Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Alpha 3.2 Feature Survey w/ Chris Roberts

23 March 201801:01:091,572 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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greeting citizens and welcome to another edition of reverse the verse live the only weekly star citizen live stream where you can help guide the direction of star citizen's development as we explore what features you most want us to focus on in the coming months I'm your host Content Manager jared huckaby go now maybe I buried the lede a little bit there so let's go over that again after every major release of star citizen the teams around here and around the world I've always gone into what we call a review phase where we examine what worked what could have gone better what exceeded our expectations and perhaps most importantly what your responses were to the content this evaluation is an important step after every release that allows us to focus our efforts and ensure you the most efficient development process we can with the upcoming release of star citizen alpha 3.1 and the 3.2 looming on the horizon and in our continuing
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efforts to involve the star citizen community in every aspect of our game development we wanted to try something new to that end on the show today we've got founder and chief executive officer chris roberts who will discuss a new alpha 3.2 feature survey we're launching later today but before we get to that let's check out the Week in Review now last Friday we had Jim Martin on the show to talk about his career in science fiction fandom and work on some of star citizen's early a spaceship designs it's always a blast to chat with Jim and it's in the chance to showcase his contribution to the project was a fun walk down memory lane to some of star citizen's earliest milestones if you haven't seen it it's available now up on YouTube Monday brought with another all new episode of our weekly question and answer series calling all depths this week with answers to backer voted
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questions like climbing cliffs and rock faces while on foot the real-time tracking of market commodities evie a between ships of high velocity switching between 2d and 3d radar types and the future of a war in the persistent universe remember you can submit your questions for consideration each and every week in the thread up on spectrum and don't forget to vote Tuesday is Laura day in the star citizen universe and this week brought with it the first featuring our newly revealed Aegis Vulcan refueling repairing and rearming ship it's a fun read and our first glance at what an experienced as a Vulcan operator might be like in the persistent universe you can find that in all our lower stories up on the Roberts space industries comm website now Wednesday we had the foot we had a couple folks at the games development conference in San Francisco where visitors could experience the game on
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the show floor and our own Shawn Tracy gave a presentation on how star citizen works with Intel's new octane technology while yesterday brought with it the latest episode of around the verse with a project update and a series of features focused on the work of our audio team now I'm going to recommend wearing headphones when you watch this one because it's always a delight when we can lend an ear to the amazing work our audio team is doing to bring the star citizen universe to life now with that we're gonna take a real short break and when we return we'll be sitting down with chris roberts to discuss the alfa 3.2 feature survey that will be launching later today and how you can influence the direction of star citizen's development by casting your vote stay tuned we'll be right back [Music] jelena lost all my cargo back on you
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love Nana all my you we see on the love Nana it stored my ship for me on your love can't get it back from Zelda oh you love poking some cargo they said to me sell it and double your a you will see oh oh we're not there thinking it would be easy mean my way over to our court my knee I was like filled up for my cargo with what I could buy of Barrow and I was like oh I made it I'll pass that move and a server crashed oh no no no no no last on
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my car go back on your love Nana oh my you we see on your love Nana it's toward my ship for me on your luck can't get it back from yellow or your love oh oh oh na na can't get it back from yellow alright that was of course yellow yellow
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yellow yellow which I can never say appropriately I know we showcased that before but it was stuck in my head earlier this week and I figured if I have to separate through it again so do you joining us on the show this week my boss chris Roberts how you doing it I'm doing good Jared okay welcome back I'm doing well 22 twice on reverse the first in a year that's a personal record for us yeah you know it's only much still it's only March alright so alpha 3.0 3.0 on live now alpha 3.1 on PTU two subscribers and concierge members and hopefully going a little wider the Cathy and evocati and alpha 3.2 on the horizon how are things pretty good so you know this is the first of our quarterly releases and I have to say that things are tracking really well I
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know there was a fair amount of skepticism out there but you know we're pretty confident that we're gonna make the 3-1 release I'll burn down the tracks exactly to the date we're looking for and everything of course is always a couple of last-minute things like I could I could have just messed up there but now we're feeling good I think we're going to have a strong PTU release today or tomorrow we've we've put a lot of work into the telemetry we still got more work to do but in terms of us being able to look at the performance both our hang servers and on clients and also on clients out in the wild so you know sort of our ever catty members can do a capture and then we can look at exactly what was happening on their machine and it's really useful because for us in our QA environment we don't see a lot of the
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stuff that happens out in the wild there's a obviously we've only I mean we've got a pretty big QA department it's just under 70 people but still they're not gonna do the same thing that thousands of backers do and all the crazy stuff and so having the data that we can just automatically so like we've put stuff in that if the server starts to dip below a certain frame rate it automatically just starts capturing a few seconds of the performance and then we can take a look and see where the times been spent in the routine is the same on that same on the clients so that's helping a lot we're building some more telemetry in terms of various sort of things that people do so we can sort of see and what people are doing in the game and how it's working so that's been sort of a behind-the-scenes effort that we've been working on and I think that's you know helping with our ongoing performance
