Wingman's Hangar ep015 . April 5, 2013

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hey everybody I'm back did you enjoy the last episode kind of interesting I got to tell you I have to give a big UPS to Michael Morland who cut that together that was an amazing amount of edits and took a lot of time watching all the crazy zus that we that we've done over the last you know 14 or 13 plus episodes what does that mean well that means we are on episode 15 kince that is a lot of episodes thanks a lot to you guys for

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   letting us get this far we're going to continue to go onwards and upwards what do we have coming up this week well we have this week in review well well last week as everybody knows hosted by Senor microfono and the the lamp uh we want to name her maybe we can name the lamp who knows we'll just give it a shot send it in we'll think about it we were all at GDC we're having business meetings we're talking to people about Star Citizen we're showing off our stuff we're talking to possible business partners and also we're looking for potential things that could help us make this game shorten the timeline for getting it from us to you as we all know very crucial so on with also this week we have Forum feedback we have of course wide world news and we have an interview with our Graphics programmer Brendan Jackson so a lot to look forward to this week let's

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   get on with the really big shoe so if we have a GDC debrief I think I can mess that up even more GDC debrief with Rob Irving come on in Rob I don't have my own music no you have you can make your own music I need a theme song well some Kid Rock thing right exactly so man you were at GDC last week in fact you were there I was only there a few days you were there for like the entire week slogging up and down the streets of San Francisco yeah it was fun though wasn't it it was it was a lot of fun very informative I learned a lot and watched a lot of very interesting presentations yeah exactly and that's that's one thing that we can do you know we find out what the rest of the world is doing you know while we've been making in our little cocoon while we're making it we can find out maybe somebody's come up with solutions that we hadn't thought of or that might make

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   our game better a pathway to successive and good so what what did you like what what did you find there that you thought was interesting well one thing I did learn is don't buy new shoes the day before the show um a lot of what I did learn though don't eat that yellow snow don't buy new shoes just before the show exactly good lessons for well you know we are a learning program so one of the things a lot of what you learn at GDC is not just what to do but also the mistakes people made you they tell you about them they they help you learn from what they did did wrong so I spent a lot of time listening to people talking about the games they made for instance the Star Wars guys and uh the guys who did uh a lot of the freeto playay games which of course their economy model is important for us to look at and learn from right find out what they did right what they didn't do right and absolutely

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   and see what we can glean from that so that we can do everything right and how not to be evil how not to be evil right right so what was the most impactful thing you saw then what was your favorite bit you saw what did you like I think the most impactful thing in something we've already been thinking about of course is that so that's really interesting what else what else did you see well the other thing is just keeping the content alive keeping the world alive that was a really big deal for every single company I went to and we've got to provide a lot of content for all you people out there so we're going to be keeping thinking about that for a long time so the live team essentially like how to keep the keep the content fresh and keep things in the in the universe popping and happening and you know we're going to be some of the things that they've done out there are interesting but we're going to be taking it to the inth level to the next level well where we hope to be mining the data from them and taking the

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   lore of what's going on and then and then building some content around that so kind of letting them create the lore and then helping them guide us into you know maybe their story lines that they create that we manage absolutely more than anything our players are our content more than any other game that's good that's good well thanks a lot Rob um problem appreciate you stopping by we also have another guest ready to come in here um every time we talk about this you know during the week I get a lot of comments saying people saying really really want to see more content what did you guys during the week really like that stuff so we thought we'd show you a little bit about exactly what we do during the week here at Cloud Imperium roll it there you go that's actual code from the game and also why you can't see

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   every week why there's something really cool to show cuz that's what we're doing and with that note let me bring in Jason Spangler come on in Jason have a seat Hot Seat you guys have met Jason before he's our CTO the big wig the big chair and he was also at GDC I think he probably took in more um sessions than anybody else I looked at your schedule and it was like you know I couldn't keep up it was amazing so what' you like uh a lot of online tech service and production sessions uh met with a lot of like vendors who could like you mentioned provide tools or services that could help us uh save time get better and faster um met with a lot of manufacturers of like gpus and CPUs so we can optimize and so we can get free

