Star Citizen: Around the Verse - A Beacon of Service

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:14

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy Garner and I'm Chris Robbins this week we'll take our usual look at the road map with a PU project update take a deep dive into the continuing development of service beacons and welcome bug smashers to ATV yes so more on that later now let's go once more to ricky gently for this week's Tarsus and project update thanks guys let's kick things off at the top of the roadmap first let's check back in on characters more progress has been made on the legacy armor sets throughout with the release of 3.2 and some new mission givers and shopkeepers have animation phases wrapping up moving down the road map into gameplay shopping kiosks continue to be tweaked from the UI and player experience to their physical design these rough work-in-progress

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   clips show the progress being made on the flow and working path for the kiosks eventually there'll be several unique designs for the kiosks with specific looks and branding audio continues testing sound design for the different functions and faces of the mining mechanic we can hear different effects for the laser itself and the rock being destroyed as you can tell the sound element is going to go a long way towards enhancing the mining experience ramping up the anticipation and ending with a satisfying payoff the effects have started work on visual additions as well and here we see tests being done to see how the effects differ depending on whether or not the mining attempt is successful in that first clip it seems the laser is off target or something went awry we can see in the second clip

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   how a well-aimed mining laser created minimal blowback from the rock the effects have also been working on some R&D for chien ship explosions and QT effects we made them with the new GPU kill noise functionality which allows us to apply a distinctive visual language to all chien effects previously we had to make this wispy ethereal style into textures but now we're able to make use of high particle counts to achieve ideal visual clarity the ship teams have been working on several vessels to become flyable in 3.2 and others that will be unleashed in subsequent releases work has been done on the EMP capabilities of the Avenger warlock and the constellation Phoenix is currently in final AR with passes being made on its many bells and whistles including the

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   fish tank and the hot tub ship teams have also been working on improvements to already flyable ships as seen here with adjustments to the animation for the star ferries landing sequence the props team continues to turn our hangar props like this repair drone these extractors and this large machine sledge these props will comprise a set that can ultimately be mixed and matched to create a sense of realism two hangars and other blue-collar settings throughout the verse and speaking of hangars and space stations procedural layout work is ongoing as more passes are done on various configurations to see what looks good with lighting and set dressing and what still needs to be added or adjusted the environment our team is also implementing seals notes to add more variation in terms of shops

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   signage and material swaps more work has also been done on the hangar elements for modular stations as NPC stand-ins props and other kinetic objects are being tested the goal is to make the spaces buzz with activity and feel lived in the rest stop exteriors are also looking good with the team awaiting delivery of advertising graphics from UI at which point they'll be able to replace the work-in-progress ones environment r has also been testing the visuals and procedural generation for biomes and environments that you'll find on the planet Hurston and its moons in alpha 33 while identifying natural points of interest where gameplay will take place here you see some tests being done on the dense forests and how

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   they'll fit into the topography of the planet a placement tool has also been developed to assist the live design team in placing outdoor locations and a footprint validate tool has been implemented in order for designers to predefined what they want to do spatially with a specific location its back-end tools like these that will make live design and implementation much easier as a team populates planets moons and more with structures and viable points of interest for gameplay finally looking to foundational core tech work for upcoming releases planet tech continues to receive enhancements some of which we may see an alpha 3.2 some of these improvements include increased channels to allow for more complex biomes and integrate my noble entities into the environments improved color

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   tinting and soft blending which will lead to better integration of objects on the terrain that's it for this week we'll have more updates next week now back to you in the studio thanks Ricky remember to check out the public road map on the RSI website where you can follow along with PU development yourself yes it's cool to see so many gameplay improvements coming along as much of the focus 43.2 has been put on them one of the gameplay elements were currently working to improve and expand our the service beacons yes making their debut in 3.1 service beacons represent the evolution of player created missions in the game so let's take a look how the devs have been implementing the system and continue to improve on it in this week's feature the surface beacons are player generated