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enhancements so 3 1 is definitely performing better than 3 zero and you know that's going to continue on as we work on some of our more long-term things we've talked about which you know the object container streaming will help with sort of memory we've got asynchronous warning that we're getting closer to have working properly it's it's quite complicated to get working because the game wasn't built it was just built to create things on the main thread and so you know people program things assuming they can touch anything at any one time which you can't do when you're on multiple threads so and it's such a big codebase that it requires a lot to retrofit it and/or change things out refactor them to be a new thing so but all those things will make you know like so for instance you play and some AI spawning right now there'll be a hitch because they have to load in and
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there's a stall on the main thread until everything's load in but long term that will go away because I'll just sort of valve loading the background when they're ready the main thread will be notified and then BAM that we turned on so we're so we're putting all these things in place so I'm feeling really quite good about it we've we've added some new features like the service beacons stuff there's been a lot of this sort of UI improvement and polishes I think people noted and little things like the you know procedural ground you know sort of following they want you know I've noticed quite a few people posting videos and liking that which is good and we've tried to work in some things to you know improve like interdiction and stuff like that and so generally it's going pretty well it'd be
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our first one and I know we've got a the belief or the trust of everyone that you know we say okay we're doing quarterly we actually do coolies so this one will be a good step the next one won't be a good step but so it's going good but you know the one of the reasons why we're doing this show here because we've you know the best way to do this is as we've planned out a road map but obviously you sort of check-in where you are when you sort of get your release out okay like this is what I'm going to do four three two that's what we're gonna do two three three before other things that we want to fix or change that we didn't foresee when we first did this road mapping you know are the things that we want to address for quality of life or things we could do in the game to make the game play right now feel better because ultimately I mean you know the amount of functionality
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that we have actually in the game right now if it all works together and works well is more than a lot of release games I mean Co thieves just came out and you know we have like more variety of missions hell of a lot more ships a bunch more stuff that you can do and a lot more area to play in but you know they spend a lot of time polishing some of their their basic stuff I know people complain they still want more features in that because I think that's generally gamers were like I want more I want more all the time but you know we've been talking internally about you know star citizen is it's not a sprint it's a sort of longs America yeah it's very yes more than a marathon it's like you know a walk around the world but yeah you know there's definitely things that in terms of the gameplay if we work on a fixed you know they perform this is obviously
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one but just being able to play with your friends and and get together easily with them you know some of the stuff that comes to the multi-crew ships that we haven't finished off properly yet you know i think the base gameplay can be a lot of fun because it's kind of a fun sandbox so we've been discussing about maybe or not maybe definitely putting a little more focus in some of the near-term kind of features or improvement at the features as opposed to always focusing on like the next big feature we're trying to get in because you know if you looked at 3-0 we put a vast amount of things into it but we didn't spend enough time making sure the base stuff was working well so what you had was a whole bunch of new features but a lot of stuff that used to work into stick so before that ended up not being as good I'll be broken and so we've been fixing
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a bunch of that and three one but we still got more to do so you know we've got things that we want to address and you know the you know how it feels when you fly around we're not we're not you know the ifcs and the flight model still has a bunch of work we want to do you know the feel of fps moving around again same stuff so you know it's a so long term slug so we've sort of right now we're taking a look at it going ok what what four three two that we didn't foresee that maybe we want to spend some time working on and you know and then just sort of reassess some of the stuff that we're doing four three two and then maybe move a couple of the bigger things off to three three so we have more time to do some sort of quality of life or kind of fixes or improvements to systems right now so that's the phase we're out
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this is what we'll do every single we sort of do it as we're coming up to the release we're assessing it just to make sure all the teams are aligned you know our new production process is working really well we've you know we've factored in to sort of a much more sort of team-based agile scrum and sort of velocity in terms of fixes and and resolving issues is much much better I mean with I think resolved something like 8,000 during 3.1 I can't cramming around but I yeah this is right and then Dennis and I think it was like 15,000 for the whole of 3.0 which was basically a year you know so and our velocity is you know 120 issues resolved a day versus the 30 or even 20 that we had during 3-0 so I think the teams working
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together because we we really work to try to put everyone together not like here's the program as his designers it's like okay you know your vehicle feature team one your vehicle feature team two your gameplay team and you've got the designers and the engineers and the artists and we're actually putting them all together and we're trying to collocate people so the teams are sort of oriented in the various Studios we're not having them spread between time zones as much as we used to and I think it sort of really helped in the turnaround and also the energy in the morale of the team so it's so generally we're you know it's early days but we're feeling pretty good about kind of the velocity and trajectory we're going to do so that's why we're sitting here and we thought you know the discussion I had with my brother Aaron who was just out here and unfortunately he got on a plane
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yesterday evening otherwise I would have put him in is that you know we were we were talking about yeah the quality of life issues you know perhaps push back a couple of sort of the the bigger feature stuff so we can do that but if we're doing that why don't we ask you guys why don't we see what it what's interesting to you because it's it's always you know for us we have our ideas but you know there's hundreds of thousands of you guys out there and I think in terms of you know what is more interesting one of the things that you want to do or you know I still remember back in the very early days when we did our survey of what profession people would be interested in and you know of course I'm just always thinking well you because you know most
