Star Citizen Live: Q&A Tech Talk

6 September 202400:52:001,280 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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provocative hi everybody Welcome to Star Citizen live I Star Citizen live did you know that I have two different shows one is called inside Star Citizen sometimes abbreviated as ISC and it is pre-recorded and goes on Thursdays other times I have Star Citizen live abbreviated as and it goes on on Fridays uh uh ISC is where we pre-record and we interview a whole bunch of people and we cut them together we make them we make them sound professional sometimes and and put a bunch of gorgeous b-roll U and stuff like that and you put that out and it's about the development of the game and then is where we sit here and I don't know every more every single week I seem to forget what I'm doing
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every like this they're two different shows uh despite sometimes me forgetting which one I'm doing at the very beginning and a host of spectrum and Reddit comments that continuously invert them and it drives me crazy joining us on the show this week uh a special treat a short abbreviated show won't be as long as normal I know I said that a couple weeks ago this is real because this guy's super important he's got places to be is a a chief technology officer of cig uh uh Beno oh you you're not gonna try the last name aren you no no no no no no I was I stumbled on your first name that's just okay like like we used to this thing like like it used to be the oldest
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Trope of of SEO we'd get somebody on the hot seat and they'd forget their own name I don't think I've ever forgotten my own name what is it that I do here again what is it that you do here yeah why don't you tell people uh well uh sure so I'm the chief technology officer for cig so uh I'm basically uh rep presenting uh all the engineers at tur uh turbulent yes but also at cig at this point uh so everybody that's you know even closely remotely uh doing engineering uh I basically care for uh make sure they have what they need to succeed uh Orient the work uh get the amazing task of calling priorities uh and basically helping people make sure that they they win at
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their jobs and that they deliver on what the game needs so my job that just sounds like everything is your fault yes yes and no way it's my fault sure there's always a way up to my fault all right so uh uh benwa has agreed to be on the show this week uh again for an abbreviated show uh so we can add uh we're in a interesting point uh in our development uh technology wise uh server meshing is on the horizon uh we attempted to get a a huge Tech preview going uh uh last night but there were some uh network issues as I understand it um 324 just went out so it's it's it's it's it's an interem moment in our technology history so we thought we'd bring them on and answer your questions so as normal we put a thread up on
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Spectrum we asked you to submit your questions to Ben wall most of them were about things like where's my spaceship or or what or what can you tell what can you tell me about this feature and what not that's not specifically what we're here to talk about Ben W with talk about Ben talk about with I don't know did you know that I'm not sleeping well so we we we collected your questions uh we went through them we chose the ones that are appropriate and we're going to go through them now uh so the first question I have been W is simply we we've released we recently released Alpha um how' that go well uh it's an interesting patch let's just say that
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so 24 has a lot of new uh uses to some very large systems right and so uh some Foundation system patch foundational systems yes so systems that have been in the game for a long long time uh getting their first update yeah exactly and uh so the it's been a bit of a rocky release uh simply because the there are some issues that happens when uh more players are present that affect core flow of the game right so anything that affects you retrieving a ship or you know leaving uh The Hanger or things like that are are you know instantly high priority um some of them work well you know on internal builds
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and then when we get real players on it there's always something new um in this case uh for 24 there's a lot of of issues that happen related to cargo elevators freight elevators the new hangers and N Flow and so we've been hot fixing quite a bit uh figuring out what was going on some missions didn't work for the same kind of reason and so we've been uh kind of uh analyzing data and hot fix you won't even say the name ATC well yeah so let's just say that there like I said there are some systems in the game that are complicated right that date back to a very long time right ATC is at the core of it it's it's one of them show me on the doll where ATC touched
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you oh my God all over but the uh and so yeah ATC Transit you know are our systems that you know there any issues with these systems are debilitating instantly and so uh you know it's not it's not a case of if it works 60% of the time it works every time uh it's it's a case of if it doesn't work 1% at a time then it's it's very high priority to find a fix so we've hot fixed a lot of stuff in the last couple of days there's more coming from the gameplay teams obviously uh some changes to how we deal with obstructions in the hangers are are coming as well which is uh has been one of the most problematic issues like uh the the checks on that side were a lot
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too I like to say hardcore uh which you know would cause some a lot of side effects and cause some hangers to break so you know we're in the in the process now of changing all that stuff to release the release a little bit the hold that ATC has over over clean up and you know how it prevents some stowing so there's already a bunch of obix that went live for that so hopefully that will alleviate a lot of the issues people have been running into uh wood hangers specifically but otherwise like uh 24 is a super interesting patch for a lot of uh reasons also because the we've introduced a new metrics uh to our to Star engine that have launched in 24 so we have now some a lot more information about the state of the game servers and