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   stuff no no no we well that you know that's one thing that I bet they don't realize is that when you're doing um and you're looking at your notes down there I see you B sheet I I don't have any notes so I'm just kidding but one of the things we're doing when you're doing Xbox or you're doing PS3 um you're kind of limited in config right you can fix you know what your limitations are but we're doing PC and we're supporting PC which means we have een number of configurations to support and so that means we need lots of stuff right and we also since we'll be releasing in the future we have to talk to them to know what the specs are going to be what they believe the specs will be at that time when they release the new product yeah EX what are they going to be in 2014 2015 you know heck what are they going to be later on this year when we're

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   doing like the dog fighting thing so it's like you're right there's a lot to learn so meeting with them who else who else did you meet with um new company called simply gone they make a tool that generates level of details uh off of uh meshes so we can save artist time and automatically generate the different level of detail uh models so explain how that works like if you're if you're in space and you're up close you see tons and tons of detail on our ships lots and lots of triangles lots of polygons it looks realistic but but when you're looking at something from a distance you're not rendering the exact same number of polygons are you what what does what does that do what does that mean right by switching to a lower level of detail we uh uh save GPU and CPU time to render what might be closer to you in more detail and what's farther away in less detail since you

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    won't notice it since it's fewer pixels on the screen there you go see secrets in the game industry not to mention you just saw a lot of Jason's code fly by there well the entire code team so cool was there anything else was there anything else you were particularly liked or found interesting at GDC um a lot of cloud computing providers are talking to game companies and and and advertising their services to game companies we're going to need that yes and there's a lot of trend of reusing server messaging Frameworks and uh no SQL databases and other Tech that is being end up being shared between like web companies high performance Computing companies and game companies cool I mean see so Jason's the guy who vets all this stuff for us to make sure that your experience on the end seems seamless we

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    don't have seems seamless can we do more alliteration like that but it's so that you get a better experience rather than you know having it choppy so all this stuff's important that's why it's important for us to go to GDC and find these things out so thanks to Jason for joining us um we're going to now take a look at Brian Brewers something he's put together our lead animator you can hang here for a second Jason take it away Brian so what we've got right here Brian's we're showing you a little bit of the animation that we've got going on this is some of our character animation our ingame itself in the engine it's just kind of a guy working out on screen and one of the things we're trying to talk about doing here at uh at cig and with Star Citizen is we're toying around with the idea of full performance capture so that we can capture face audio performance at the same time sort of like you block out to play or

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    something of that nature so that it looks realistic so that the lips look match up the eyelines match up things like that so we want the experience to seem as immersive as poss as imers realistic immersive as possible I knew I could do it and so that's one of the things we're going to do so that is the end of the week in review which takes us exactly to Forum Fe oh not to Forum feedback whoa Michael thank you he just mentioned something I totally forgot about it you know what this means folks that's right we've got the nose cam let's get it going we're going to take you out and we're going to take a look at the 300i some aspects with Chris Smith be right back let's go all right let's take a look there's Mike again microphone and

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    we're on the way out almost to the Whiteboard don't want to do that let's take a look around the office again there's Mr Skelton how's your hookah what's up man what's up just saw Jason right there there's Brendon we're going to see him a little bit Tom Sawyer how's the fence painting going yeah never gets old coming on here Elijah is still here zay's working on the website can't show too much of that there's Brian we just saw his stuff look good Brian and here we come along to Chris Smith what's going on Chris hey how's it going pretty good say hi to everybody hi everyone you guys remember Chris he got uh belly bumped we're sorry about that Chris we apologize yes it was quite the experience have you uh have you recovered uh not quite I don't blame you my appetite's still off good some of us at least one of us is skinny so tell us about what you're working on here what is what do we got here well um I'm