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space sim games have been very combat oriented so you're thinking okay it's you know being a pirate or a murse or maybe even a trader but you know I think it was something like 70% of the people wanted to be explorers right so that was a surprise but that's cool and then we're like okay well we need to put gameplay to allow you to do that and you know it did kind of affect sort of where we went so I mean we went a different way than say something like a leap or a no man's sky where they sort of procedurally darian but we one of the reasons why we went with the procedural tech to build the world's - the level of detail we did was we thought that sort of micro exploring this you know like that idea of getting landfill on a planet and you know discovering the mountain or the lake or really getting into the detail would be something that we great so we're still working towards
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realizing that but you can already see you know it with three moons that we have around Crusader and Delamar and you know in our upcoming releases it's obviously going to get bigger and wider but you know that sort of effected because you're thinking about okay yeah like we want people to sort of be tactile and get out there and explore and so so yeah we thought it would be really useful to have a discussion about things that we've identified that we want to improve for the immediate experience and then also get some feedback of sort of the bigger long-term professions what's interesting or what's the most important you guys my name's already been in progress it started at the beginning of this year I know in our roadmap it says scheduled but it's actually being in progress it should be that should be changing in the next the next roadmap I don't know if will be
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this Friday but the one afterwards but we've been working on that that has a lot of infrastructure issues in terms of making sure the resources are mapped on the planets and we can persist them across instances and we can generate it and handle all the stuff so we're making very good progress on that and it's I think it's going to be a very cool feature that people be really happy with so that's that's that's definitely three mm but in terms of some of the other ones yeah we would like to know priorities because if we're going to add some stuff - three - it's a zero sum game we're gonna have to shift some other stuff out so yeah what's more interesting you know is is you know repair more interesting than Salvage is more interesting than refueling those kind of so this is one of the unique challenges that star susan has is that we are
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operating a live game environment in the middle of our game development yes so that was a massive challenge yes so so some of what we're going to talk about today is is that balancing act between adding new features and going back and revisiting old ones and Britain and making them better making them more user-friendly making them more enjoyable because at the end of the day it's a video game the games are supposed to be fun to play and whatnot so to that end we are launching later today our alpha 3.2 feature survey you're gonna see that up on the robert space industry comm website it will be a survey for backers Souto so it will only be available to backer so if you do go to this thing and it doesn't let you do anything that's probably because you're either not logged in or you know a backer you should consider the movie exactly and get any happier voice for you but when
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the feature Survey launches today you already said we're gonna talk a little talk a little bit about big profession based features like Salvage mining or Salvage and repair and revealing but a lot of it is is is quality of life stuff is the kind of things that will make playing the game easier to play with your friends my dad's been asking me hey so I'm not even gonna to play star citizen and like like but not what if we add if we had if we had some of these features I'm not gonna have an excuse anymore I'm gonna have to play the game with my dad so careful you vote but let's go ahead and talk talk about some of these features we have now week now we can show you what the survey is gonna look like i JJ want you to bring that up there alright so we've got this so we'll then this goes live later today you'll see your
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star sis and alpha 3 point to feature survey we've got a little preamble pretty much a much shorter version of what Chris just did so we'll go ahead and skip that past that and some of the feature improvements that we're we're gonna be discussing for the survey this the this this four three two is uh things like quantum linking improved interdiction service bacon improvements so why don't we why don't we just go from top to bottom here let's talk a little bit about quantum linking what is quantum linking in a why should people I mean it's you and your friends you're heading to a destination and yeah first of all you need to share the destination and also everyone jumps at the same time so when you're traveling there and someone gets it's addictive you get pulled out all at the same time so it's I mean I think for multiplayer gameplay or playing with your friends it's it's super important
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so it's been on our horizon we've we've discussed it we've implemented elements of it but we haven't managed to finish it off because there's always been some big new massive shiny thing that we're trying to do and so you know we've actually one of the you know you'll see on a couple of things here we said okay look you know getting in with your friends playing together doing stuff together you know how do we make that simpler easier because we have elements little bits of it but they can't you know like it's it's not nearly as you know friendlier as polish as it can be and it's all sort of like halfway solutions that we've said well this is a temporary thing when we have the new shiny thing it'll be great so you know now it's time now's the time to sort of sort of say okay yeah let's not keep deferring this right and this is
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actually something that I've you know in general sort of made a direction this year which is like do not think like we one of the problems we have in star citizen is that we constantly are thinking about when all this is done like it's all like projecting into the future well when we have all this it'll be great right but you know we basically are operating a live game as you said right now people are playing I mean we have people playing hundreds thousands of hours evening some cases and you know they've got a lot of patience I mean you really do because there's a bunch of issues and quality of life things and shout out to our speakers and so yeah I mean so it's like you know let's let's let's let's recognize what we have which is a live game make sure that the live experience we make sure is as good as possible and then you know we're adding
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on all this extra you know functionality and content as we go but don't forget you know like as I think with 3-0 you know we rush to put so much stuff in that I think we should did ourselves a disservice and you know essentially release something that was lacking polish or had broken features and I don't really want to be doing that going forward and so you know so we one of the things that we were looking at is okay you know in terms of you know chatting with your friends or getting together with him and all joining together in the same place and making that easy and making that accessible or going to go to places together like the quantum linking there are all things that we should spend some time to make sure it's it's well and polished and a lot of times on our features we put the base stuff in and then that team schedule to do some