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how they perform uh so we've instrumented a lot of things in the engine not and to be clear we've had metrics before uh this is more about long-term metrics that we track over a long period of time so that allows us to really correlate uh important events right like an area streaming in causing problems certain game components costing us you know frame time in certain areas and so uh I like to say that these new metrics are like a if optimizing the game is like a large corn field uh We've the tools that we used to have to do this were very optimized very great microscopes right but now with these new metrics we have a radar that tells us exactly where to look for uh
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and drill down and and so I'm hopeful that with 24 we already got a couple reveals uh just seeing you know the live release roll out with these metrics so I'm hopeful that that that's going to bring forward a lot more improvements yeah so that's why I'm excited about it it's one of those things where I I it's hard to see it now but there's but so much of what we're building towards with the way that freight elevator play into pyro uh and and and yeah stuff that you're going to see at at citizen con later this year NE next month six weeks um are all based on stuff that's in 324 it's it's it's I understand it's rough now and stuff but it it is a foundational patch uh that will be built upon and will and will bear fruit in
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future releases uh all things we yeah one of the one of the things that madebe I don't know if it's it I don't know if we've communicated this this way I mean Chad probably did outline this in one of the insights our citizen but is that the the tech behind the way the hangers function is actually an an it's it's an instance Interior right which that this is the first use we have of the instance interior system but you can imagine what we'll be able to do uh with that technology moving forward um you know I know that some of you guys have encountered uh ghost sounds when you go in your hanger like you can hear other stuff from other that's because in reality the hangers are superposed on top of each other and an instan uh in place and so when you go to
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your hanger there's some all all just qualified as black magic rendering cing that happens that you're basically in your hanger that's what you see right now there's a bug with audio that's why you're eating you you've heard some audio from the other Interiors but the reality is all these these hangers are actually on top of each other which is a when you start thinking about it it's a bit weird and then when you request your ATC Gateway that's when your actual instances is moved into place so you can exit and enter and so that Tech will be will be able to use that with uh throughout the Universe you know for a lot more more things for for instancing interiors which is super key for a lot of the gameplay we're trying to do all right so we are 10 minutes or one third through our scheduled program where we got one question down so I'm going to skip uh uh uh you you tell me if you tell me when we get when we get to the
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30 minute if you can stay later or whatnot but I'm I'm going to try to I'm going to skip to some of the more pertinent questions here to make sure we get them in um server meshing so uh uh obv we obviously we had a series of tech previews earlier this year um we were we're supposed to start one up last uh last night UK time uh we're hopeful to start one up again today um a lot of folks are I'm going I'm going to combine three questions here and get and get a broad thing here um what are we testing for now why is the gap been so long between between Tech preview tests for this and is this really working as well as we hope yeah so the Gap I'll start with The Gap right so uh yeah later in
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the Spring end of spring we did a couple of of of good tests that gave us a lot of good data right so the what we what we've been trying to do on the Ming side is be a bit more pragmatic and methodical in how we approach the development and so uh these tests really gave us a lot of data right because of the way we conducted them we were able to try different mesh configurations uh look at performance specifically on the hybrid uh which is the replication layer Service uh and uh to be to really be able to hone in on what we need to improve in order to get the scale that we want and so what came out of these tests in the spring uh was that there was uh already things that were touching on the performance of the hybrid and uh the game server
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Communications that needed Improvement and so uh this is what we call the uh the component called the nmq the network message Cube now that's a uh there's a lot of chatter online about you know there's a replacement thing and it's called is it rabbit mq whatever no so that we're not even in that realm we're talking about really the networking component that transmits data between game server and client game server and hybrid hybrid and Game servers it's like this think of it as the the communication Library underneath it so uh like all games that Technologies using UDP trans uh uh transport to get you know uh eventually consistent updates out uh as fast as possible now the network message queue had a couple of issues uh when it got a lot of data