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    working on a 300i ship and uh this is uh the landing gear for it the landing gear looks really detailed yeah yeah so we're putting a lot of a lot of detail in these in these little mechanical things to make them as believable as possible Right take a look at that folks make it make it look nice take a look around show it around move that around for everybody so I can see look at the detail on this ship look at that amazing wow if we're putting that much detail in the Hang into into the landing gear we must be putting a ton of detail into the rest of the ship too yeah yeah everything will be pretty detailed and uh very high fidelity so exactly we are pushing the boundaries pushing it of not only space but computer gaming right absolutely of course for foran of

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    course see you later d all right later thanks Chris all right here we go back into the AUD there's our designer coming around the corner we know what that room is don't go back in there and we're coming back and we are back that was cool that was interesting ta let's turn this off here take off the head cam woo little brightness want to thank Chris for showing us that you know um if just think about that folks as detailed as as the landing gear is there the rest of the missiles guns cockpit is all going to be even more detailed so um it looks amazing and you know it does take time so you know again when people say they want to see something every week that ship takes you know five six weeks to make so it takes time because we want

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    to get it right because it's going to be stinking great right so let's get on let's wrap it up and get to my favorite part of the show Forum feedback try that one let's get right to it from slow reflex he says will you announce in advance which events you'll be attending in the future and fans can make plans to attend as well yeah we will absolutely be doing that I mean when we're we're hitting up a show or we're playing to show Star Citizen we'll announce it you know we'll have things for golden ticket holders to attend things for Pleasures to attend we're we're actually trying to get some stuff for gamescon this summer in in Germany so look for some announcement in the future about that but Lord knows I'm want to go there for some you know some seresa from Reebok he says it wasn't in the ship component

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    update so we wanted to ask Will Ship sensors be similar to the rest of the components and how you can upgrade or tweak them for better performance yeah I mean we want to make the environment as interactive as possible but that's one of those situations where we have to still design it um it's still got a lot to do and right now we are kneed deep in creating assets so that all is all going to work we'll probably release something on that much later as soon as we figure that out but environmental interaction is is key to to good gameplay in my opinion so the more we can do in that regard the better you know whether that's Day One release or whether that's you know a little bit after that who knows that that will that'll still be determined from THS he says will every energy weapon be named laser or will we see energy weapons based on different

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    Technologies yeah they're all going to be called laser no come on man really no plasma Neutron guns particle cannons it's all there we're going to have tons of different weapons I think we even had something about a couple weeks ago uh talked a little about this so yeah no not everything is laser man there's even projectile weapons missiles I mean come on you can't have just lasers well not if you're good not saying that anybody's not good if they don't just admit that redacted from anxious confusion he says welcome aboard infusion in many online games players tend to over G SS with an ersion breaking SE of

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    player with there be dark limits or such to cument this love my Minecraft love that video well done yeah you know our service charting system is U being designed to keep a limit or a top on how many people can be in a in a certain instance how many that is is still TBD to be determined and you guys are going to help us with that um through the dog fighting and and hanger apps and thing or modules as we release them you'll be able to help us stress test the servers and the Shing system to where we get the exact amount that that it can handle uh we don't want a large frame rate 2500 massive thing going on unless of

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    course the servers and machines can handle it uh we're more along the lines of you know dog fight think World War II Battle of Britain Style flying on shooting each other stuff like that that's more the size and scale you'll probably see in the game but again TBD we got to figure that out and you guys will help us figure that out from hermit boy he says how will the UE and other groups respond to stolen carriers will the uee attempt to recapture the carrier whenever they see it in you e space yeah but they'll probably do more than that they'll probably try to blow it up man if you're strong enough in your guild or whoever else is holding a carrier you are a tar ghetto everybody is coming at you and they're coming at you hard and if you come in if you come into uee space if you were that foolish then uh you're going to take the lumps

