10 for the Chairman: Episode 11 (2014.03.10)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hello everyone uh welcome to another episode of 10 for the chairman uh for those of you that don't know that is where I take 10 questions from uh the star CZ and subscribers and uh answer them as best I can um for you that don't know about the subscribers they're the folks that um pay additional money every month to be able to support the extra amount of community content we do which uh involves things like this show or wingman's hanger um creating the jump Point um uh sort of monthly magazine which originally was only be four to I think six pages long and tends to be about 40 to 50 pages uh full of cramp

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   Pack full of details of uh behind the scenes how we're making the game uh and there's a bunch of other sort of uh you know some of the stuff that we do on the web the stories um and more stuff that we've got planned is all made possible our subscribers so thank you very much um sitting next to me is David hadock our lead writer uh and I thought I would um have him along because sometimes it's nice to talk about something more than just the straight questions maybe go in a little aside give you a little more insight into the game uh and then sort of Hit the questions so um the first question I have on our 10 for the chairman is uh idolo who is saying I was wondering since our characters are now legal citizens of the Empire will we be able to vote on issues that the Senate tried to pass uh so that's a good one and so I thought that would be a good opportunity to have a little side

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   conversation with David about um sort of politics and kind of how we thought about how it would work and then also how we thought it would affect the persistent Universe um so David I was wondering since our characters in our legal Sy of the Empire will be able to vote on the issues in the Senate tried to pass uh I don't think you'd be able to vote directly on the bills um but we had we had talked about the idea that uh you the characters that you're seeing sort of pop up in like the the Congress now uh news updates and stuff like that are the actual Senators that are working that are have been elected and the one thing I I think I probably want to let everyone know cuz I do see it sometimes where people think that like some of the fiction is filler on our site and that's actually not because I had a few people I just want to know more about how the game is getting made and that's cool because we want to tell you more how the

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   game is getting made but um we actually very deliberately are sort of spoon feeding out like the world and creating the universe with what we do with um you know we have an update on Tuesday we have an update on Thursday and we're actually sort of um kind of using as an infiction way of revealing things and ideas and Concepts and tensions that we want to have in the universe and also in some cases play mechanics so we've had pieces where you know um you know you know the show where we're talking uh the the trucker show or whatever and we sort of talk about some of the mechanics we had some talking about piracy and so the idea of some of the pieces is to sort of kind of in a infiction way highlight what how we thinks some the gay mechanics are so I would say that it's probably a good idea to read those even if um you feel like it's a lot of text um but back to the back on to the point

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   yeah uh but yeah I mean so you know one of the things we had talked about was having uh elections basically so you know the Senators that you're reading about now have to be have to run for office again you know and so uh we basically would write up these sort of characters for them to run up against you know do ads do all sorts of plat like what is their their belief platform and all the sort of thing and then let the players vote for who they think who they want to have an office which would be a kind of a fun way for the community to throw us a curveball because if we write up a character who you're sort of like internally like well he's probably going to become a des spot if they if they elect him and then you guys elect him we have to kind of accommodate well sort of right yeah live storytelling right so like kind of one of our goals is that once the game is live uh we want

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   a lot of the player um actions uh to sort of shape how it goes so we've got an idea of like we've got a general sort of big overall plan which is sort of inspired by the decline of for the Roman Empire but there's a lot of sort of directions that can go inside that large framework that we want to have sort of player Fed so this is you know this is a great example where know you have the citizens vote on Senator and then if they're voting for like a you know particularly aggressive militaristic Senator then or something would affect kind of how we would start to update the content after that and and there's other things that we're going to do so you know like if there's battles involving two big groups of players I mean we're actually um essentially going to have what you know think of it a game master that plays a reporter role so we're actually going to have some people that jobs are when the full persistent

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   Universe going is to sort of go around and just be watching and recording stuff and then we basically collect news from around the universe and then if you're going into a bar and we'll be playing like you know off in the Vegas sector there was a you know the you know the Teran Confederation got into a brawl with you know one of our other organizations um uh the Goon rafay or whatever and and there's a report so it's like so hopefully if you're playing the game you'll sort of uh you'll feel like your actions actually start to become part of the law I mean it's all part of that whole idea of death of the spaceman where you know we've got like long you know you've actually got a timeline you've got uh you know our our spaceships themselves get wear and tear the characters get wear and tear time passes you know things change in politics players affect it um so that's that's all part of the the spirit of um

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   of of of how we think uh the universe itself will be actually a really fun cool place and kind of we're kind of excited to I mean this is a ways away because obviously we've got a lot of other things to do before we get to this final state where the full game's all fully done but um and I think we're pretty excited by getting to the getting to that point and just seeing what happens cuz already just what we see involve on the on the forums on the web is more than we would have guessed and the alliances and the groups and all the rest of stuff well it'll be kind of fun it sort of blurs the line as to what is generated by us you know to the average player they're going to it'll be difficult to discern what was generated by CI and what's generated by other players so it just becomes yeah I think it would be great I mean like we're like it's almost like we will be editorial right uh for the player generated