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in a very short period of time so these spikes would cause uh and that's what we saw in the in the in the final uh Ser of mhing tech previews was that the uh when large areas would stream in and a lot of players would join in and leave at the same time uh the network message CU could go into a tailes spin where think of it as a a drain right and you're trying to put stuff in the drain and at some point if you exceed the bandwidth of the drain then water starts filling up now the way that that manifests itself in the game is interaction delays uh so you know pressing F trying to get in the ship and it takes seconds before the system reacts powering on ship takes forever uh you know now I'm not talking about the one-offs because there you will you can have interaction
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delay in your game based on your connection that can absolutely happen so it's influenced by your machine your connection so if you're playing on a 486 without the turbo button on a satellite connection you know you you might get interaction delay right but in this case we're talking about widespread like when an entire Shard gets uh into that state right so that's what we saw in the tech preview so that we had to go a little bit back on drawing board and actually Fast Track one of the refactors we want to do which is the introduction of a replacement Mage Q now we call it replication message Q replacement message Q kind of you know we've basically called it rmq and so this rmq is a new implementation of the of of this that is has more abilities to adapt to higher bandwidth and react to these
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large uh these large message uh pushes that happen when we start stream in large areas or when a lot of players are coming in and out of the game rapidly and so what we're testing now is rmq in a server mesh setting so for you guys who don't know 324 half of the servers on live currently run rmq the other ones are running nmq still we've been Gathering data across both of them to see uh the performance improvements the gains so far those have been really good uh a lot of really good improvements uh and so now we're we want to test this in a server mesh setting so what changes in a server mesh setting is that now the hybrid is going to manage more than one game server that simulate these key areas and so there's more traffic going
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through the the hybrid for this at Key moments and so that's what we want to test with this next uh set of tech previews so what our hope is is that the issues that plagued the 800 players last time where there was a lot of interaction delays right also some of those tests had a lot of game server crashes uh at the time that we did the test but in this case uh we're we're hopeful that all these interactions delays will be uh you know basically gone from the this bandwidth side of it of it so that means we we can get to bigger shards and the experience is going to be joinable across that the the thing that actually did work really well in our uh spring test was the actual server maching Tech itself so Authority transfer management of territories all that stuff was
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fantastic a really big success but we did need to take a little bit of a of a sideways step to optimize their rmq which is now done and also getting Mission uh tested right now by you guys on 324 so that'll be new information to people who at this moment here that one half of the 324 servers are running on nmq and one half are running on rmq is there has there been a noticeable performance difference yes uh overall like the the so we track we track some of these interaction delays uh and you'll see this is a common theme that I've been pushing quite a bit is that we need to measure a bit more of these things and so on the long interaction uh we've been looking a lot at the amount of events uh duration of
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these events which players get them and so we're able to see a noticeable uh Improvement on that side there are still uh you know some interaction lag happening but uh they're not systemic anymore in those other causes that mentioned exactly yeah exactly so and so that's cool the thing that's also nice about this is that we have the ability uh you probably noticed especially with 24 that we have a new uh set of ways to deploy and Canary technology on live to Mission test it so not only are we doing Tech previews when it's you know necessary but we we also are throwing you know tests so sometimes you might be you might end up on a server that's running something new and you don't even know about it but we know about it because we're looking at all these metrics to make sure that the new tech works as expected and if it doesn't we
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can backtrack stop the canary things like that so we've been doing a lot of that in the last you know uh for the entire 24 cycle really I want I want to ask a follow-up question it I feel like I have to here if there are people that are just we all know that every version of Star Citizen is a test bed even the the full live Alpha is that's what Alpha means it's a test beted evocati PTU Live tech preview whatever you call it they're all some level of test bed yeah there are there are people that are just trying to log in and play right now and some of those people are going it sounds like some of those people are going to 324 with rmq and having a better experience than some of those people are logging in through no no fault of their
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own are going to nmq servers and having a degraded do we have a timetable for when we just switch all of them over to rmq so we stop now the interesting thing current currently for the servers running nmq uh we're not seeing heighten interaction delays right I guess just comparatively between them uh we do want to keep going at it so we're being prudent right so we've we started with a couple of shards then we moved on to a quarter then to a half right and so uh as as this is more stable it's very possible that you know within the release of the next couple patches all servers will be running uh rmq I mean at this point there's not much uh stopping