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    for doing so you can count on it from mariluna hi wingman miraluna here are there plans for in-game tools to manage plans or alliances thank you and have a nice day absolutely in the game there'll be ways to manage your friends your Clans your guilds whatever you want to call there'll be tools and such in fact there'll even be tools on the new some tools to help you with that on the new website some things will allow you to keep track of things like that um which will be revealed as as the website comes online from Artis he says will there be player housing have you heard of the hanger app or Hangar module have you heard of the hangar module yes dude of course we're going to

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    have player housing there'll be you that's what it's going to be the hanger is your housing and Star Citizen and if you want multiple hangers well you know around the universe that's fine too you can park ships all over the place it's up to you you bet there's going to be player housing have you heard of the hangar module just kidding bro yes is the answer to that question from reuk will we be able to interact with the environment to create more imagin a chief deaths or will it be limited to a more straightforward mechanic of just being able to shoot people and ships absolutely there will be tons and tons of upgrades and of course if you have upgrades to your nav system and your computer systems there is going to be counters to those upgrades so you can be as all powerful all powerful o or you can be as

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    stealthy as you wish it's all up to you and we want to support your style of gameplay but you know how you customize your ship it's all up to you from zombie he says uh hey wingman if you keep mining One Planet it will be empty after some time wouldn't the entire universe be Min empty eventually or will there be counter measures to avoid this well I got to go my uh dinner is getting cold well let me think about that zombie first of all I hope you enjoyed your M meal the Earth is 4.6 billion years old and we still have lots of stuff to mine here so if Star Citizen gets to be around five billion years old we might and I mean might run out of stuff to

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    mine so I think we'll be okay there from kin Shadow this is pretty interesting folks take it away wingman it's kin Shadow again from dread citizen.com Place some security cameras on his desk L land of the planet catch that slipper the gante before he knows it anyway on to my question on the death of a Spaceman post a while back it was mentioned of tractoring in ejected pilots and selling them off to slavery later sounds like a great way to make a living so do I need anything special equipment for that like a a slave pen for my cargo hold or uh some sort of freezing mechanism to transport the slaves or could I just get in there with my default pledge cutless in my tractor beam and start slaving on day one thanks wingman now uh off to the

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    hunt a man guys well done uh not sugar be to make a living at it but slavers will certainly be a Comm slaves will certain be a commodity in the game and slavers themselves you know you'll be basically be a commodity dealer although on the Shady Side of things so first of all that was another great video so that is your Forum feedback now it's what's on to wide world news ever since early childhood fantasies of space the rocket ship has served as a pivotal character in comics Pulp Fiction and movies early imagination served up a vertical rocket on fins that could take off and land vertically while the Fantastic design

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    was abandoned in favor of more practical methods of Landing like splashdowns and gliding to a Runway present day rocket designers are returning to that early vertical vision of space flight last week Mast and Space Systems completed their latest in a series of vertically controlled rocket flights and landings their zombie rocket completed a flight to nearly 500 m in altitude that 1640 ft for the metrically challenged the ship then began a controlled maneuver 300 M downrange to simulate a common curved approach from orbit to a planetary body after a precisely controlled descent zombie performed a perfect soft landing on a pre-planned Target and shut down its engines Mast and Space Systems is not the only private space company recreating our retr future rocket ship SpaceX and their grasshopper autonomous spacecraft has had similar success and

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    now let's take a look back in time the week in space on April 9th 1959 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ANC ounc their choice of the first Seven astronauts to train and fly for the fledgling manspace program dubbed the Mercury 7 they were alen Shepard Gus Grom John Glenn Scott Carpenter Wally sharah Gordon Cooper and deak Slayton each astronaut was considered a superb physical specimen with the genius level IQ and the ability to function well both as part of a team and on their own the press and public soon adopted them as Heroes embodying the new spirit of space exploration these brave men were the only astronaut group with members that flew on all classes of NASA man orbital