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new feature but of course there's always you know bug fixing and polish and then maybe enhancements in the features or you see people use it and go oh we can make that better well that all takes time and you have to do and you have to so where's that time going to come from for the teams and so that's kind of what we're focusing on so quantum linking is not just you and your buddies and other ships you going together and if you get it one of you gets interjected it pulls all of you out so you're no longer having to face these AI a pirate's by themselves but it's also great for the service beacon missions you know you'll be able to pick a missions and now you know if you're got to go out to some you know or out-there area you don't it's this one scroll over here so over here it's no that's not the right one you know now you can all link and you can all go together yes yeah so a pretty important feature and I do want to
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mention because I'm looking at the chat while we're talking the vote is not do this or this these are all features that are going to go into star citizen yeah yeah yeah so yeah it's be totally clear these these are all things we are definitely going to do what we're interested in knowing is what's the most important things be priorities that helps make us priorities you know we're actually going to try to do all this stuff and maybe get it all done four three two but we have to have a priority list because you know we will have to at some point make a call you know if there's something's running behind something would have to get pushed and so what we're really interested in is what is the most important things for you guys because that really helps us in terms of ordering you know what our team's work on first or you know if there's a conflict
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between two things who wins yeah even with 475 plus people around the world and you're still only so many things you can work on in any given time there's always there's never enough people everyone wants more people I'm constantly amazed if you told me that this company would be the size it is and we're doing all this and it would take this many people to to do this then I would have told you you're absolutely insane about four years ago three years ago probably two as well but you know I think it is part of the fact that the game is so big and is built at such fidelity but also at such scale and that we're operating a live project and the same time as doing development and also building this incredibly ambitious single player game squadron 42 it's just a lot it seems like a good time to say
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that I need like five more people all right so moving on from quantum linking which you know it seems like a pretty valuable feature our next one in the list was improved interdiction now improved interdiction why don't you just take them there what is improved in addiction okay well of course well we're trying to even in 3-1 we sort of have done some interdiction improvements to make sure that the spawning is like when you get into dicted the AI of closed you know so it's not like someone's ten or eight kilometres away because in 3-0 it was just a fixed number and the fixed number was determined by the biggest thing which was the scenario that I think had some asteroids and so it had to be a big distance so now the the distances and the arrangement of the ships is more dependent on the kind of
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scenario you're getting pulled out into and you know we even have we've put the first I the basically we've always planned to have sort of a quantum jammer which was gonna you know be an item which could either be on a ship or it can be you know sort of mine or a way that you could put out and so we actually implemented that for AI so the AI ships in 3-1 that interdict you will one of the ships will have this item and we're going to I think it's not in the current right now in the PTU but it will be by the time hopefully we released next week you should be able to be able to see which one is actually jamming and you have to disable it or destroy it and then you'll be able to jump again right or get far enough away from the jamming signal to be able to do quantum
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again so with the interdiction improvements we won't need to finish off the item functionality make it available to players to equip the the component or like deploy a launch a buoy so in 3 1 we don't have the voice we would have the boy in 3 2 we have a very simple version of the component the item in 3 1 it would be a much more sophisticated one that pulls more power like obviously if you got the power you can see maybe the e/m signal the ship would be much greater and you'll be able to go okay that's the one that's that's jamming my ability to use quantum and then we're also going to enable it so players then can deploy this and pull other players or AI out and so that's going to be kind of fun because you don't you so if I'm a pirate you know I can deploy it and maybe I don't catch players but I can catch them AI generated cargo you know
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haulers and you know attack them or get you know go and take their cargo and then we have another feature that would tie into this which i think is the service beacon thing is the world which ties into another one talking about but well we also want to make AI ships to be able to also do our service beacon responses so you could have a nice feedback loop where a player puts the quantum boy out captures a a AI cargo hauler who then generates a service beacon help request that brings in another player or another AI so so so and and that's a core gameplay loop I mean like if you played freelancer you play you know privateer you know the whole point of you know there has to be some risk or challenge to get to locations and obviously in more
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dangerous areas you get paid more for your cargo or whatever with and there's a higher chance of being interdicted or attacked and so we need to make that gameplay loop of you know going from point A to point B challenging right but not annoying so in 3-0 definitely annoying three one I think will be better and three two is game focusing on that call because that is the core gameplay loop in a lot of sort of space system games and space trading games so it's not just new tech for the for the addiction it's actually a increased variety in the type of scenarios yeah I know definitely so so again again where we'll be building more fluid scenarios making them more sort of emergent on and you know there's a feedback loop between what AI and players do and so I think it would make the world just feel more alive and more