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that from happening it's just uh Prudence to make sure that there's no new issues that would come on right you know it's like if you replace the net code for an entire game right like the the there might be side effects you know and then the typical exactly invisible player you know new crash on whatever you know bad handling of slow connections you know it's responsible not to just switch everybody over it exactly exactly so nmq does work well we know where it falls down and at what moment we can also identify the shards that do run into this there's a there was a bit in 23 of an accumulation in certain areas that were that we noticed shards that were a lot older had this accumulated uh uh data and it's not persistence data necessarily but it's it's based on the state of the world where it would transmit more data and
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that would cause some more a heightened state of interaction delay and so uh that really clued us in a bit more our plan to do the RQ was the right one okay um two-thirds of the our goal our goal is to roll it out to everybody as soon as we can that's for sure all right so again I'm I'm I'm going to the big ticket once because now we're two-thirds of the way through uh desync yeah what the well completely related uh I mean not completely related that's not true that's not fair so the the network uh transmission layer right uh you know games server game client client does interpolation right so as your ships or your actions move the your actor so your character and your ship uh when you're actually poting a ship the
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client does interpolation about your movements so it's trying to predict what server will say and then the server comes in and says yep that's what it is and that comes from the network CU right so obviously when we have uh congestion on the network it's going to cause some of this but it's also uh server uh FPS of course has a very large effect on this right and so uh desyncs are combination of factors right that when you see a desync it's you know could be because the server is simulating a piece and he's he's back in time a little bit so he's skipping time steps well he's not skipping time steps it's not the right way to do it I'm trying to make it simple so we don't go too deep into the weeds but think about it this way if the server is not running at a very decent frame rate then when those frame rates
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dip uh the effect will be some kind of level of decn for certain kinds of of of items and so with the rmq we Hing on some the stuff that's related to the network transmission that's will help definitely and with the new metrics 24 that helps us to really hone in on what is the cause of the cost over time on frame time where is our frame weight what resources are being used uh what resources are being allocated so the the thing that might not be clear uh when you look at the game but uh so the star engine is really good at streaming stuff in dynamically and streaming it out dynamically that's the key feature of the engine uh but that also has a certain level of cost so depending on what players are doing in the game the
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servers might be doing just fine right uh you know certain areas are just super easy but then other areas stream in and then they come they become problematic and so that's the that's what we're looking at with those metrics is to see what areas and what entities in those areas are costing us the most so that we can optimize the things that really affect those desyncs in that gameplay uh literally so right now the improvements we're getting there is several engine fixes uh or optimizations I should say uh and then the network Q replacement is going to help on these things quite a bit okay so I like we've said a couple of times this has been that this has been the truth for as long as I've been here for 10 years as far as mentioning whites um a bug doesn't always have just one cause sometimes the same this the
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the manifested effect can actually be caused by several things and that's what makes bug smashing so hard is you have to you end up finding this cause and then it still happens you oh this also causes it and then you then it happens half the time and then you find something else is oh this also causes it the same is same goes for desync performance and stuff like this some sometimes it's this that causes it sometimes it's that yeah sometimes it's a like I can speak to one bug I I know you guys like bug smashing but for example uh at the launch of 24 uh we start getting reports that the original intro cargo missions were no longer functional and so at first you know shock like what's going on you know it's not like we we haven't tested this flow at all we've been running on PTU for a while plus internal testing so
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what's going on so we start looking into it and so long story short obviously you need to discover things one by one but long story short uh a lot of players on live compared to PTU will abandon missions go offline during missions uh cancel missions uh and so the cancellation flow of the missions would leave the cargo boxes in these inventories that we use for the missions that are shared and so these would accumulate uh all these cancellations and it weren't being properly uh destroyed and so at some point these inventories reached a point uh per is I think it was per location if I remember right but that there's so much standby cargo boxes waiting there that your box is further down the data set so uh that
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and that code didn't assume that we'd have that much in those vories it was never meant to have that many items we're talking about hundreds of thousands of boxes and so at that point you would not find your your boxes because and so you couldn't start your mission because those boxes were way further down uh and this was completely based on accumulation of cancellations of you know players abandoning missions when they're on them or things like that's a fantastic example of something that doesn't happen in PTU that does happen in life because in PTU everybody's focus is on testing the mission so everybody accepts a mission and and and the majority of people play through the mission because they're they're trying to complete it because that's the test correct and then you get to live and you get a completely different Behavior so it's it's one of the reasons it's always it's when people