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   missions and we wanted to give the players the opportunity to interact with each other on a level that most mmo's don't really do you know a lot of them have PvP but this is like I've taken a mission that's that's too big for me to do so I want to give other people an opportunity to help me with that at a conceptual level the service beacon is a mechanism that allows players that want something to easily form a short-term contract with others that want to provide it this is a much more important feature than it might initially appear because it effectively means that we're leveraging the player base to supplement and enhance the scripted and systemic content that's available within the game while at the same time because other players are involved injecting a very unpredictable element that's ultimately going to result in a lot of very unique gameplay experiences just as importantly

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   by constantly pushing players together when they've got compatible interests the service beacon is going to help foster the creation of relationships within the community and that in turn will lead to the formation of a lot of new friendships alliances and in the case of deals gone bad sometimes even than debt --is so three point one laid the architectural framework for all of this functionality and introduced the first couple of beacons and you can now hire other players to defend you or ask them to transport you wherever you want to go but this is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of where we want to take this system we're aiming to push it a lot farther in the future you go in through the exact same same way that you would do any other mission you open up your mission manager you have a beacons

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    tab so if you want to generate a new beacon for somebody else to take you need a service then you can go there and create a new beacon select the beacon type fill out the parameters it's really simple right now fill out how much money you're willing to pay either combat assistances is by the minute or you know the personal transport is just a one lump sum payment and create a beacon and you can respond to it directly through that or you can actually go into the mission manager and go into the general tab and other players missions show up under a beacon header in there for the UI side we figured it made the most sense to utilize the existing mission manager screen to implement these new features so along with our mobile ass overhaul that we did to expand the amount of

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    realistic real estate the mobile glass took up on the screen we factored in the service beacon creation screen our goal with the with the UI on the beacon creation screen was that it would be fairly kind of self apparent as to how the player would interact with it there was very few pieces of information needed for the player they need to know what kind of beacon they'd want to create and then based on that other elements would turn on in this case all want to go somewhere well where do you want to go we need to give that to the player if you're wanting combat assistance that information is not needed so we would need to turn that on and off as applicable and then validate everything is correct that you have a price you have a reputation request you have a location and then send that off to the code so we had to lay out the

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    different dropdowns make sure that they would work out correctly there just so that when you look at it it's not we don't have to do it to Tory I'll have to explain how this work you see it it makes sense and you're able to just run with it that was the core goal of the way we ended up setting up the UI also making sure we're going to have additional beacons going forward and when we do that we want this system to be able to easily adapt add in or change out modules in there as needed and just be able to punch these out from a UI standpoint relatively quickly compared to the initial framework setup so in designing the service beacon system we implemented a rating system where players can be rated both on how they provide the contract and how they actually execute the contract so both sides also players are rated on a per contract type basis so essentially for

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    example you are very good at doing personal transport type of contracts however you may not be so good at combat so you have different ratings for both of those so it doesn't make sense to have and kind of like this overall rating because you could be really good at one thing but not so good at or another and so we have that split out so as a requester of contracts you are able to specify what the minimum rating is for people to accept your contracts so person with a two-star rating won't be able to accept your contract if you specify that as three or four stars so right now you can't as a requester of contracts as a person who configures a contract you can't necessarily see the writing of the person who is accepted the contract as a as a as a player who accepts contracts

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    you are able to see what your rating is compared to what the minimum rating of the contract is so contracts that are higher than your rating won't show up in the mission manager yeah so you can't see a 4-star contract if you're rated at only three stars another thing we had to set up is the missions need to show up to other players so once I create the beacon it gets broadcasted out and another player would see it show up on their mobile glass through the existing mission system we already have a lot of that happening but we just needed to expand that to allow these player created missions to also be picked up and broadcasted to the rest of the mission screen which is why when you go in you can see when you go to the beacons tab it shows other created missions that the player is able to select and are the ones you've created to cancel out and