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things going on and I for one I'm gonna rush the opportunity to get revenge on some of these AI players and interdict them just over and I'm just gonna log in for like eight hours straight and just interdict AI over and over and over again that's just for three-hour all right so this leads into the service beacon improvements so when we go ahead and bring up the the she here service speaking improvements the service beacon will expand and evolve to include new contract types additional filters and more feedback precision AI characters will be able to interface with the system so that they too will be able to request help and provide assistance to others which will in turn increase both how much this type of immediate content we can offer at any given time as well as the likelihood that someone whether player or non-player character will be drawn to respond to your calls for
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support so what can we add to that service beacon well I mean so I mean we already have service we can work on the 3-2 roadmap so you know what we're talking about is some of the stuff we did but also you know like the a I mentioned AI is being able to also generate service beacon requests which sort of creates a really nice feedback loop and you know general you know I think we've decided that we need to spend a little more time on the usability and focus the first issue of the you know the first use of service beacon will be in 3-1 which was nice we moved it up from 3 to into 3-1 so I know everyone had a lot of teeth-gnashing when bank killing went out of 3-1 yeah but the service beacon stuff you know came in which is I think it adds a little bit of gameplay but it really is going to sort of come alive more in 3 2
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and will include things like the sort of ability to be able to rate and you know yes this person's a this one's a reliable service beacon person or no they're a bit sketchy the service beacon system is new for 3/1 and I even though three ones only been in PTU for a couple days many backers won't have experienced it as a system yet why and I think in some of the past releases it wasn't functional so I might have to check I think in the PTU release that will be happening today people should be able to be using the service beacon but yet it's a very very new thing yeah but it's kind of cool because it's there basically player generates it's the first stage of player generated missions and the whole service beacon system is actually how players you know it's basically a player contract manager it's like hey I need
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you to do this job whether it's helping me I'm under attack or it's take me from point A to point B or escort me from point A to point B or you know eventually you know take out this person or whatever it would be the this is this is how players will enter into contracts with other players put jobs and missions out also probably how they'll be able to sort of you know like you can hire some people to help you do this big run which you'll make a bunch of money on and then you distribute some of the products some of your costs go to the people you add to hire to help you to do the run and so the service beginning is the infrastructure that allows that and we're building on top of it and it's very critical I think for the player interaction or we're talking about you with your friends or interacting with other players achieving stuff either together in cooperation or in some cases you could be in opposition but I think
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very much a good focus of star citizen is the idea of like you and your friends going and doing stuff together whether it's you know against you know AI or it's against players you know it's kind of up to you but I think you know our big focus is yes this is an online game how can me and my friends go and have fun together a pretty big feature yep and and and I'm thinking I'm just imagining that somebody is going to end up creating a star citizen Yelp to start reviewing people and servers well that's actually the idea so the service beacon is going to have a terrace so it's going to have like of the Yelp ratings or the uber ratings where you can both rate the person that's responding taking the contract
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and the person that's giving the contract so it'll help to have that sort of you'll you know if someone's basically you know they they do a honeypot deal like you know you give them a 0 star 1 star rating and you see this person who's offering a contract and they've got you know their ratings one versus two an African contractor whose ratings 5 you're gonna take the person as a 5 rating my condolences to tyler witkin ahead of time all right moving on from service bacon improvements one of the more intriguing options that are that are on the survey at least for me speaking only for myself first tier of guilds and associations now that this kind of came up in our in our vault in our ages vulcan promotion with the Wayfarers club and i've seen a lot of
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people talking who might have thought that this was just you know sales copy this was just something for the lower but but this is actually the way prayers club is actually a guild our association that's going into the game it'll be a functional organization in the game yes yes so we we've always had a plan you know and this was true in privateer or things like velocity you have you know non player organizations or guild you know where the classic ones of the merchant gamer scenario guild and so we have those and we we also want to have a level of associations to like you know the Wayfarers clubs almost like triple-a in space and you know like you have it here in america and triple-a you know they have services or come out and they'll tell you or whatever and also if you you know go to certain places i'll
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give you discounts because they pre-negotiated discount and so we actually want to start to put the infrastructure in for the various you know guilds and associations you'll do so in three two it would be the very beginning of that but as we go through would build much more of it up and and so what you would do is you would essentially you know earn some money or you know pay with you you see to be a member of this guild that you know you would - but you get benefits for it like for instance you know jobs or missions that maybe you couldn't get somewhere else or you could get help in a way that you wouldn't normally get it or you get discounts in discount gas prices yeah exactly that's sort of what we were talking about for the white Wayfarer cop so so it's the beginning of that and
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that will definitely have quite a lot of these that would be sort of focused on the different you know like the I'm sure there'll be a salvagers organization and you know various different those in the world that you can you know you know as an ex-military one you could join or whatever it would be and so we want to start to put that in to kind of lay that infrastructure because it's quite important for I think the long-term gameplay very cool so yeah that stuff we were talking about in the ages volcán promotion wasn't just a flavor copy should check that out if you haven't already waivers know things just flavored coffee if you read it in the fiction stuff we're usually thinking of at some point that would actually exist in the world that's the whole point so if you read you know like the writers do really nice fiction stuff but a lot of
