and not kind of give estimates on the tasks so it's a lot of it was a lot of sort of bottom-up working to end up

6. 00:04:07

   with the roadmap we have now so it's taken fair amount of time it became more complex because we also have star citizen to consider so some of the tasks are the same between star citizen and squadron some of the tasks are not some of the tasks are subsets sort of tasks of supersets so we had to get all that worked in our system because the roadmap is a full reflection of our internal zero task tracking system so what are what are some of the went like with caveats what are some of the outstanding things on the roadmap you know I think I said in the citizencon that you know in terms of squadron I mean we've been working on this for quite a long time we're definitely on the downhill slope now it's one of the publishing this you know it's you know we're showing a sort of six quarter

7. 00:04:56

   schedule where by the end of nineteen we'll have pretty much all our features done and then in q1 of 20 we're doing optimization and it's sort of the alpha phase and polishing and hardening phase and the finishing with levels the chapters and q2 would be the beta phase where it's personally just book testing and continue polishing so I'll keep my time free next summer yeah you should but yeah so anyway we with that that's that's sort of our time horizon that we've that we've been working on and it's you know a lot of work but on a caveat basis it's similar to what we do on the PU so you know some of these

8. 00:05:45

   tasks may take longer than we have estimated or there may be some unforeseen problems I will say that the uncertainty the R&D technology aspects are much less of an issue a risk now squadron because the biggest remaining one was really object container streaming we've got mostly that sorted on the PU star citizen side we still have a little bit because some of the server-side technology for object container streaming is needed for squadron 42 because squadron 42 is basically a server and a client altogether but once that's online you know we'll be able to stream this really high detailed world keep the frame rates up which is really important don't don't be beating around the bush of the AI

9. 00:06:35

   there but at the AI is probably the biggest I would say remaining unknown or risk partly because we're going for a really high level of AI we've been spending a lot of time building sort of the building blocks and based off so people aren't really appreciating the potential of what the AI can do so the AI you see in the PU is you know leaves a lot to be desired some of the flight AI some of the fly AI is sort of we've we've been developing that with the new ifcs which isn't yet in the PU but will be in the three five release if I was going to put my finger on one thing that would be a risk on the schedule it will be us executing all the AI mostly because at the moment we have I think about four AI programmers and we

10. 00:07:25

    need probably another three to four AI program is to really feel like we've got it sort of covered Thank You program well I spend a lot of time since I've done that kind of programming I've got a lot of other things that I've been we were so they'd be just as crappy nominate you just in case we can't find that eggs for she I don't have that after to do some programming but but anyway if there's anyone you know on an AI front we are looking for AI programmers or gameplay programs they're interested in AI and we're looking to repurpose of our internal engineers into the AI side because that's what we see is the big risk on squadron V yes so so that that would essentially be the risk

11. 00:08:15

    and then the other risk would just be the amount of time it takes to sort of get all the content in and polish it up does that mean I need like a couple of mega Titans or something to to make this run smoothly oh why don't so I I think relatively in our goal that's why we have over to optimization test at the end but our goal is to make the game itself run pretty buttery smooth you know so the objective would be to try to have gameplay there's at least 30 but definitely closer to 60 frames a second nineteen sixties I'll call and I think we have a good shot doing that because in a single-player game like squadron you don't have all the issues of multiplayer that we have in the PU and as people have been seeing we've been getting really nice frame rates in the

12. 00:09:02

    PU and that's with 50 of the players and you know the issues you have with networking and and the processing that you have up on the server so I think I think we've got a very we will have a you know the performance of the game in squadron will be a really nice smooth fluid experience and that is definitely cool we're gonna hold you to that so there's a few other people will be doing that yeah yeah so so so going through the roadmap with a fine-tooth comb are you sure you've removed all the spoilers because the fans will find them well you know sort of I mean the it's a it's always a delicate balance to share the stuff we're working on and then not

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    share things that will give away the story so for instance other chapters we don't have chapter descriptions because it would definitely give the story away so sorry if they're a bit generic I mean we've we've actually broken the the the one thing I would say is the roadmap itself is kind of set up slightly different than the one for star citizen slash the PU because we have two parts to it one the more traditional bit which is the feature part which is set up a lot more like your you've seen on the PU one where it's you know laid out per quarter the various tasks the engineering tasks the asset tasks are like we're making a character or a spaceship or a weapon or a prop or something like that so you can see how those stack up like you do on the the PU

14. 00:10:40

    one but then on top of that because as squadron 42 is a narrative story game it's got these different what we call chapters and the chapter is really a sort of it can be a it's the equivalent of a collection of say missions that you would have had back in say Wing Commanders days but a you know you can start on a ship you can fly you can be given a mission land on a No ship or land on a location get involved in FPS combat get back in your ship go somewhere else getting a dogfight then go and land on another area getting involved in FPS combat get back in ship come back to your hova land and then talk and catch up with everyone's doing on the crew and that could just be that is that's an example of say a chapter that would be and some of them are bigger than other ones some