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    then in active ailable missions you can see which missions players have created and you can accept those just as though it was any other mission so we're using the players ingrained knowledge of how the system already works and letting that drive how they interact with this right now our existing notification system is a little bit rudimentary it's it only handles single strings and there's just a simple queue for those messages but later down the line we want to introduce signers the control to be able to push in notifications that require and like an accept or decline action or a mission objective which has a timer and different note types of notifications would have different ways of being presented on the screen and transitioning off the screen to be able to visually associate with other HUD

16. 00:12:33

    elements so for instance a mission objective that comes on would flash on the screen for maybe a second and then that would tuck away in the direction of where you have a persistent note a objective list on your on your HUD so we want to have more visual association with those notifications so it's easier to see what they apply to basically expanding the the capability of the notification system so we don't have to have a hacked you know cept only separate layer of UI we it can all just factor in the same thing when we created the personal contract beacon and the combat is to speak and we had to make different game rules to make those things work so we had to think about the logic that needed to be implemented and what I mean by

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    that is that what does it mean to be successfully transported from one location to another I need to be picked up I need to be detected within the bounds of somebody else's ship I need to be successfully landed at the destination that I chose and so we want to try and make it so that these things our players can't exploit the system so as we move forward you know we're gonna make it so oh well combat assist you actually have to be within a certain range of somebody in order to be considered you know assisting them if you're across the universe that you're not really helping me out right so as we go through these different contract types and the different beacon types we we really need to make sure that we we

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    catch all of these edge cases and try and put in some game logic that really focuses on removing those exploits from from the system so tailoring each mission and each beacon type to what they really need and and how to get those exploits out that's really important to us so it really enhances the player experience and it gets rid of some of the trolling that that can happen in in some of the MMOs that you see out there these servers beacons are part of a new class of features that were making in the game are really leveraging the services technology that we're writing for the backend and what this allows us to do is write game features that can communicate

19. 00:14:58

    with players that will be in the future across several server instances and this is a requirement as we look towards a feature where the game is actually running in a server mesh so not the entire universe or solar system even is running on one server and said we have a mesh of servers that are kind of running the logic and simulation for regions of this space so because of that we need to write some kind of infrastructure that allows game play game flow to occur even with players that are across these different server nodes and when they may traverse the bounds of the different server nodes and so this adds some interesting complexity to the development process but also a lot of excitement I think as well the interface

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    for the service beacon is going to gradually evolve in a number of different ways cosmetically notifications are going to become diegetic so that the presentation of the information doesn't rip you out of the game reputational feedback that's gonna expand from a simple good bad rating to a more flexible 5-star system that will allow you to more precisely rate the other party we're also gonna add support for hotkeys so that you can do things like quickly and easily dispatch calls for combat assistance when you're under attack and doing everything you can to evade enemy fire now you can already limit your interaction with other players based upon their reputation and we're going to expand that system to allow you to limit your dealings to just those players that are friends or members of select organizations one of the the most interesting upcoming

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    features to me though is going to be the ability of the system to record a variety of stats relating to the providers performance and give you that feedback in real time so combat escorts will have things like their hit ratio and kill percentage tracked personal transports will record things like elapsed time and average speed and fuel suppliers will have their transfer efficiency monitored this information will allow you the employer to more effectively determine when and whether to terminate a contract as well as what kind of reputational feedback you eventually want to give right now the service beacons are just factored into one category that you see on the mission screen and to actually create that beacon to create a player generated mission B we implemented a new tab for

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    specifically for service beacons in which you are able to view all of your beacons that you have created previously and you are able to have a form to create a beacon as well so right now it's very basic you can specify the type of contract basically there's only two types at the moment and you have will specify a location and a price however later down the line we want to massively extend this to be able to configure it in various way so you can set up logic like you know pay a certain amount if they've done a certain task or whatever so there's gonna be a much more robust functionality later down the road for creating contracts we're going to expand the system to allow some contract types to support multiple multiple providers