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that fiction stuff is specifically seeding what we want to do long term so so don't just view it as fiction it is it is it is highlighting where the game will go hi it's the next step on the list the party system this is a party system reads these improvements these improvements will improve these improvements Mike these improvements will improve the players ability to create groups allowing you to team up with your friends or to join the same game instance and cooperate on jobs and missions that's a big one yeah well I mean I think this is a massive communauté complaint of feedback for a long time and we've always been so yeah yeah when we get the full spectrum integration then there will get it over and
00:36:50
basically what we've we've said was look we just got a focus some time on this now so because yeah I mean I'm saying this you want a game with your friends and you want to get me your AAG made so or you know however you want to do it you need to have an easy way to do it and right now it's not so easy at all so we want to spend some actual time on our back-end and on a front-end side to make that process earlier and sort of be the beginnings of what it is yeah let's you know make it easy I to many people tell me like how will be really easy I would like it much you know I could only get in with my friends reliably counterpoint though I told my dad I wouldn't play with them until this was in so if we put
00:37:38
it off yeah you know so you don't have to vote for it I think of disco right now partying says no it's a big one of the folks that folks have been talking and asking for that for a while complementary to that team chat the improvements to the team chat system that will polish communication between players and make the experience more robust and intuitive work on this system will also begin to factor in the incorporation of spectrum into the game yeah well you know we've talked a long time one of the reasons why we did the whole spectrum set up on the platform is the idea is we're going to unify you know the friends lists and all the rest of stuff that you'll do on make on the platform side and it can also be replicated down on the game side so you don't have to maintain parallel lists but you know basically the chat feature
00:38:26
in the game right now is the chat that was in from the very beginning we spent no time other than just fixing it if it breaks in the game and you know like yeah how does that work with your list of friends or you know groups and so again it's along with you know getting together with your friends getting into the game having an ability to sort of chat with them and that in your various sort of like setups or groups it's super important and it's also a precursor to the type stuff that's going to come in with 3 3 so we want to get it in there and make it easy because you know right now yeah just there once in a general chat which is cool but it would and even that still you know again like I said the implementation of chat that we had before we even did you know the the PU
00:39:17
yeah it's best I don't say anything all right so next up on the list we've got economy shopping UI experience now this feature includes the implementation of shopping kiosks in the stores and increased variation of available products including ship items and weapons not physically available to display so like mail-order catalog yeah we search so one of the big things is that you know they obviously we want to be selling everything in game ships ship weapons ship components all the rest of at the moment in the game because we've got a limited amount of real estate and we don't have the big landing zones in we don't have the big planets in yet we don't have places to sell ship weapons or ships or any of that stuff because they're just we don't have stores set
00:40:05
for them and we don't have the room for it now that will we will you know have sort of physical you know big stores and displays as the landing zones come in and all the rest of stuff but we haven't done the sort of shopping kiosk functionality which will allow you to have a kiosk in a shop and you know you could go through a bunch of ship weapons or you know even the buggy or something and you can see it there and say okay I'll buy that and then it can be delivered to you but it doesn't need to be displayed in the store so it give us the ability to allow you to buy a wider variety of items like basically we want to get rid of the Virgin Voyager direct store online on the platform that the goal is that's going away and you all those items you buy in the in the game but we can't do that until we can have
00:40:55
like a location to sell you in and you know up until now that's sort of waiting for the landing locations but really if we can get some of the key our stuff in we can sort of make that move studio and I think it would be good because one of the things we want to do is you know the ability to sort of upgrade or very old coming one of the later features we have here you know we want to make the components of your ship much more meaningful this whole item 2.0 that we've talked about there's a whole infrastructure for it but we've got to finish it off properly for you to really realize and understand and see the benefits of it and one of the components of that has been able to sort of buy bigger and better stuff and so the shopping kiosk will allow that to happen sooner rather than later because you know otherwise we're kind of bound by real estate and then
00:41:43
we're bound by when we roll in the planets and the other locations which you know they're kind of dependent on the object container streaming and extend yourself so it we think that's a good way to get some of this possibility of game play in the game sooner rather than later awesome so you know seems like shopping you know you I but obviously it's a gateway to a lot of core game that's very important which leads us into the item 2.0 ship systems and weapons so this is another option there's another feature that you'll be able to vote for it and again remember we are doing all of these that's this is just about prioritizing so item 2.0 ship systems weapons says feature work would include finalizing item 2.0 functionality that allows them to overheat misfire and suffer critical failures based on factors such as increased wear and or
00:42:31
damage it would also introduce deeper functionality to upgradable items so that new power plants shields coolers stealth coms radar all make the marked difference to a shift performance based on how they are configured so yeah that this this is this is the big thing from you know this is my Hornet and you have your horn my horn it won't I would say I would say this is probably the biggest missing element of the kind of like core sort of gameplay mechanic of venturing around in space is that we haven't finished so we have an infrastructure for item 2.0 and a lot of the bits are there but not enough of the stuffs in there that the the the user can realize it so where we so we already had wear and tear in the 3-2 roadmap so wear and tear is definitely part of this but really where it comes in is you know the
00:43:21
effect of say for instance I'm running my engines my thrusters hot right I'm over I'm overpowering I'm putting more power to him so I can boost him so I can turn a bit yeah I can for that time I'm turning him but they're running hot so as a running heart they're becoming overheated as they're becoming overheated there's a chance that they may misfire or they could even have a critical failure more their overheating the faster the wear increases wear also affects your chance of misfire and overheating so because you need to have you need to have downsides to doing things right so everything is the trade-off right so what we don't really have that's that effective in the game right now is you running your ship should have to be making conscious choices am I putting my power to the shields because I'm going to come over then I'm not being able to