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    spacecraft Mercury Gemini Apollo and the space shuttle the Mercury 7 America's Brave New explorers in space I feel like I'm back in junior high or high school and I can't remember whether I slept through that or whether I actually stayed awake and paid attention who knows either way that was really cool and Mike Morin voiced that very good stuff and that ladies and germs is our wide world news this week's guest our everpresent and busy producer interviewed Brendan Jackson uh my name is Brendan Jackson

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    and here at Star Citizen I'm involved in creating new Shader effects for the engine um working on performance for the various features that we want um just trying to achieve the look and feel visually that Chris Roberts is looking for so how did you get started in the game industry so my first games job started in 1997 July 1997 and I started as a tools programmer at a little company called Beyond reality in the north of England before working at Cloud Imperium um we me and several others of the team were working at lightbox interactive and um in 2012 we shipped a PlayStation 3 game called Starhawk what kind of games do you like to play I find I enjoy those kind of God games um so I love civilization Sim City you know going back populace those kind of games

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    where you have a lot of interactivity with the control of the world and I'm really looking forward to getting back to the combined elements that I see in Star Cien um you know the economic kind of building an empire kind of effect and you know good space combat who doesn't want that well I'm glad you're here and Welcome to Cloud Imperium thank you and I'm enjoying it immensely and here he is Bren our lead Graphics programmer Brendan Jackson hi everyone hey how you doing man I'm doing good thanks so let's let's uh let's start a little bit you were at GDC last week right I was yes yeah I mean it was a busy week for all of us it was fun what did you what impacted you did you see anything you really thought was cool um quite a few shows a lot of Graphics stuff obviously um my favorite was the Oculus Rift show man they kind of took us through a

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    lot of the things you have to watch out for when you're making a uh Oculus Rift game um a lot of the technical issues was the big thing but and we are making an Oculus Rift game that's the plan as soon as we get the dev kits just saying so you liked it then you thought it was cool um lots of design stuff lots of art stuff kind of helpful advice on how to make your game not suck on the Oculus Rift that's right that's going to be important I mean if you're spending money on for that gear you want it to be you know you want it to really and I got to say I got to try it out at one point and it's something else it is really an immersive experience we will need to include an auto bath mode though an auto bath mode barf like Auto barf oh mode some people some people do it does experience it I mean it takes a moment

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    to um mine was I had to focus my two eyes together which was a little difficult so listen you you obviously not from Texas quite true quite true so you've lived in a lot of countries haven't you I lived in several yes so how many what how many countries have you lived in I've lived in England obviously England right um South Africa South Africa and America and America that's three that's three that's three so United Kingdom South Africa and America so that this is your world traveler I'm a world traveler I've visited several countries as well so all those countries well most of them are soccer countries so are you a big soccer fan a nut a Rowdy not a soccer fan what you're the one I'm the one Englishman who does not like soccer that is amazing but they call it football over there anyway so I don't think it's that big so this question came from some of the people on the office because it's probably true what is your favorite uh thing to

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    drink I believe uh coffee might be what people thinking of that um you know I might be the only person with a coffee maker in the office uh at your desk how many cups of coffee do you think you drink a day oh it couldn't be less than four more than four that is under stating Brendan's coffee consumption so what's your favorite drink what's your favorite food then what do you like to what do you like to eat oh um I like Indian Indian food really comes good curry oh have you found a good curry here though in Austin I mean there is there are one or two restaurants um you know I like the Bombay beastro which is further up north um there's also uh I forgot the name of theay Clay Pit right over here both awesome Indian restaurants yeah do you think they're awesome see because I miss that's the one thing I miss is the Indian food when I go to England oh man no to be fair they don't taste as good as

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    English food fair enough okay it's not technically English food just because it's in England hey it's still Indian food man after after 100 years we call it English food yeah fair enough Fair that's true so how how did you get into games how didd you get started what what brought you here to Austin what are you doing here um let's see I you know I finished University and games and programming were the two things I enjoyed most so I decided I was going to do game programming make a career out of it made a career out of it um you know and then after several years in England I decided to try and move to America I just appealed to my adventurous side having lived in a different country previously I thought I could do it again on my own terms right um and you know it took me almost a year to find a company that wanted to help me work in America but eventually I moved over to Tulsa Oklahoma to work for 2015 Incorporated I