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ask often why did you push it to live and stuff like that it's because many many times this is just one example that's the only way we find the the the the outliers to Big Ticket things um and and I mean shipping patches too is is a very it makes it is complicating the development in general uh so like I call it the cost of shipping but you know developing developing developing right is good but when you go to when we give you guys a patch to test and we get give you guys a patch to play uh that's where a lot of new issues are discovered for the size of games that we have even PTU like you mentioned like people recopy uh they they have a behavior that's you know it's not their normal behavior
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doesn't go through progression they're not cutting in the middle of it it's like a it's a lot different and so shipping these patches the cost of shipping is enormous uh but it is uh very rewarding in that we then Harden you know in the first couple of days like I mentioned uh in 24 like was to scramble for to oh we need to fix this immediately and so a lot of you know kudos to the teams that were pushing hard uh to get those hot fixes out but uh that's basically the I think it's shipping these patches like requires an enormous amount of energy right and it's absolutely worth it but it's it's where you know pushing it over the hump at some point you need to make a call right because the longer a patch stays in this limbo of like we're almost there and we
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are we are we going to discover something else at some point with the model that we have with the our game being Alpha we have to we have to move it over the H get those last issues sorted out so we can continue development because internally like it's like a a bunch of freight trainers right like we got this stream of development this stream of development this this release is holding the the rest of the developments at some point we no longer have a choice we do have to move forward um last question about performance and stuff we talk desync performance like this the different causes um server frame rates are are are one of the the the obvious things that that players can often see they can they can turn on the we also share that information like we reported to client so you can see it with our display inform yeah so one of the
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biggest Defenders of server frame rate is also the reason why in 324 when you put something on your T when you put your gun on your table or something on the table it starts bouncing and flopping around and driving everybody crazy uh physics sure uh how do we how do we get the server frame rate up is is is is is it just refining refining refining physics is it buying bigger servers uh better servers and just increasing the cost of running the game to an to an unmanageable thing is there it the server meshing distribute the load across it well and then that'll get us higher frame rates like like what how do we get server frame rate up well so so
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you're right like our our game servers do perform a lot of physics calculations and a lot of physics uh simulation that's the nature of the game right uh uh you know thrusters uh ship simulation like we we track so many types of geometries in the physics engine it's it's it's crazy like we have a really great physics framework in the engine uh for sure like the the most immediate gain there is going to is server meshing for sure like we've seen in our play test significant uh frame rate increase across the board for areas that because you have less physical entities right uh in general so that means less geometry less allocations less simulation uh you know think of the
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server frame rate as a as a bunch of phases right and it's the engine is extremely well multi-threaded meaning that we can do a lot of things in parallel but the challenge there is always determining what we can do in parallel that doesn't have impact with other things so what can we actually simulate that doesn't depend on anything else and so that's true of entities so when we do entity pass or or what we call an ecus update so that's every frame and it's true of of physics so and it's true of networking so all these phases at some point need to wait at the end of a frame for everybody to be completed before it com up and so obviously this is all bound on entity count and also physical entity count so server meshing is the from the top is
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going to reduce that count by a lot because you have way less areas to simulate so less entities to simulate means uh you know um the that the overall weight time across the frame will be better and so that's the first gain for sure right and then we can control that granularity granularity as our machine technology moves up we can control the zones the size of the zones that we want to simulate uh now that doesn't mean that we can't have an area that's filled with something and is going to have a high you know either Network or uh engine cost or physics time cost oh yeah because you know happen for sure you know when we increase the the player counts to 800 all 800 are going to go and CR themselves into the same 890 jump of course of course and the and so that's a