00:44:08
put as much power to my guns so I can't recharge them as quickly or I can't put as much power to my thrusters to a you know to super heat the plasma to check the you know the the gases to thrust me around and so what we want to do is is is is give you know focus much more making all that whole sort of holistic aspect work that also has the issues to downside the wear that then means that the item as it gets older or gets worried you're not fixing that like if you've got a damaged item you're not repairing it the chance that it can misfire or just have a critical failure as much higher right so what we want you to do is you've got your ship you've been out there you've been a fat you've got to take back you're gonna have to repair it make sure the equipment's in
00:44:55
good taste it's like if you don't you know do a overhaul of your change and every so many hours of operation you know you could quite likely fall out of the sky in the real world well we want you to have those same sort of calls and that you know and if you overuse it like you just you know you just trash your your your you know in the real world you thrash your car all the time you on your breaks all the time well you know at some point your breaks are gonna fail if you don't replace them right so we need to make sure that all that whole loop is in there and it has effects and players can feel it and so there isn't any case where one player can just say oh yeah well doesn't matter I've got so much power everything's powered and tiller there and everything works perfectly we want sort of trade off in the ships even you know big expensive ships that you have to make decisions on your resources
00:45:44
am I doing this right doing that there's always a there's a pro and a con for both of them and then also having this the item 2.0 finished I properly means that the multi crew behavior that you can do is much more like so one of if they and say a constellation versus in horner is the crew could run around and like be fixing up components as a sort of failing that would enable you to last longer or in a fight or out in space so you know if you're getting hits on your shield and you you're your power plant it's putting our energy to try and keep the shields up right as that strain on your power plant the power plant would have a you know at some point misfire opportunity if it misfires one of them fuel rods in the power plant goes power plant now has say four fuel rods so now it goes to 75% power instead of a hundred percent power as a player you
00:46:32
could go and change the sub component the fuel rod our knee and then get it back to 100% right and you know the more so and the same for other items could have fuses and stuff and so we have these sub components we've got they are even for them but having that whole loop October you can go and do stuff and you know I mentioned Co thieves at the top of it and it has some kind of like much smaller stuff but you know you're in a fighh and your cannon ball comes into your ship and there's a hole in your ship and if you don't put a plank on it and you don't bail out the water I mean that's cool right there's someone's there you know driving the ship someone's down trying to bail out the water or someone's firing the cannons and you know you know it's that's what we've had is our design from day one you know back in 2012 and 13 and I sort of feel like we need to finish it off properly instead of talk about it and and and get
00:47:20
it done so that was a that's a big sort of drive for me too you know so I think it's I think it will provide a vast amount of fun and gameplay and challenges and trade-offs and discussion for the for everyone out there when you talk about having to maintain your components or they miss fire all I kept thinking was Han Solo in the Falcon in Star Wars versus Han Solo in the Falcon and Empire Strikes Back you know one that's maintained when it's not any cos you can see the difference there also land out in the Falcon in the news so excited all right and then the final of the feature improvements that backers will be able to to vote on fps AI combat the first stage of getting combat AI into the persistent universe now this would expand mission types by
00:48:07
introducing the risk that an AI could be waiting to ambush you on a moon or in a Hulk drifting in space now you say FPS come we're talking like like not in ships obviously we have comm yeah we have we have ship come I know it's basically you know we have all these great space wrecks but there's not a lot of unless there's some other player there waiting to ambush you there's not a lot of a challenge in it so you know the the goal of the idea has always been that like you know some of these wrecks could have some outlaws of pirates waiting to ambush you and you know prevent yeah creates a known risk challenge and also just kind of fun for us to use another part of our you know like we've got a very you know you know full-featured FPS game inside of a full-featured flying around in space
00:48:56
game and you don't really have an opportunity to use it that much outside of playing other players and you know ultimately you know the goal in the star citizen universe is to sort of be 90 percent kind of AI environment 10 percent players and you know there's a you know the problem with player versus player stuff is that there's always a loser in that case that's a player right so there's someone that's pissed off but AI don't get pissed off when they get shot in the face they don't get pissed off when they get blown up in space and so I think it's very important to have a lot of AI or environment encounters whether it's in space are down on the ground so as a player even they're like great I compute you know like yeah I took I took that pirate out oh yeah I'm badass right and you know I may not be nearly as good of a pilot as as you know
00:49:46
the guy that's obsessively or the girl that's obsessively playing 30 hours a week and can snipe me a kilometer or whatever but you know it's it allows people to sort of have fun because you know combat to a certain extent is one of the core mechanics and so I think when we'd be missing we're missing in the PU this sort of ground combat aspect or you know like shipboard combat aspect and so this is the the first aspect of it and obviously definitely always on our plans but we kind of want to try to make a bit of a push for it just to yeah have some challenge of variety when you're down on you know these moons these you know large amounts of area that we've created for you to explore like let's have some challenges let's have some risks down
00:50:33
there rather than just looking at the sunset or the sunrise and I can already see the reddit thread Chris hates PvP being creepy he doesn't wear time of adding to it we've got PvP now yeah I don't hate PvP I'm adding to it I just think I think what you want to do is you want to have a game that allows for both and allows people to allows people to choose kind of what they're more interested in I mean that's the service beacon stuff and all the rest of stuff and so I'm hoping that we put a structure together and the way that we're doing it it will allow for both types of play and you know people I kind of view what's gonna happen with PvP is going to be more all player organization driven and they'll be fighting over resources on you know there's a vast amount of land that we're now creating
00:51:21