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   content which in some ways is also what we're doing with like the next great Starship I mean that is going to be user generated content that is editorialized so we say this is we think this is good enough to to get in the game we help guide it um so yeah that's I think um that will be hopefully a lot of fun uh when we get to that uh but until then we still got a a bunch of other things to do um all right so uh that's our sort of big first de side question so now onto the more quick fire answers uh Checkmate asks Chris if you weren't overseeing the whole star system project what role would you like to have or where do you think your talents would most closely lie on the team uh well I guess um you know that generally Falls in programming or design I mean I kind of

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    in some ways think programming is design um you know for me the best um game creators game programmers have the programming background because you sort of essentially programming is sort of Designing a system and how it's all going to work and you sort of set the parameters um so yeah I mean I would guess I don't know lead programmer lead designer would be mostly what it is I mean when I started in the industry I you know there was projects were massive like say sty citizen is so I was like a Bandon of one I did the programming I did the design I did the graphics I did the sound uh I did the writing um so now obviously I you know on something that's massive you can't do all that um so of the stuff I'm doing more I I tend to do some Hands-On coding because I'm kind of enjoying the design of some systems um and then just general overview of design

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    and you know art directions fun too I kind like do that but I I guess that's me overseeing the whole project so that's kind of not really answering the question propy all right um next uh question uh comes from rear Admiral Murray who asks after the game is released over time as server and connection technology improves will we potentially see larger but fewer PVP instances so more players per instance so yeah the simple answer on that is yes I mean there isn't any like structural design in terms of how we're coding it like like uh you know like if it was A8 bit you couldn't get over 256 players in an area it's not built that way at all it's really just going to be bandwidth throttled and performance throttled so as those limits go away we probably will be able to scale up more people in any uh particular area uh but it's hard to say um you know because you know with the rate of change of technology and

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    everything who knows although bandwidth doesn't seem to move quite as fast as everything else um all right next question comes from spay Jack Spa Jack I think sorry if I mispronounced it I noticed that you are number five in the uee citizen Records who are numbers 1 2 3 and four well I didn't actually know um who these were so I went and asked uh uh our web team um and uh it actually turns out I'm actually number four in the UE citizen records not number five uh number one is the uh RSI um uh Prime uh basic admin account number two is the old um websites admin account number three is Ben Lesnik who is in front of me and then I Am Number Four uh but um since I am I don't know Mr Star Citizen

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    the web team is graciously agreed to or offered to make me number one which I think is uh is suiting so from now on I will be known as number one uh okay next question from Uncle Mo can you tell us more about your goals for the shooter portion of Star Citizen will it be an awesome first person shooter or some sort of third person tab targeting style shooter will it focus on PVE or PVP or both well I'm all about awesome firstperson Shooters uh so it's not likely to be third person tab style uh targeting shooter haven't decided whether you'll be able to sort of pop out to see yourself in third person or not um because sometimes the the you know the characters is really cool to look at but in general it's designed as a first- person game uh crisis is a first person game um that's the engine

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    that we're built on uh and the team that's working on the first person side of the game his background is all in like first person shooters and you know really inspired by sort of the unreal tournaments and all that kind of stuff although we're not going to be sort of quick and arcade the same way that say some of the you know old style Unreal Tournament or um Quake style Shooters are because of our death mechanic so um we've got to it's it's I would say that our first person combat is uh sort of slightly more realistic and more tactical and there more at stake um uh and we're going to be announcing and sharing more about that uh probably in um well I wouldn't say in the next month or so but after the dog fight we're going to start to to to share um that and one of the additions onto the dog fighting will be sort of the boarding

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    addition onto it so we're going to get dog fighting V1 will be sort of the single Ceder ships dog fighting V2 will be more the multi crude ships and then we'll move on to sort of boarding and then they'll all sort of get tied together which would be kind of cool um okay so uh Cel asks will it be possible to remote operate a ship if I have two transports I want to take both on a mission by myself will it be possible to connect these two uh EG star fars belly against belly um I would say not really uh I don't think we have any plans for that you certainly will be able to hire either an NPC or another player to fly your second ship for you um with the risks that you have with that I are they good are they not good all the rest stuff but you certainly can hire like I said NPCs and other players to fly your