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    so for example if you want a combat escort to tag along and protect your valuable cargo as you make a run through a particularly dangerous area of space you'll be able to specify how many higher slots are available for that particular job with each provider working as an independent contractor towards that common goal another big change is that NPCs are going to gain the ability to interface to the service beacon and what this means is that over on the employer side this is going to help us inject a lot more life into the world so based upon what the back end simulation dictates we'll be able to ensure that a given area always has the right mixture and quantity of contract jobs on offer and players can elect to respond to or ignore those opportunities however they see fit and over on the provider side NPCs will do their own

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    mental calculus to determine whether the reward offered justifies the effort and expense and if so then they'll compete with players for those opportunities and what this means in the long term is that be able to guide prices for these jobs into a reasonable range and also ensure that we've got the ability to fill in the gaps within MPC when players aren't willing to step up perhaps because there aren't any in that area or maybe because they're just doing they're just busy doing something else we're currently in the process of working on several new types of contracts with escorts slated to be the next one out of the gate and it's going to combine regular payments with quantum linking so that you can travel anywhere as a group another interesting one is assassination which is going to allow you to put a price on someone's head and introduce the concept

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    of multiple providers vying for a single prize the point of interest beacon is going to take things in a slightly different direction and allow information you've discovered such as the location of a derelict ship that can be salvaged or rich to positive war that can be mined to be shared or sold to others refuel and repair those will come along a bit later along with the associated gameplay and eventually a number of other contract types at the beginning of the system and and it should be it some players are already you know talking about it and having fun with it so it's pretty exciting so as service beacons continue to be improved and expanded in 3.2 and beyond these player crated missions will become an integral part of the star citizen experience fleshing out the universe adding a lot of variable content and

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    unpredictable situations for players as mentioned earlier bug smashers is joining us this week as a segment here on ATV without further ado let's give our resident bug smashers general mark abent a warm around verse welcome take it away hey everyone welcome to bug smashers I'm your host mark David let's get smashing look spacious everyone we're here in my fancy dancy well not test map but portholes are one day I'll get renamed depart port bug Smasher and we've got a fun little bugs where supposedly when we spawn ships all of our weapons fall off so I'm going to spawn my favorite ship the Cutlass mostly because I could type cut and it spawns and I'm gonna zoom around you can

27. 00:21:25

    kind of see my guns just floating around in space because they're like I don't I don't like you anymore I'm just not gonna be part of my part of your ship so I could fly away there called my missiles and yeah apparently this is happening and all of the game you know you come in one day everything's fine come in the next day and all your guns and missiles are flying off your ship alright so let's see what is happening this was a very weird one and it caused a lot of confusion because well this makes enough sense and one of the first things we were looking at and what was happening is looking at the server console and we were finding where is it somewhere in here so many things I

28. 00:22:16

    thought that the way go down console doesn't even show it anymore whew it's showing other stuff oh oh there it is we're seeing there is any component Network set network parent and what this is basically is saying is if we have a gun and we have a turret and we have a ship the parent of the gun should be the turret and the turrets parents should be the ship but what this error is saying is the the back the mount or the turret is not yet bound to the network so the gun cannot be parented to the gun so its parenting it to the ship and this is bizarre because

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    the ship's supposed to spawn then the turret and once the turns bounces a network and then we spawn the gun it's this whole batch system that we have to make sure things come in the right order and we're getting Network spam saying well that's not happening so let's go to ha this set Network parent will put a breakpoint on there and see what is happening let me get out of my fancy dancy ship and will spawn inside of another color so Zam we got the debug alright looks like we just hit it take a look at the call stack and we are to do aha so we're spawning the entity then we're