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bit why you're going to see some Jitters especially you know with cargo we're putting a bit more on the gameplay side uh we're putting a bit more of the physics uh on the spotlight because we're using them to move you know with tractor beams moving boxes uh things like that and so of course we're we're looking at improvements but the first one uh well metric has actually already given us quite a bit of very interesting things to look at and so that's I'm very hopeful uh you know that that our the radar I was talking about there is going to you know allow us to find even more optimizations there that we can do there's always optimizations guys by the way it's always a thing uh but server meshing will definitely help quite a bit we've seen that in the last test like you know even with the very large shards
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servers were running on average a much higher frame rate uh than our current game shards so I'm I'm really hopeful for those those gains because that's going to be a game changer for the game like obviously performance for the game you know if we gain you know one millisecond on frame time that's one millisecond directly to your gameplay right so for sure like server optimization for Star citizens is as is at the top of my mind uh when I I synchronize with game team all right so so server meshing optimization obviously you know and I when I mentioned physics that that's not me throwing the physics team under the bus that that's me as Ben Wa said recognizing how much physics simulation we do in our our universe um is there anything else we we can do just just
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optimize and and distribute the load across multiple servers correct there's also obviously content optimization so uh you know uh like you mentioned there's always more than one cause right so optimization is when we talk about optimization because you mentioned one thing in your question which was oh do we just get bigger servers right there's a limit to that yeah uh a limit that we've uh you know I don't want to say we've reached it we're not there yet but there's there's still a a server size that makes sense right in terms of cost cost per player and operations in general right of of something that makes sense and so the when you do optimizations right you need to have box to fit in right so if you're saying our budget frame is x amount of milliseconds well then you need to optimize towards that and you
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need to touch on everything it's never just one cause or one thing and so obviously how you multi-thread how you parallelize the work across every phase so that touches on every team but then there's content as well right like a good example is the first time we put cargo boxes in the game I forget which patch at this point I'm bit losing track but the actual one seu box was composed of like 30 some entities which was like they look really good oh was such a dumb box but you know when we looked at it with the scope it's like okay yeah no we can't do that and so content optimization is the other pass of this right which is reduce the entity counts try to be smarter about you know uh how we construct objects uh object
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containers streaming is also one you know we streaming things so the other area of battle on the server optimization front is once you have Ser frame rate so you have entities loaded you're simulating them every frame that's one one area to optimize the next one is putting stuff in and out of that simulation so streaming it streaming data in streaming data out and so there's these phases that every entity and game component go through and uh those are you know these components are written by game developers and they do different things we have I think over a thousand game components they're not all active but registered roughly a thousand different game components um and so each one of those have seven phases they go through in their life cycle two of them are really important uh it's uh they
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call register and unregister and so this is when a game component that's attached to an entity so entities have components and entity is getting loaded we need to run the phases on the components so that those components when they register that's where they do oh you know I'm a security component I need to register with the security system and let know of the AI in the area what's going on and things like that yeah those happen when a spawn batch appears and so the what people refer to as the spawn cues is when the server needs to spawn things right that is a cue that is basically processing these phases to put the entities into the engine for simulation and so that's the other area of battle is optimizing these phases so that the spawn is faster and it's sharper and despawning is the same right so you
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finish a mission you leave away we stream out we need to get this out right and so that's the other area of optimization in battle that also has an effect on gameplay that we're really diving into uh with these new metrics yeah I'm happy you brought up the content optimization in addition to feature and service optimization uh one of the recurring uh criticisms sometimes valid and we deserve it and sometimes not is how often we rework a thing uh uh there's been three or four versions of the freelancer for instance and there's a really good reason for that one but it's it's and that's because we discover inefficiencies in the way it was built the first time uh not because sometimes because of fault sometimes because there just wasn't a better way to make it then
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and there is now and stuff so so R so revisiting that reworking that allows us to make it more efficient the the freelancer famously gosh if if oldtime backers will remember I've told the story before but if so if you've heard it I'm sorry uh there was a there the second version of the freelancer had hund uh 200 rivets little rivets that went around the the the panel lines and the the the artist who built it for us it was a third part it was a third party client at that time because it was still early days they they copied the rivet from the concept model instead of I don't want to I don't want to spend time remaking a Riv and then just copied and pasted a concept rivet over the entire ship 200 times and so a single freelancer now had a greater resource cost than the entire