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    other ships Euro Warrior asks will there be an engineering look for our ships so we can walk around a selected ship in the hanger and see through the ship to see all the various systems so we we actually um we're actually have we had a meeting earlier today we were talking about sort of Mobi glass and what it can do and so we're talking about a unified system that will be from Mobi glass uh potentially into um your ship sort of heads up display and even if you have a helmet on into your helmet mounted display um and the Mobi glass will actually have a mode where like you can essentially do what the hollow table does but on your Mobi glass and then there's some other engineering kind of stuff where you can manage systems and we were also talking about having that happen um on your mobiglass so you can sort of pull up the different systems you have on your ship and set them for different power ratings and all that kind of stuff um so uh and

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    I would think that the way we're doing the Mobi glass is it's sort of got an augmented reality so you would like essentially pass the Mobi glass over your ship and and like it highlights with like a hollow outline around over the elements that that you're thinking about so that would essentially be how you would sort of see the ship systems so it'll be pretty cool um so there you go uh next question comes from K who asks will there be a reason to ever fly at less than Max velocity I.E cruising speed say 80% of Maximum using far less fuel or less wearing components or wear and upkeep be model or some other reason not to always go as fast as the ship will fly uh so yes there will definitely be reason to go less than Max velocity first off if you're in a dog fight um you will be able to turn much tighter at a slower speed or speeder I should say at a lower relative velocity to whoever

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    you're dog fighting with or whatever sort of celestial object you're around uh because you'll be able to um turn a much tighter turn because you you'll be able to sustain um well you tighter ter because your G's uh are you're going to be GM lied right so your flight control system will essentially keep you inside the limits of what your body can take and if you're going very fast and you try to pull a tight turn over a very short period of time um you'll you'll experience a huge amount of G's and you'll black out and we're modeling Glock and all that kind of stuff so um that would be a reason not to be flying at Max velocity other reasons would be uh use of fuel because when you're at Max velocity it's just like a car you're not going to be as efficient uh and we have wear on components and we do model wear and

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    upkeep on the model so you'll actually see your ship get grme and dirt and age over time you play it you can take it into a planet and get it sort of scrubbed up but it'll never be pristine showroom quality until you buy a new one so it'll be it'll be like a real car so which will be kind of cool I think um all right so next question comes from draer who says how satisfied are you with cry engine so far are there any things you fear you cannot realize with it that would have been in your dream version of Star Citizen um so yeah and I'm very uh satisfied with cry engine so far it's a very powerful engine I think it's one of the it's one of if not the best looking um engine out there for the kind of look and style that I want which is a sort of more feder realistic look um I mean obviously we have some challenges because we're using the engine for something that um it wasn't

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    primarily built for IE we're having a big space open you know like space we got vehicles that fly at fast speeds over long distances whereas um Cay engine was built for sort of firsters on foot combat so generally their play play areas are sort of you know 4 kilm x 4 km or 8 km by 8 km ours will be millions of kilometers across so we have to do modifications the engine to enable that but you know most of the things I think that I want to get done are getting done I mean there is some longer term stuff I want to do where we're going to go stimulous from say space down to the planet this is very longterm not the the initial uh release um but we're pretty sure that we'll be able to get that worked into the framework of the engine I mean my guess is that down the road um as we're up and running as we continue to add more content you know the engine

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    itself will be so heavily modified that it won't really resemble the base engine it came from because we've got such specific needs for what we're doing um so but yeah it's a it's a great engine we're really happy we really love the look of it uh last question comes from uh ayum who asks how will the chat system in the game work when we stumble across another player in space how will we communicate with him will it be via voice voice chat text chat or both so we're going to still flash that out I mean our goal is to try and have voice over IP and we're also going to try and uh have this technology which we've got up and running so we'll we'll probably have it called live driver where um you're you you're actually you can talk and the webcam on your computer is looking at your face and it transcribes it to your avatar your Avatar's mouth moves sort of along lines with what your

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    mouse moving and but you're hearing your voice and we'll probably do some level of voice processing on it because there's a lot of real-time filters uh that we can apply in the sound system that we're going to use uh so it will so it'll be cool it'll be sort of like I'll be talking to you as a pal we're going to let people hail uh other people and then if someone accepts the hail then you can talk to them because you also don't want people just always abusing you and spamming you um and uh if you don't want to use voice chat you could also be using uh sort of text chat in a in a box um so you have you'll hopefully have both those options so Voiceover IP is definitely part of our plan so far we're we're planning to have it in um probably won't be in for dog fighting uh V1 I'm not even sure whether we'll have text chat in for dog fight V1 but as the year progresses this stuff will will get in there um but I'm sure all you will

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    find ways to harass each other without having it built into the system probably having Skype open at the same time or or whatever um okay so that was the last question um thank you for joining me as always thank you to um the subscribers for making all this possible thank you for Dave harck for joining me and helping uh sort of elaborate on some of the stuff that we're trying to do in the sort of living Universe uh and thank you to all the backers out there for um helping us make basically this dream game uh for us all to play and hopefully for you guys to play so see you next week bye