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    worked at 2015 for a while too yeah let's not go there so you know you you but you're down here in a a where did you come from for for here how did you end up here um well after leaving 2015 um you know I spent a little time in Idaho with my wife's family and then eventually um moved to Texas to join um Midway Studios Austin um where I worked in the record Technology Group oh cool um for almost 2 years before moving on to a game that would have been called um criminal underworld I know I know about that game actually did you know I I knew John summer was he on that game with you yes he was he was the Out director yeah he's a really good friend of mine so yeah yeah good we worked together at digital Anvil and fever pitch that's

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    kind of cool it's kind of an incestous industry and then you went to lightbox right yep and from light boox to here we actually have about 10 people from light boox yes as I said in my interview you know I tried to escape them but they keep coming with I think you were the first though right so technically they followed you yes that's so you can you can take heart in that so the audience wants to know because they've seen your bear this ginormous bear you have um what's the story behind the bear a and then we'll get to question b in a minute um so the story behind the bear was you know we got the bad news that light box was closing down the team that we were on yeah and we were soon to be searching for work again and I went shopping that day and I saw that big teddy bear in Costco and you know I took a photo of it

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    with me hugging it and posted it on Facebook for all the guys to see and I said I needed a hug today and everybody thought that was funny so I decided I had to buy the bear I can his job is to go where he needed that's fair enough that's fair enough and he has no name he has no name so that's question be so if are you going to name it or is it possible that we could just ask our fans what they want to name it and see if it's a decent name I believe I'm willing to accept submissions from the funds there you go so why don't you guys put your thinking caps on think of a name for the ginor orous bear which you've seen in lots of these clips and we'll get it there so listen I want to thank you for being on the show we're uh we're going to thank brand Brendon here not Brandon my son's Brandon you're brandan um and your wife's watching right yes she always watches the show thank you very much um thanks for joining us Rob

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    and Jason thank you for showing your GDC experiences and being on the show thanks for Chris Smith for showing us really really cool intricate landing gear on the 300i we'd like to have showed you a little more but man it looks too hot and we didn't want to burn up the internet today uh we've already crashed it on the Reddit and the and the website enough so we didn't want to crush more stuff and we also want to thank fraps fraps was an amazing company that allows us to record um what you have on your screen at any time like your games or whatever you're going it fraps will let you record and it allows us to record things and show them around the office so and fraps was very generous to us and it became a partner of ours thank you very much we'll put up a website on the credits look for that if you want to record what's on your computer screen at any particular time I highly recommend fraps thanks very much to the lamp and senor microfono I think they're busy probably

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    well senior microphono is right here uh he's probably you know trying to trying to find the lamp's number and digit somewhere but we'll see how that goes and we have coming up next week Chris is back in Austin we'll try to Wrangle him in so we can answer those Forum feedback questions I think that he generally gives some of the best answers in the world for that and it helps everybody out love having him on the show uh check the website today for updates on t-shirts and citizen cards let's take a look at what we have here that's right folks citizen cards we have the colonel the rear Admiral the vice admiral space Marshall and Wing Commander these cards here that we just showed you are the first proofs um sy's got an update coming out to you guys later today about where they're at with t-shirts and citizen cards they're in

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    production each one of these cards has to be intricately intricately etched they're absolutely gorgeous they look fantastic don't want to give away too much but later on today after the show check the website out because you'll get some really nice information that I think you'll be happy with so don't forget the after show wingman's hangover an informal look at what we talked about today what you liked what you didn't like well you can keep the didn't likes to yourself but tell us what you liked we'll see you in about 15 minutes on the in the chat roll so what's that mean see you where in the verse I'm a leaf on the watch How I

41. 00:34:25

    saw aren't they just great they got not so much