15. 00:11:33

    of a pretty epic somewhere a little more contained and smaller and you know those are trapped on the sort of overview page that we have on the roadmap where you can go and you can see where they are at their various levels whether it's you know we're still I'm gonna cut you off now well you just gotta hurry up and finish already like it's my phone it's like telling me about the chapters but you can't really tell me because it's like boiler alert it will track the you know the level where you are like where white box white box playable grey box full production polish which is when everything's in but we're just sort of polishing and hardening the level and so you'll be able to track where those are the combination of getting to the end there well we're in the Polish phrase and getting the features done is when

16. 00:12:20

    the game is basically in beta great so how often you're gonna update that so I can I don't have to well we're gonna wait team well will will will update it sort of with the same regularity that we do with the starters and p1 so we'll just we scrape out your database I think every week and then it won't get updated so I know there's some things on the squadron roadmap things like swimming for example that people are looking forward to in the PU but it's actually not on the PU roadmap so what's the what's the deal with that okay so in finalizing everything we need to get done for squadron there is a lot of various say actor features or ship features that we need it's okay this is going to happen so things like vaulting

17. 00:13:09

    rattling sliding swimming they're all things that we say okay yes we'll have an aspect that you could use some of this in squadron so it has to be working so you had to make sure most of the stuff was already on the backlog but we hadn't sort of fully broken it down or scoped it fully the people felt comfortable making it you know putting a stake in the ground and showing in the the PU roadmap but we had to do that for squadron so now that we've done the work for a squadron they'll reflect across into the PU roadmap so a bunch of the features you'll see in the squadron roadmap will also now reflect across into the PU roadmap because you know obviously things that you do with your character or things you do with spaceships a lot of it is consistent across both games so the work that we did for squadron really

18. 00:13:56

    sort of will help give even more detailed definitions to PU roadmap excellent so thank you for being grilled yes I enjoy being grilled yes every week just to be grilled yes okay in other news if you haven't already go check out our newly relaunched corporate website looking quite slick yes cloud Imperium games comm and we have quite a few job postings there so likewise as mentioned in this quarter 42 its yes you people out there that have the talent and would like to be you know helping us bring squadron 42 to completion and star citizen then yes please give us a shout as our email or whatever it will be out but ya know it's you know we've put the site together to have a better corporate

19. 00:14:48

    site and a good place for recruiting and you know letting people know about the various studios and also be a place that we can put various corporate announcements on yes and we've grown if you look at our studio pictures we have grown so it was an exciting time to to work at cloud Imperium games and there's also some other exciting news speaking of corporate news yes speaking of corporate news there's exciting news what is the exciting news Christmas well you know I sent out a letter to all you guys and it's on our corporate website but we've taken on a investment that I think is going to really secure our independence so we've you know I think you guys have known and I've said from the beginning the camp that all the money that we've been bringing in on crowdfunding is going

20. 00:15:36

    towards star citizen is going towards squadron 42 is going towards development yeah and we've been upholding that side of the bargain and that is something I feel really strongly about but of course is it ongoing business we have some other needs like for instance marketing yeah well squadron 42 we're now sort of on the downhill ramp we're now 18 months away looking like from when we have to be ready to release it and as you tell me all the time yes after start start start start start doing it you know start the preparation and planning and booking and all the rest of stuff for the marketing long before I have actually had this plan for a very long time and it has shifted and shifted and shifted and finally I feel like we might have an actual plan that I can execute

21. 00:16:24

    there you go and then sir then the other aspect is you have been able to you know do that properly being able to fund it without having to go to someone you know there's a lot of other people on the crowdfunding world anyway that have raised the money made the game and then partnered with someone like a publisher to release the game and a wider format but we don't want to do that we've always you know you know I value the independence we've we've been able to have the independence because all you guys would really appreciate it and so for us it was really important to be able to control our own destiny and this is really going to enable us to do that and also have all the money that comes in on the sort of game front the crowdfunding go to the dollar without having I don't never wanted to take any of that money and spend it on you know ads that we would buy in places so this

22. 00:17:13

    for me is the best of both worlds and gets sort of great independence we have security warchest we can we can do various things as well as you know build the best down space sim out there so there you go happy about it yes all right well that is a lot of news a lot to download go check out the road map the website read your letter even have some financials yes that's a big thing to show you guys yes lots of info thanks as always to the subscribers for sponsoring the show and all of our shows another example of an amazing community that would be you that makes my job as marketing a very creative one let's put it that way but power to all of you because I could not

23. 00:18:02

    do that yes absolutely and I second that and obviously a huge thanks to each and every one of you guys out there they're backed and supported the game you know we've never been more excited about our projects and we owe all of that to you yes we do and until next time we will see you around 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