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    spawning a bunch of the item ports and then that's calling more things to spawn but the interesting thing is in this spawn entity function we are going through this top level instead of this bottom level now this top level is meant for as you're loading in the game as a client we just spawn stuff directly while this bottom level was meant for if I'm spawning a ship a turret and a gun we put them in a batch so that they spawn correctly in order and we don't spawn the next thing until well it's already however we're bypassing this and the even stranger part as is this bit where it's called is loading screen active the loading screen is not supposed to be

31. 00:24:48

    enabled on the dedicated server in fact it should never be enabled because that means we're loading UI code on the dedicated server so what I'm gonna do is go into the bit of code that turns on that duel and if we're the dedicated server we shall basically cause a debug break so we can see what's turning it on all right so let's compile the code and give it a try all right code got compiled let's start up the dedicated server and see what's enabling the background screen which should not happen if you do start up superior level should hit a breakpoint

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    one day - aha we hit it so let's see how we're doing this huh it's interesting enough we're hitting it from the loading screen so yeah it is the UI so when the UI gets enabled it sets this background screen and I guess it's just never turning it off because well the server's not meant to be doing any of this so what we're gonna do is look for where all the UI gets created aha down here so we have the global game you ID the front-end and then the menu screen pause what we're gonna do is move this a bit of code into here and what

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    this will make sure is that if we're running the dedicated server we're not going to run some UI code so it won't turn on the background loading so that the swon system will spawn correctly in the batches and then everyone will have their amazing weapons on their ship so let's give that a compile and see what happens all right to remove the magic we are back at port olisar with the new improved compiled code so we will spawn they an amazing cut list and see what this time I have to go into it into the amazing pilot seat and I still have all the guns attached to the ship sweet so if I fly out out of the green

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    zone I should be able to go pew pew pew warp speed there we go so all my guns and missiles are still attached and everything's back to how it should there you have it UI code causing shenanigans on the dedicated server guys like that one so as you guys saw we had a fun little incident where all of our weapons were falling off and that's a little big thing and funny enough it was because UI code was loading in the background dedicated server when it shouldn't have setting some bool the true and that the earth I'm sorry the spawn system was checking to see if it was the client spawning and it caused havoc which bypasses the spawn batch so things are spawning incorrectly and is a whole big

35. 00:28:12

    mess luckily this is the stuff we have to deal with as a gameplay programmer and all we had to do is just shut off the UI loading code and ettiquette server everything was good to go hope you guys enjoyed until next time thanks mark smashing as always iterate sister most definitely you still have a few days to enter our Intel screenshot contest nary an m7 took the top spot in round 2 by capturing this inspiring Vista check out spectrum for a closer look at all the entries and your chance to win your own Intel up teen 900p solid-state drive yeah and there's been really some pretty impressive shots submitted so far you can check them out on the spectrum forums and I'm looking forward to seeing round three tickets for citizencon

36. 00:28:59

    are now available we look forward to you joining us on October 10th at the Long Center in Austin Texas for a full day of presentations interactions and fun yeah we're gonna be bringing everything you loved about last year's event back and building on that foundation it's a really beautiful venue and it's going to be great bring Sue's and come back to Austin where it all began you can find all the details and purchase tickets in the comm links section of the website and while you're there check out our newest concept ship the Crusader Hercules yeah you saw it featured last week on shipshape and this ship is definitely a brute the ability to transport ground vehicles small ships and massive amounts of cargo that's all for now tune in to this week's new calling all devs for answers to questions about pretty much everything related to flight control and this week's reversal was live will feature more on service beacons so get your

37. 00:29:48

    questions in thank you to our subscribers for sponsoring our shows and we hope you're enjoying those new exclusive ICC edition weapons and of course thank you to all the backers for supporting the development of star citizen and squadron 42 yeah and remember it's Mother's Day this weekend in the US and I think in Germany too so don't forget to call your mom she's probably always wanted a Hercules a2 gunship if not sell for some flowers yeah and until next week we will see you around [Music] thanks for watching for the latest and

38. 00:31:02

    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 www.uvu.edu/library