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Idris in Squadron 42 and folks for the old hanger module days remember if if you if you owned all four Freelancers and you loaded that up when they got remade your your hanger module was a slideshow that was it and stuff like that I remember also there was a a thing with the original cutless black yeah first cutless that if it would be in your frustum view that was it like that thing was like you know I don't know how many polygons it was it was a crazy like assembly originally but yeah content optimization is a big part of this right and it's uh it also the hardest because the universe is very large right so when we talk about content optimization absolutely box as an example but we're talking about you know harvestable asteroids
00:38:57
plants AI characters your character like everything right needs to be looked at under the scope to go like is it under the entity budget is it you know uh draw calls uh because the client performance also important right like we're you know we're talking about server stuff now but the you know your client also needs to render that stuff right and so uh content optimization is a super big part of this uh that you know we have to get a lot better at in general uh for for because our our our approach is always to make things look great and they do look great right but the then we schedule time to optimize it but sometimes you know we have to because of the nature of our development we have to put it in one patch and then optimize it in the next one and so that does cause some some some frame drops at some points but you know we we make we make
00:39:47
we constantly make improve improvements for our level of detail system and stuff like that uh we are over by 10 minutes and I'm sorry I'm gonna I'm going to keep you for two more questions all right and I'm gonna I'm gonna say this while you're live so you can't say no without looking like a that's okay okay um obviously turbulent got their start with the project building the platform building the the the the the website yeah um I want to see how how I want to phrase this this isn't a question from the thing this is this is my question I've got you here you're on the hot go hey come on on I'm ready um one of the one of the of the many annoying things that
00:40:35
exist one of the most annoying for for for for me and for many people is that these items that they've pledged for the these smaller items that they that they get on the website uh that are that are rewarded from events like not they get lost they fall through the cracks they they they they they they they disappear into the unknown through no fault of of people's Lo and there's no way to easily recover that in the verse we've been talking about this idea of pledge item recovery for a while now um uh it was actually last November uh when we first uh really started to talk about it it did not arrive in 324 like like we and a lot of folks hoped can't is there anything you can tell us give us some hope uh well is this will it come out tomorrow please uh
00:41:27
so the the in terms of the uh item recovery in general right the the you know there's been a lot of discussions in 24 which was to be honest very interesting for uh you know myself and the design team mostly to read uh was the different opinions about the item kiosk right and drawer no drawer access to inventory I mean this is still going to go go on right and now that we have to at least one release done with the current system but I'm not saying this is the final one at all but the that's one of the reasons for why the item kiosk exists also right was to basically uh give you guys access to get your items back right and so I don't want to say when the feature is actually going to drop because I don't really know specifically when but I can tell you that the adding all those kiosks in
00:42:15
every location getting them hooked up uh you know this is and getting the actual recovery part we had to take it out at 24 because obviously 24 had to go at some point right and there was more pressing uh you know development and issues to solve with that so we have to make that decision but the the actual kios themselves are already in there I mean you see that in thee now they're usable and so that means that that feature is in a good place now to be implemented and and be added in a patch I can't tell you which one but I can tell you that that's we talk about that stuff all the time uh about hey when are we going to close the loop on this when is it going to land right the in terms of the the database work two on the back ends that's already ready to go so it's really about you know when can we get uh Cycles from the game teams to get that
00:43:03
in there and I I do agree that's for me is also a bit uh that's a pet peeve of mine like being able to get your items back especially when they're unique is a Super Key so yeah I mean I I use the term pledge item recovery but it's really unique item recovery it's the thing yeah yeah it's you know the the ones that you only have one of and that are important now that that said there are plans you know for how this is going to work work for Star Citizen not just during the development but as a whole right because uh you know there's there's more and we're going to discuss about this I think at citizen g a little bit with some of the uh things we're going to be showing but there there is a a larger plan on how purchased items are going to work and how that ties up to the the gameplay of the universe and so there's going to be more updates on that
00:43:51
for sure okay um but not tomorrow not tomorrow fortunately okay uh last question is just sort of a personal we've been talking about a lot of tech stuff here today yeah um you and I go back 10 years now at this point um there was a time when you know it's it's I was one of I was one of the few people and at cig that interacted regularly day to day with with the turbulent folks you're now you've gone from founder and CTO of turbulent and the last time we had you on the show we knew this transaction was going was happening but we couldn't tell anybody yet uh which is why we talked a lot about the history of turbulent in that show by the way um now that it's happened and now that it's gone through it's still going through you know it has gone through but