with this sort of very detailed procedural system so I sort of whew you've got you're gonna have individual players that are playing sort of lone wolf style small groups of friends doing stuff together cooperatively you know I would I could kind of see there then be more kind of PvE focus like let's go and adventure and do stuff and we have fun and get attacked by AI pirates or whatever it would be and then the bigger orgs on a player basis are fighting over resources and you know various aspects that you know a sort of player PvP and that's but it allows people to sort of choose what they they want and a group of you know a smaller group could join that larger player group and be part of this bigger battle or you know all versus all that's right so I think we can have all those in the game and I'd like to do it in a sort of organic
00:52:09
holistic way so I don't want people to sort of only be in a PvP server or only be in a you know a PvE server I want it to be this is the world and it's sort of up to you to sort of play and choose your challenges alright so but that that's that's the Alpha three point two feature survey that will go live later today look for that in shortly after the conclusion of this show we got about 10 minutes left yeah you want to do some backer questions for sure do it right off the bat this question came up a bunch of times we talked a little bit about it but how far are we in the development of mining gameplay it's kinda it's an equation but it came up so many times I feel like I have so we're pretty deep into it we generate we have a resource map for the various
00:52:59
planets which determines what kind of resources can be mined which also determines what kind of rocks are generated we already have the gameplay for controlling your mining laser and breaking apart rocks so you know the goal is that you should be able to once you learn how to do it you could mine just based sort of the visual and aural feedbacks but you also will have sort of UI that will sort of be telling you like how much energy you're putting in and how close to in the optimal zone the the rock is or it's gonna go critical and blow up but yeah we're pretty far along I mean I've been reviewing the sprint reviews of it and it's looking it's looking good so four by three - I'm pretty confident that it'll be pretty full feature them and polished okay this
00:53:47
question also came up quite a bit one of the ships coming online with three point one is the the misc razor we've had the dragonfly with with 3.0 the Knox queue is coming with 3.1 which was also a racing variant we haven't had any additions to racing in play for a firsta first yeah yeah so we've actually I mean we don't have it on the list here we've talked about trying to get some racing stuff in four three two if we can make it definitely in four three three the other thing which is sort of going to the playing of now in the game is that we we've decided that we need to make sure that we give love to arena commander we give love to star marie and we give love to Marie Cup racing and so we're in the process of looking to build
00:54:37
dedicated teams to focus on that because the problem right now is that you know we did the arena commander because that was okay let's get the dogfighting working and then we did star marine because us I get the FPS working and all sort of feeding into the PU so all the people that were supporting and doing that do PU stuff now so you know essentially we just sort of fix up stuff in arena commander of stammering but we're not really adding new content polishing and keeping up there and we sort of feel like we need to have some dedicated scrum teams that that you know you're the arena commander team you're the star Marine team and we're adding you know new levels new challenge because for me the like long-term vision for what we're doing here in star citizen is yes you got the PU the array venturing in but you know arena commander is where you go to practice so you don't have to risk your stuff it's
00:55:24
also where you can go and you can easily sort of just you know you're on you're on a certain level playing fields you can say objectively who's the best dog fighter in a way that would be maybe hard in the PU and the same four-star marine and the same for the marika racing now we're going to have racing that will be embedded in in the PU that you can do which will be really kind of cool but the idea is yet we I want to make arena commander and star marine viable ongoing game modes that have updates that have new content and allow people because I think sometimes you may just say you know what I don't have the time to get into the PU and do a big mission with all my friends but maybe I just want to get in and you know have a you know see how I do on the leaderboards and have a quick dogfight or you know get into a quick stammering match so I feel like we've done a disservice by like getting these game
00:56:12
modes up and running to get a to get a mechanic working and then once once we have we just like okay so the PU now we don't worry about it so so we are definitely going to do that so do look for stuff that will add for racing that is on our agenda only downside is you know unfortunately good resources don't grow on trees so hiring the people and getting them up takes a bit of time but it is a it is a goal for us to have dedicated stakeholders so that's all they're doing they're not getting distracted to fix something else on the PU so look look for that to be happening towards the later part of this year all right well we do it that's it that's it yeah yeah yeah everybody always dreads coming on the show with me and I'm like
00:56:59
bypassed don't worry about it all right so remember the Alpha 3.2 feature survey will go live very shortly later today look for that that it's open to all backers it's not a concierge exclusive or subscribers loose exclusive if you supported the project you'll be able to cast your vote and that'll go for roughly about a week I think we're still kind of flexible with the end time but it'll be it'll be at least a week yeah we probably want it done I would think before we start on three two stuffs exactly we need we need the feedback so that we can make our decisions four three two so we are aiming to go live for three one the end the next week no so yeah so look for that later today Chris thank you so much for be on the show you're welcome Jared and thank you everyone out there tuning in and listening and everyone that's back to us thank you very much and you know I think hopefully you guys are going to like
00:57:48
three one and you know this year I'm pretty excited I think we've got a good cadence going so it's gonna be good okay we'll see in a few minutes everybody there was a video all right well that
00:59:55
about wraps up this week's show special thanks to chris roberts for being on the show this week the court the the Alpha 31 to feature survey will go live shortly after the end of this broadcast so you'll be able to cast your vote on Monday we've got another all-new episode of calling all Deb's where we address questions about tractor beams if bigger means better when it comes to equipment slots players building their own space stations and more so don't forget you there's also one week left to pick up an Aegis Vulcan refueling repairing and rearming ship if you haven't already and there's also the paint and decal library to pack that's good even if you're waiting to earn the ship in the game so for reverse the first live on content manager Jared Huckaby I'm gonna go watch that reclaimer trailer again I'll see you next week everybody thanks for watching for the latest and
01:00:51
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

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