00:44:39
the after effects the the repercussions of it are still happening um how's that been how's that been for you going from CTO of turbulent to CTO of all of cig sure to to going from a web development platform to full game development yeah thing I mean you know ultimately it's software right so for me it's it's it's I'm a bit of a natural uh there it's been a crazy ride for sure in the last year going from you know I'm going to use General numbers here like 100 150 you know maybe engineers in general uh to like you know the amount that we have at cig and different teams the thing that I find the most satisfying is that we have so many incredible talented engineers at
00:45:28
cig like from our engine team graphics AI audio uh tools uh R&D groups gameplay teams uh you know VFX VFX programming all these like our our teams are so talented it is crazy right and so it's really an honor to have the opportunity to try to make their lives better right uh improve the internal processes that we have for our Engineers uh make sure they have career paths at cig that they're that they're fulfilled that they work on things that matter right so one of the big roles of of a CTO is to make sure that we're working on the right things right that we're not you know just developing and then hoping for a result that we're actually
00:46:17
driving for the results that we want uh making the right calls across that so for me it's been very very fulfilling also very difficult because my you know like the the the context switch is crazy right going from all these subjects right uh but very very fulfilling and I'm so proud of the team that we have uh the our engineering teams at cig are are best in class right they're really making Miracles with smallish team like in terms of the pure engineering teams like making an engine building the tech that we need for this game we I mean the the level of talent is really incredible so I'm it's been roughly almost a year now you know that I've been I've picked up this role and uh it's been only you
00:47:06
know positive uh it's also been really positive I think for the turbet family in general that join in the cig family overall it's made Communications easier it's made our missions easier to communicate uh you know it it allows also the cross culture pollination things that you know turbulent do well things that c do well we try to get the best out of it try to influence each other uh out of it into one big family so it's been it's been a really good ride so far I really I'm really enjoying it it's really really cool plus I love this project like you know I there's nothing more that I want than for this uh for all of our Tech to come together and then to really make this game the best thing that can be for them so it's it's for me it's like I'm I'm just ecstatic about it it's been nothing but
00:47:56
positive is such a executive answer no no hang on hang on say that what's what's been difficult is if you want the downsizes of it is really uh catching up to speed to all the disciplines right uh understanding the state of things to be able to make calls right uh so I mean my my people laugh here Cu uh at the office you know they locked me up in in this office because I'm always on calls nstop from like 8:00 a.m. to like I think the first time I get up during the day from my desk is at 2: p.m. and then oh I need to eat something and then you know keep going right and so uh that's the part that's difficult the intensity is really up there right
00:48:44
uh really really up there but at the same time it's so I feel like all these things really move the project forward and so it's it's it's motivating but it is it is hard on the on the date for sure all right well Ben W thank you for staying much longer than we we agreed uh I expected that this will I try to do the short shows every once in a while but then I always pair the idea of the short show with the people who talk a lot and it's just think i' know better but I I I appreciate you sticking around I'm Gonna Let You Go uh folks thank you for watching this has been star seon live uh what do we call it te talk Tech talk with with with with Ben Ben W Bose Shore oh my God so gooded do you want to know
00:49:34
what my orange cases do you remember you remember fisher Fisher Price constructs oh my god really yeah look got my hole oh is it the OG one too yeah it's the OG I'm an engineer now too got the constructs in it yeah I'm an engineer now too builds that means that means I manage you um if you have if you haven't checked out yesterday's uh Insight Star Citizen on creatures and characters um it's a show be sure you watch it uh and then uh uh come back here next week uh next week on ISC uh we uh uh finally pulled the curtain fully back on the two new Zeus's
00:50:21
that are now coming in a 324 x patch uh it's X because we don't know if it's going to be .1 or point2 or whatnot it's uh and uh the new MFD work that's coming alongside it uh the new mfds are super cool and if you're like how can new MFD be super cool check it out they're super cool they're super cool um so uh for that's Ben Wa I'm Jared thanks for watching um thanks for just letting me do what I do we really thought this yesterday's ISC might be the last one they let they let us publish uh uh uh keep your eye on on uh the robertsspaceindustries.com website and Spectrum uh for news about the tech preview Channel um that if that hasn't started yet it it'll start when they're
00:51:09
ready for it and it's really important for the project and for everybody involved that we get as many people in there uh uh to to to stress this stuff as possible so uh your participation is tremendously valued and appreciated uh if you can make the time to jump in there and help us out uh so thanks a lot uh I'm Jared that was Ben W I already did that that's Dave and Pete over there you never see them say hi guys guys okay uh see you next week everybody take care bye

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